146347530
submission
eggboard writes:
Apple’s AirTags provide long-lived ubiquitous tracking in a coin-sized device wherever anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac lives, works, walks, or drives by. This can be great to find missing objects and where you parked your car, but are they good for averting theft or recovering stolen items? And they’re rife for abuse.
83525855
submission
eggboard writes:
Apple added a new Touch ID timeout rule in iOS 9, but only documented it a few days ago. This explains the mystery that I and other people had as to why every few days, we'd be prompted (typically in the morning) to enter our passcode or passphrase when we knew the iOS device hadn't restarted. This timeout rule requires that if you haven't entered your passcode to unlock an iOS device in six days, that you must use Touch ID within eight hours, and then within every eight hours after that. Whenever you miss an eight-hour period (by, say, sleeping), you're prompted for the passcode.
82324865
submission
eggboard writes:
While blue light emitted by monitors and mobile displays has been widely cited as a cause in disrupting people's circadian rhythm, the evidence is thin: a narrow range of blue spectra might not be the problem (it may be a more complicated interaction), brightness may be more important, and Night Shift's (and f.lux's) effects are probably too negligible anyway.
74291185
submission
eggboard writes:
If you've ever turned on what's now called "two-step verification" for an Apple ID, you had to create a Recovery Key. Lose this 14-digit code and have your password reset (because of hacking attempts against you), and you might lose access forever to purchases and data, as Owen Williams almost did. Apple confirmed today that starting with its public betas of OS X 10.11 and iOS 9, two-factor authentication won't have a Recovery Key. Instead, if you have to reset a password or lose access to devices, you'll have to go through an account verification process with human beings.
58139287
submission
eggboard writes:
Minecraft YouTube videos are fantastically popular, and a core group of producers of these videos have enjoyed a wild ride up the virtual charts. Diamond Minecart, a YouTube channel by 22-year-old Daniel Middleton of Northamptonshire, England, has almost 1.9 million subscribers, and people have watched his videos over 400 million times.
Joseph Garrett of Portsmouth, England, records himself as "Stampy," and has passed 2 million subscribers and 708 million views. The Daily Mail estimates that his channel currently grosses anywhere from $88,000 to $880,000 a month. A less-watched channel with 140,000 subscribers brings in $5,000 to $10,000 a month.
What's the appeal in watching someone play Minecraft? They are a way for kids to learn not only how to play the game but also how to modify it in almost endless combinations. It also brings them into a community of Minecraft players and turns something that can be an individual activity into something social.
57740901
submission
eggboard writes:
Rosie J. Spinks writes about the experience of women in the hacking and hacking/activism communities, where harassment, intimidation, sexualization, and patronization try to relegate them to the sidelines. Some just up and leave.
She writes: "Nowhere is evidence of this anti-female ethos easier to find than in the Internet’s most high-profile and highly organized subverters: the hacktivist group Anonymous. Anonymous’s roots lie in the profane message board known as 4chan, where jokes about rape, porn, and homosexuality are for nothing other than the “Lulz,” or gratuitous laughs. When 4chan factions morphed into Anonymous, the entity gradually gained a political activist-minded consciousness.
"Anonymous has always been a shifting entity, defined by whoever decides to participate on any given day, making proper accountability nearly impossible. Using devious tactics and a middle-school sense of humor (such as sending hundreds of unpaid-for pizzas to a target’s address), the amorphous group carries out a diverse range of well-publicized actions (or “AnonOps”), such as targeting the Church of Scientology’s Dianetics hotline or impinging on the operations of PayPal after it suspended payments to Internet messiah Julian Assange’s Wikileaks."
57306673
submission
eggboard writes:
An Irish programmer started with a club in Cork to teach (at no cost) kids aged 5 to 17 how to program. It was such a hit that it's expanded to hundred of cities across 27 countries. CoderDojo has a template that includes self-directed learning with mentors on tap to help out. The notion is to provide kids a productive outlet. Among its successes is an average participation split about halfway between girls and boys in most chapters.
57130359
submission
eggboard writes:
A responsible dealer of the radioactive element radium, a substance once pushed widely as a quack cure, tried to keep the genie in the bottle. Theresa Everline explains that in the first half of the 20th century, Frank Hartman, known as the Radium Hound, kept track of accidents and incompetence in handling radium. His diaries reveal that radium lingers in forgotten places.
56856163
submission
eggboard writes:
Jen A. Miller has an egg allergy of a variety that her doctor has told her could produce a severe reaction if she were vaccinated for the flu, as flu vaccines are grown from viral strains incubated in chicken eggs. But, she explains, two new approaches have been approved by the FDA and are in production that don't use eggs at all; they're on the market in small amounts already, but will be available in much larger quantities soon. It's not just about egg allergies: the new vaccine types (one relying in insect proteins and the other on animal proteins) provide a much faster turnaround time in response to flu pandemics — as little as two to three months from isolation of a strain to mass production instead of at least six months with eggs.
56790707
submission
eggboard writes:
I thought I knew what I was doing when I budgeted for a Kickstarter campaign. I spent weeks sorting out details, set a number ($48,000) that included expenses, Kickstarter fees, and a margin of error. In the end, we raised over $56,000. But my tax planning nearly put a crimp in cash flow, and could have been real problem. It all worked out, but I've written a detailed guide for people for before and after a campaign to avoid my mistakes.
56617419
submission
eggboard writes:
A tintype is a form of wet-plate collodion photography, which requires exposing a metal plate covered in fluid chemicals within a short period of time after applying the emulsion. The process is receptive only to blue light, which tends to emphasize wrinkles and capillaries. The results are both gorgeous and unforgiving, the opposite of the selfie that tries to blur, hide, or present the subject in the best light. It may be old fashioned, but more and more shops have sprung up to offer slow photography. One in San Francisco has produced piles of prints, but is shutting down as its owners pursue other endeavors.
56572584
submission
eggboard writes:
There are a bunch of apps that help women (and their partners) manage fertility, to make it easier to conceive a child. But Natali Morris, the mother of two and planning no more, explains that they can be used for the opposite: contraception through careful measurement of vital statistics. For now, she'd rather avoid devices, hormones, and surgeries, and is using an app instead. It requires commitment and the scientific method, but it's not a quack idea; it conforms with modern knowledge of fertility cycles.
56351237
submission
eggboard writes:
Scott McNulty has found that his decades of playing Dungeons & Dragons took him, a natural introvert, out of his shell rather than giving him an excuse to stay inside it. For Scott, like many of us who played and play D&D and other roleplaying games, he built his comfort level with other people when he can don a different mantle (whether paladin or a mage betrayer who sold his soul to the devil).
56158039
submission
eggboard writes:
If you can't easily leave the house for days, or even your bed, it might be hard to help spread the word that the funds that literally allow you to stay alive and function are likely to be taken away with little recourse. Two women (among many people) in the UK use Twitter and other social media to rally people online and for rallies to explain how the Tory-led government's new testing programs for disability will drop hundreds of thousands of people who are incapable of working at all or full time. (There's some fraud, of course, but the program is designed to cut deserving and healthy alike.)
56053049
submission
eggboard writes:
Henk Rogers was a Dutchman who arrived in Japan in the 1980s following a girlfriend (later, his wife). An inveterate D&D player, he became enthralled with the NEC-8801, and nearly killed himself trying to create a D&D-like world that he released as The Black Onyx. No one initially knew what to make of it, and the game sold slowly at first. Through savvy pricing, packaging, and press attention, sales grew, and the game jumpstarted RPGs in Japan. Rogers got left behind, though, as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy hit a local nerve better than his efforts. "I also realized that I didn’t quite understand the Japanese aesthetic and way. These games were quite different to mine, and just struck a more effective cultural chord.” Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine.
