via Gadget Love

via Minimal Mac

Across the Web today is news that Apple accidentally leaked specs and images on the new iPads being announced tomorrow.
From The Verge:

Regardless, if you were hoping for major design changes, the iTunes document all but confirms they’re not coming this year.
This is everything that is wrong with tech news today. If it’s not new, it sucks. It’s boring. Old news. They act like 5-year-olds getting bored with a new toy five minutes after opening it up.
What exactly is wrong with the current design of the iPad and iPad Mini that The Verge wants to see changed?

This week Michael and Bryan discuss crazy, roadside car race spectators, Ebola, iOS’s Crappy Handling of Animated GIFs, problems upgrading to iOS 8, the nature of sports fans, Michael’s complete disregard for sports, the end of Bryan’s news embargo and horror flick archetypes. This episode opens with the sound of the Blue Angels in F-18/A Hornets during Fleet Week in San Francisco.
Weekly Exhaust – Episode 19

That’s a picture of one of the godfathers of modernist architecture, Le Corbusier, vandalizing a French villa in the nude.
The heroes and idols you look up to are people. Fucked up human beings like the rest of us.
This fact doesn’t take away from the brilliant and creative things they may make and say, it’s just a reminder: they’re just people.
Lucky for him 4chan didn’t exist when he was alive.

—Barry Switzer

So Imgur is reimagining the GIF format with Project GIFV:

The above GIF started at a whopping 50MB. After conversion, the final file is 3.4MB and loads at warp speed. Pretty sweet, right?

The cornerstone of Project GIFV is a platform-wide upgrade to automatically convert uploaded GIF files on the fly into the MP4 video format. The converted MP4s are significantly smaller than their equivalent GIFs, which allows them to load at lightning-fast speeds with better quality. By lowering bandwidth consumption, the change also optimizes Imgur for users on mobile. Rejoice!
Pretty cool.
I’ve said this before and it may sound silly to some people, but I think the animated GIF is one of the most important mediums for artistic expression in the 21st century,

Co.Design headline: Microsoft Can Now Turn Any Space Into The Holodeck
How about this, how about Microsoft make an operating system worth a shit?
It’s is easy to solve problems for the future but it’s the present that needs the most help.

Craig Mod on the iPhone 6:

Our grandfathers sacrificed their lives in world wars, lost limbs, left widows alone at home to raise children on their own, leveled communism, fought bravely for our free market, allowed us to elect a black president, and, perhaps most importantly of all, enabled us to focus on producing premium consumer products made of space age materials to take selfies and browse Facebook. And so, live knowing that each time you touch your case clad phone, the terrorists have won.
As I said years ago, I’m not down with bras on cars, or cases on iPhones.
My iPhone looks like Han Solo’s blaster and I like it.

This week Michael and Bryan review Anaconda (1997), a movie where Jennifer Lopez’s most famous asset (ahem) is cropped off the screen, horror film recommendations for Michael’s night at home by himself and they end it with a few really bad jokes. The episode opens with the exhaust from an AMC AMX.
Weekly Exhaust Episode 18

The NYTimes has a great article on the 40 years of portraits Nicholas Nixon took of his wife and her 3 sisters:

Throughout this series, we watch these women age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience. While many of us can, when pressed, name things we are grateful to Time for bestowing upon us, the lines bracketing our mouths and the loosening of our skin are not among them. So while a part of the spirit sinks at the slow appearance of these women’s jowls, another part is lifted: They are not undone by it. We detect more sorrow, perhaps, in the eyes, more weight in the once-fresh brows. But the more we study the images, the more we see that aging does not define these women. Even as the images tell us, in no uncertain terms, that this is what it looks like to grow old, this is the irrefutable truth, we also learn: This is what endurance looks like.

From 1996-1998 I worked at the Zabriskie Gallery on 57th Street & Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Nicholas Nixon was one of the photographers Virginia Zabriskie represented. I was lucky enough to put on white gloves and thumb through many of the photos mentioned in this article.

Nixon used 8×10-inch film to make 8×10-inch prints, so the details in them were hyper-real. When your film is that big, it doesn’t come in a roll and you can’t fire off a lot of shots (easily). You have to know your shot and have the confidence to shoot it. Nixon is one of those old school photographers who can do it.

Just keep going.

No more laptops in Clay Shirky’s classroom:

Over the years, I’ve noticed that when I do have a specific reason to ask everyone to set aside their devices (‘Lids down’, in the parlance of my department), it’s as if someone has let fresh air into the room. The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of relief from many of the students. Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting – when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.

So this year, I moved from recommending setting aside laptops and phones to requiring it, adding this to the class rules: “Stay focused. (No devices in class, unless the assignment requires it.)” Here’s why I finally switched from ‘allowed unless by request’ to ‘banned unless required’.
Great move by Clay.
I did the same thing with my students when I taught web design at FIT in 2010.
I used to make everyone to put away their phones at the start of class. To back up my request, I’d hold my iPhone up above my head so everyone could see it, and place it face down at the front of the class with the ringer off.
[Because my class was about web design, they were all sitting in front of iMacs with Internet connections, so I’d still have to walk up and down every row to make sure the students weren’t on websites unrelated to their projects.]

MG Siegler on Microsoft and Windows 10:

Such a strange, yet predictable response to Windows 8 by Microsoft. Windows 7 was the de-Vista-ing of Windows. A return to Windows XP. Windows 10 is the de-8-ing of Windows. A return to WIndows 7.

How many development years has Microsoft collectively wasted on these OS boondoggles? It’s the epitome of a company that wants to change, but can’t.
Bingo.
Windows Phone and Windows 8 are really, really trying to be fun and useful and everything they need to be, but they’re having a bitch of a time.
Getting rid of Ballmer isn’t going to be a band-aid on everything.
In the same way that there’s an underlying culture keeping Apple on track well after Steve Jobs has died, so too does Microsoft have an underlying culture holding them back from making great software that doesn’t have a ton of baggage.