A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
My son was watching some iteration of a Mickey Mouse holiday special this morning and deciphering the message of the episode declared:
“Mom, it’s just like the book we read. Christmas is not about candy canes!”
“That’s right! What is it about?”
Without missing a beat he confidently declared, “Christmas is about presents!”
David Thomas writing for Reuters:
Apple’s former top corporate lawyer will receive no prison time after pleading guilty last year to U.S. insider trading charges, a judge said on Thursday.
U.S. District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey, sentenced Gene Levoff to four years of probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Levoff was also ordered to pay a $30,000 fine and forfeit $604,000.
Levoff had admitted to six securities fraud counts that each carried a maximum 20-year prison term and $5 million fine.
A lawyer for Levoff, Kevin Marino, said in an email that they were “extremely pleased” for what he called a “fair and appropriate sentence of probation.”
A spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
Prosecutors said Levoff exploited his roles as Apple’s corporate secretary, head of corporate law and co-chair of a committee that reviewed drafts of the company’s results to generate $604,000 of illegal gains on more than $14 million of trades from 2011 to 2016.
Levoff ignored quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading before Apple’s results were released and violated the company’s broader insider trading policy that he himself was responsible for enforcing, prosecutors said.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, fired Levoff in September 2018, five months before he was criminally charged.
When someone uses insider information to trade stocks, it really does take the money from other investors. That $604,000 came from somewhere. As someone bought shares during that time, perhaps the difference would have only equated to fractions of pennies on any given share, but it still makes me glad they caught him.
(via Daring Fireball)
Android has a new app, Beeper, that connects to iMessage. Well, it did for a few days until, apparently, Apple shut it down. It remains to be seen if Beeper Mini has a future.
Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:
On Friday, less than a week after its launch, the app started experiencing technical issues when users were suddenly unable to send and receive blue bubble messages. The problems grew worse over the course of the day, with reports piling up on the Beeper subreddit. Several people at The Verge were unable to activate their Android phone numbers with Beeper Mini as of Friday afternoon, a clear indication that Apple has plugged up whatever holes allowed the app to operate to begin with.
Beeper Mini was the result of a comprehensive attempt to reverse engineer Apple’s messaging protocol. A 16-year-old high school student managed to successfully pull it off, and for a while, everything worked without a hitch. That effort became the basis for the new app, which requires a $2 / month subscription
Beeper Mini used a direct link with Apple iMessage servers, allowing beeper users to access Apple’s exclusive blue bubbles directly using iCloud addresses and no intermediaries.
I’m a little disappointed it’s been shut down because I would really like my Android family (just my brother actually) to get on the iMessage train.
Update: MacRumors confirms Apple shut it down over purported security concerns.
From Jesus Diaz writing for Fast Company, “Tesla’s Cybertruck has a serious problem that only a complete redesign can fix“:
The problem, according to Musk, is the bright metal construction and predominantly straight edges mean that even minor inconsistencies become glaringly obvious. To avoid this, he commanded unparalleled precision in the manufacturing process, stating in his email that “all parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy. That means all part dimensions need to be to the third decimal place in millimeters and tolerances need [to] be specified in single digit microns.” Drawing a comparison to everyday products known for their precision, Musk added, “If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.”
The cybertruck is not made from LEGO blocks or soda cans. It’s just not feasible to have such tolerances on parts that are so big and non-uniform at production scale. I suspect we’ll continue to see the truck’s release date pushed back as each deadline comes whooshing by until they admit defeat and do a redesign.
At least it’s bulletproof:
Bobby fingers is back with another unhinged installment, this time opting for supersize scale.
I created these living works by animating some images from The Photography Book as well as a couple other pieces that I just happen to like. Using the magic of Photoshop I widened each of the images to an aspect ratio of 16:9. Check out the originals linked above each image to see what I changed.
I completed a project like this for a university class on Flash and I’ve always meant to make more but since the deprecation of the .swf format I wasn’t sure I could get it to work in html 5. It turns out, it’s not that difficult except that you may have to scroll if you’re viewing them on mobile or viewing from an RSS reader.
Cabel Sasser spent 10 years preparing this blog post. It’s a deep dive into the Golden Age of direct to consumer catalogues.
For a decade, I’ve been snapping up copies of a certain gadget catalog, one by one, when they’re up for auction. Collecting and waiting.
The catalogs were disposable, and that means not many people kept them. But, to me, they tell a critically important story of the golden age of electronics, gadgets, copywriting, and sales.
They deserve to be preserved.
And I’m the guy to do it.
The closest thing I had growing up, was the Consumers Distributing magazines.
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2023 fourth quarter ended September 30, 2023. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $89.5 billion, down 1 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.46, up 13 percent year over year.
“Today Apple is pleased to report a September quarter revenue record for iPhone and an all-time revenue record in Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We now have our strongest lineup of products ever heading into the holiday season, including the iPhone 15 lineup and our first carbon neutral Apple Watch models, a major milestone in our efforts to make all Apple products carbon neutral by 2030.”
• iPhone: $43.805 billion (up 3%)
• Mac: $7.614 billion (down 44%)
• iPad: $6.443 billion (down 10%)
• Wearables, Home & Accessories: $9.322 billion (down 3%)
• Services: $22.314 billion (up 16%)1
Jason Snell’s 6 Color Charts.
]This weekend Andrea and I went to the ATA Substitute Teacher Conference in Calgary. Since neither of our extended families live in town, we drove to Medicine Hat to drop our kids off at my brother’s house.
I don’t remember the last time we got away for an overnight trip without the kids. With our travel expenses paid and the hotel advertising outdoor roof-top hot-tubs, it was going to be a great weekend!
The five hours of driving beforehand was a bit much but we found the conference itself very rewarding. It turns out talking to other teachers (both about teaching and about their adventures) was my favourite part!
Sitting next to Andrea during a talk, I discreetly used sign language ask her something — the teacher next to us noticed and asked, using ASL, if we knew sign language? We lit up and excitedly responded that yes, we know sign. Later, she told us how her son, at three years old, lost his hearing due to complications with meningitis. She shared her family’s journey into learning sign language and her son getting one of the first cochlear implants available. Because it wasn’t available in Canada, they travelled down to the one hospital in Los Angeles that offered it. She talked about the media attention that she got and about some of the difficult choices they had to make as parents about getting the surgery and how the deaf community reacted. Her story was inspiring. Eventually her son went on to be an engineer and now he works in the Google X lab within Alphabet in California. She says if you met him today, you would never know that he was once deaf.1
After winning some prizes2 we shared in some intriguing conversations while hot tubbing in the cool October air atop the hotel. A man named Peter told us the reason for his hand being wrapped in a plastic bag was a recent table-saw accident in which he seriously cut his right middle-finger. He explained that after making a really nice rip he turned off the saw and thought, “this 3/4″ sheet of plywood is pretty heavy for my brother to catch on his own so I’ll just do what I can to take some of the weight.” Without thinking, he brushed his hand across the blade as it was slowing. Looking down at his bloodied glove he knew right away he had a particularly serious injury. He’d lost the ability to wiggle that finger.
Luckily it was still attached and surgery to reattach the tendon would come a few days later. He got an X-ray showing the detachment but claims after a prayer on it from his pastor he was playing the organ at church the next night.3
Next, a nice woman named Elicia told us about a dangerous adventure she had in her younger years when she and a group of about five people hiked a mountain in Waterton where sheer cliffs dropped off just below them. They decided to take a shortcut up bypassing the switchbacks and found themselves on some shale just above the dangerous precipice. They all insisted it would be fine and Elicia, the lone hold out in the group, finally relented. When they got about halfway across the dangerous path one of the girls began crying. She sat down and refused to go any further while declaring that she would wait for a rescue team to find them. Elicia explained that no one would be coming anytime soon. She explained that even in the very best case scenario it would be at least 24 hours before anyone thought about rescuing them. After some time the weather began to turn and the group convinced the girl that if she didn’t move it was going to get very dangerous if the wind and rain began to pick up. Just then two young men peered down at them from a path above and called to them giving encouragement. They even jumped down into the shale like skiers slaloming down one jump after another. Seeing that, it inspired Elicia that the shale would hold if one got deep enough into it and the group got the courage to climb out of danger on their own.4
We crashed that night close to midnight and the next day enjoyed informative talks and delicious food. The ATA knows how to put on a worthwhile event. I started to feel a little under-the-weather and talked Andrea into leaving slightly early (though I wanted to stay but my head was just pounding) and we made the trip back to the kids and ended the weekend the next day back in Lethbridge feeling great about our lives and our livelihoods. I don’t believe in miracles per se but nevertheless one can’t deny life itself is a miracle. I like to reflect on that often.
]]]]
