Covered this week; Pete Souza releases the first pictures taken using Apple’s new iPhone XS… Freezing your credit will now be free… Denise Mueller-Korenek smashes the bicycle speed record… A 200-year-old guide to color, redesigned for the internet age… Imprisoned Valentino Dixon released after 27 years, due in large part to a golfing magazine… Meet the people helping Tim Cook run Apple… Myst turns 25, how it changed gaming, created addicts and made enemies…
September 17, 2018
Just a quick one today, but pretty cool, especially if you’re a fan of our nation’s capitol… Pete Souza took these shots exclusively for Dailymail.com around Washington DC.
September 18, 2018
TransUnion, Experian and Equifax are now required to allow all of us to freeze and thaw our credit for free. Very few people (13%) have actually frozen their credit even though experts agree, it’s by far the best way to protect ourselves from identity theft. If you seek the definition of time well spent, read this article.
A security freeze makes it harder for criminals to use stolen information to open fraudulent new accounts, or borrow money, in your name. Credit bureaus house records of your accounts and payment history, which card companies and lenders use to decide whether you are likely to pay your bills. If you freeze your file, the bureaus will not provide information to lenders unless you “thaw” the freeze first, using a special personal identification number.
September 19, 2018
The fastest speed I’ve ever formally recorded of myself riding a bicycle was 39.4 mph… that was going down a steepish hill in Wisconsin a couple years back… I felt the shimmy in the frame, so little between staying upright and eating pavement, it scared me a little… to imagine going close to 5 times faster than that… well, I can’t even imagine it, it’s mind boggling… but that’s what happened here. An incredible story of specialized tech, will and wear-with-all.
This was not just any other ride, of course. Mueller-Korenek mounted a specially equipped bike with a massive gear and tethered it to a race car, which then accelerated to 100-plus mph—the velocity necessary for the rider to turn over the cranks on her own volition. Then she unhooked from the car and stayed in the slipstream, smashing the pedalsaround to hit the highest speed possible under her own power.
September 20, 2018
For my art and graphics people out there… or any that may have a lingering interest in color… what made this so cool to me was the side effect of transporting my mind back to a simpler, purer time. Enjoy.
The nomenclature of colors we use today is really a machine language–numerical hex codes crafted to communicate with software on computers and printers. Before the age of CMYK and RBG, though, artists and scientists created their own languages for talking about and categorizing color. Though many have fallen into obscurity, at least one is now accessible to anyone with access to the internet: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours.
September 21, 2018
An incredible story that gets you thinking about the wrongly imprisoned. In the case of Valentino Dixon, you get a sense for what sort of ‘inner strength’ must be conjured to survive and even thrive considering what he’s been through.
Six years ago, Golf Digest profiled this inmate who grinds colored pencils to their nubs drawing meticulously detailed golf-scapes. Although Dixon has never hit a ball or even stepped foot on a course, the game hooked him when a golfing warden brought in a photograph of Augusta National’s 12th hole for the inmate to render as a favor. In the din and darkness of his stone cell, the placid composition of grass, sky, water and trees spoke to Dixon. And the endless permutations of bunkers and contours gave him a subject he could play with.
September 22, 2018
Back in the early days of Apple, I knew the names of all the company leaders, in many cases they were cult heroes, out and about and showing up all over Northern California… Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Bill Fernandez, Danny Kottke… but today? Only the big names… which is why this article was pretty interesting…
Tim Cook is the face of Apple. And design supremo Jony Ive is arguably the next-most important executive. But more than 100 other folks collectively help run the world’s most valuable company.
September 23, 2018
Haha… remember when we bought our games on CD-ROM and waited for all those graphics to chunk in so we could get started… Good days, good days…
The creators of Myst, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, along with a small team at their Washington state-based firm Cyan, were no strangers to innovation. The company had previously developed the first-ever game released on CD-ROM for a personal computer (in this case, a Macintosh), The Manhole, in 1989. They followed that children’s title with other whimsical point-and-click words crafted in HyperCard, Apple’s Mac-based hypertext environment that presaged the World Wide Web. Creativity came naturally to the Millers, and Myst was the natural next step in the refinement of their art.
Editor’s Note; I’ll be taking next week off, see you back on Monday, October 1st.
