It wasn’t touted onstage, but a new iOS 8 feature is set to cause havoc for location trackers, and score a major win for privacy. As spotted by Frederic Jacobs, the changes have to do with the MAC address used to identify devices within networks. When iOS 8 devices look for a connection, they randomize that address, effectively disguising any trace of the real device until it decides to connect to a network.
—Russell Brandom, The Verge

Dan Seifert at The Verge reviews the Samsung Gear 2:

The Gear 2 is greatly improved, but it’s still not great. I was able to use it for about 2 1/2 days before it needed to be plugged in, and it still requires a clunky, easy-to-lose clip-on adapter for charging. A smartwatch that can be charged on the weekend and last through to the next weekend would be ideal, but the Gear 2 is not there yet. The Pebble can very nearly manage this, but we’ve yet to see what the coming Android Wear watches will offer in terms of battery life.
Cons listed: “Interface is still clunky; Battery life isn’t great; Only works with Samsung devices”
So the Samsung Gear went from really shitty to kinda shitty.
Sounds awesome. Where do I get one?

Sure, we’ve got the iPhone’s Siri, and the Food and Drug Administration just approved a prosthetic arm controlled by signals from the brain — but where are our smooth-gliding flying machines, our Landspeeders (“Star Wars”) and airborne DeLoreans (“Back to the Future”)?

You may think that the absence of such cars speaks to a failure of engineering or distorted incentives in the marketplace. But the humbling truth is that we don’t have these vehicles because we still don’t know, even in principle, how to directly manipulate gravity. Indeed, the cars missing from our skies should serve to remind us that, to a degree rarely appreciated, we have surprisingly poor control over most of nature’s fundamental forces.
—Adam Frank, The New York Times

Without a doubt, Apple has copied certain features from its rivals as well. The difference is that Apple seems biased to design based on its own intent first, and copy second; its rivals tend to copy first.
—John R. Moran, Design Is About Intent
Moran’s whole post is great, but that quote above especially caught my eye.

The Hill now reports that Comcast is “waging a campaign of shock and awe for its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable by fielding one of the biggest lobbying teams ever seen in Washington,” as the cable giant “has added seven lobbying firms to its roster since first proposing the deal earlier this year, and it is adopting a posture of overwhelming force to try to win approval from federal regulators.”
—Brad Reed, BGR
Democracy in action! Fuck yeah!

The Glut Life shows us how to make the infamous Brass Monkey:

STEP 1:

Ok now what you’re going to want to do is drink the 40oz till the top of the label. This was by far the worst step making this drink. I swear have no idea how I used to drink OE all the time back when I was younger. The shit taste like homeless.
Although I had many a 40 ounce of Old English back in high school and college, I’ve never had a Brass Monkey. The only Brass Monkey I knew was the one by the Beastie Boys.

Over at McSweeney’s, Mike Lacher gives us Client Feedback On the Creation of Earth:

9 – Re: “mankind.” Interesting take on the brief here. Big pain point is that mankind is coming across as largely made in your image. As you hopefully recall from the deck, our users are a diverse group (slide twenty-seven) and we definitely want to make them feel represented (slide twenty-eight). Afraid that if our users see fleshy bipedal mammals positioned as “ruling over” the ground and sea (if we’re having sea), they might feel alienated and again less willing to convert into brand evangelists. Let’s fast-track an alt version with mankind removed. Doable?
This is a brilliant piece but almost too real for me.
It makes me sad when I think back to how many client projects included real emails like this fake one.
Clients can sometimes suck ass.

I’ll admit that upon seeing the cover of Stan Parish’s debut, Down the Shore, I was unsure I’d peel the cover back to see what was inside. The silhouettes of two surfers carrying their boards had me thinking that, at best, this would be the story of some dudes finding themselves in some sort of Endless Summer-type setting. Another book about dudes written by a dude. Dudes and their problems. Poor dudes. And to some extent, yes, Down the Shore is a book about dudes. It’s a book about young men with privilege getting into trouble, and I’d say the age of the protagonist could qualify Parish’s novel as a “coming-of-age” book; yet Parish deftly defies all the pitfalls many dude writers (usually named Jonathan or Joshua) tend to get mired in when dealing with any or all of those things. It isn’t totally a book about a straight white dude who doesn’t know how good he has it, but it isn’t far from that either. Instead, Down the Shore is a look at how we screw up, try to redeem ourselves, and inevitably screw up again.
—Jason Diamond on the book, Down the Shore, by Stan Parish
As someone raised in (northwestern) New Jersey, that is exactly the term we used: you weren’t ‘going to the beach,’ you were ‘going down the shore’ (not ‘to-the-shore’).

Chris Hayashi, head of San Francisco’s taxi industry, is stepping down amidst the disruption of the industry brought on by Uber and Lyft (via Co.Exist):

But DeSoto Cab Co. president Hansu Kim, who agreed that Hayashi shepherded the industry through some of its most trying times, said that with Uber, Lyft and the like, he would be surprised if the cab industry survives another 18 months in The City.
What’s happening to the taxi industry is not unlike the disruption of the horse carriage industry when the automobile was first introduced over 100 years ago.
I’m not happy that ‘traditional’ cabbies will be losing their jobs because of this, but to try and ban companies like Uber and Lyft like the state of Virginia is doing is counterproductive and delaying the inevitable. This is dustruption in the true sense of the word and is a byproduct of innovation.
I stand firm with my mantra and favorite quote by Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest nor the most intelligent species that survives, but the one most adaptable to change.

via Colossal

That’s about right.

Comic Book Cartography via Quipsologies

Emphasis added:

According to a designer who used to work with Frere-Jones, his eye is so sharp that he can look at a printout of a letterform and tell if it’s one pixel off, the same way Ted Williams was said to be able to hold a baseball bat and tell if it was a half-ounce too heavy. He often approaches typography from strange and playful angles; in college, he drew an experimental font called Cat’s Cradle, “which nested and tangled each letter into its neighbor, like shopping carts nested together in front of a supermarket,” he says. “The goal was to preserve character identity under duress.”
—Jason Fagone, New York Magazine
I love that, “preserve character identity under duress.”
Aren’t we all trying to do that in one way or another?

Just remembering how insanely great Ellsworth Kelly’s drawings are.