Category: Tech

Facebook Is Breaking Brains

~ Darren Cohen ~ Leave a comment

It has become a familiar story: The older relative, the intensifying Fox News habit, the alarming Facebook posts, the inevitable detachment from reality. Losing a parent to the conservative cyber-swamp is such a common experience among millennials that it has produced an entire sub-genre of documentaries, books and online support groups.

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Facebook is literally destroying nations across the world. From the Philippines to Myanmar to right in our backyard, the damage Facebook is doing is hard to quantify.

Apple Going ARM

~ Darren Cohen ~ Leave a comment

This will be the first time in the 36-year history of the Mac that Apple-designed processors will power these machines. It has changed chips only two other times. In the early 1990s, Apple switched from Motorola processors to PowerPC. At WWDC in 2005, Steve Jobs announced a move from PowerPC to Intel, and Apple rolled out those first Intel-based Macs in January 2006. Like it did then, the company plans to eventually transition the entire Mac lineup to its Arm-based processors, including the priciest desktop computers, the people said.

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Apple has had the best processors for consumer facing products for years, so this is a long time coming. There will be some issues, and one that came to mind was running Windows in a virtualized space or Bootcamp. However, the need most had to run Windows is lessening as more and more and services have moved some their offerings to the cloud while being accessible in the browser. There will always be outliers on the margins, but any pressure on Intel is a good thing at this point.

The Newsletters Chosen for my Inbox

~ Darren Cohen ~ Leave a comment

It seems that every media outlet, company, and person on the internet has a newsletter now. For a while I signed up for so many that I ended up reading none. Now I have paired down what reaches my inbox, and it feels like a perfect balance. Here are the newsletters that I find are must read.

The Daily Book – New York Times

Theatre Update – New York Times

Reliable Sources – CNN

The Morning Brew

Stratechery (Subscription) – Ben Thompson

The Interface – The Verge

Stop Using Third Party E-Mail Apps

~ Darren Cohen ~ Leave a comment

Several users of popular email app Edison Mail this morning are reporting that they are able to see email accounts of other users within the iOS app. In what appears to be a major privacy breach, users report that after enabling a new sync feature, they have full access to these other email accounts.

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Popular e-mail apps like Spark, Newton, and Edison all require access to your data to implement the features they advertise. This is bad for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it’s really not needed. Use the default e-mail apps or the apps provided by your e-mail provider. So GMail app for Google users, Outlook if you host on Microsoft (no do not use for Gmail), or your built in app that comes with your machine. That is the list. Most corporations will block third party apps for good reason, but you should follow that same practice for your personal e-mail as well.

The Economics of Covid

~ Darren Cohen ~ Leave a comment

Stacey on IoT | COVID is the cure for bad IoT

When times get tough, it becomes easy to see which ideas make economic sense and which don’t. It also becomes clear which products provide users value and which don’t. I know I’ve already gone through every one of my business and personal subscriptions to figure out where I can cut costs. Company managers are doing the same thing, while at the same time having to justify their investments in technology and future product lines.

Subscribe to Stacey’s newsletter. No one covers IOT like she does.

The Giants will Grow

~ Darren Cohen

Big Tech Could Emerge From Coronavirus Crisis Stronger Than Ever – The New York Times

But when the economy does eventually improve, Big Tech could benefit from changes in consumer habits. And despite more than 18 months of criticism from lawmakers, regulators and competitors before the pandemic hit the United States, the biggest companies are likely to finish the year stronger than ever.

Post economic downturns the companies that survive are always in the best shape to swallow up the rest of the industries they play in. We need a competent government running a DOJ that takes it’s anti-trust job seriously.

Everyone Should Learn to Use Shortcuts on iOS

~ Darren Cohen ~ Leave a comment

Announcing my Shortcuts Library, featuring 150 Siri Shortcuts to use with iOS 13 – Matthew Cassinelli

I firmly believe this is the most ambitious update to iOS since perhaps the redesign of iOS 7. However, while that was an overhaul of how iPhone and iPad worked visually, iOS 13 overhauls the entire way users can interact with their devices. Just a few years ago, apps were operating in silos and couldn’t talk to each other; now, every function of every app can be abstracted out from the interface, brought it all into a brand-new programming language that involves absolutely zero actual coding, and—oh yeah—it works across almost every Apple device using only your voice.

You need to follow Matt on Twitter and on YouTube as he continues to show new ways to use this powerful tech that is now in every iPhone and iPad.

Good Take on My Favorite iOS App

~ Darren Cohen ~ Leave a comment

Signature features – All this

Drafts, for example, is commonly thought of as an app for writing small bits of text that then get shunted off some other app—Mail, Messages, Reminders, Evernote, another text editor—where they “belong.” And there’s no question Drafts is spectacular at this because it launches quickly to a blank note and it has a big library of actions for moving text into other apps. Its developer, Greg Pierce, even markets Drafts as “where text starts.”

But for me, Drafts has become the place “where text is.” The power that comes from its library of actions—especially the Script action—allows me to treat Drafts as my iOS version of BBEdit, the place where I do all of my iOS writing, no matter what the text is for or how long it is.

The power the Drafts app is that everyone will have a different answer to the question, “What does Drafts do best?”. Here is an example I tweeted out yesterday.