Jimmy Kimmel Gives People the First Look at the iPhone 5 But It’s Really the iPhone 4S.
I love people.
via Laughing Squid

I hear a lot of people whining about the iPhone 5 looking almost the same as the iPhone 4 and 4S.
So let me get this straight. You’re complaining a new, beautifully-engineered phone looks just like 2 other beautifully-engineered predecessors.
There are people that say the same thing about another company who makes beautiful, high performance automobiles that change little from year after year: Porsche.
Don’t turn consistency into a bad thing.
In the immortal words of the great philosopher Louis CK, everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

Fascinating story in Wired about Cosmo, a 15-year-old hacker, “who weaseled his way past security systems at Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft.”
Typical pranks hackers might play on each other? Oh, just getting the SWAT team at your house:

“Someone also swatted my house,” he tells me, smiling. “It happens a lot to me. Well, the SWAT team was only once at my house, but lots of time with the local police department.” Swatting is a vicious prank where a hacker uses an internet call system to report a hostage situation, which scrambles local law enforcement to the victim’s doorstep.

Every more impressive than Cosmo’s computer skills are his social engineering skills:

And that’s the secret. When Cosmo calls a company pretending to be an employee, he doesn’t wait for them to ask for details. He tells them all the person’s data he has up front. If he knows three pieces of a puzzle and just needs the fourth, he gives them those first without waiting to be asked for them. That way he demonstrates a knowledge of the system, disarming the person on the other end of the line and making them less likely to question his authenticity.

Cosmo sometimes even provides details that he knows tech support doesn’t need. For example, if a tech support requires only the zip code on file, he’ll provide the full address anyway. It makes him appear more knowledgeable and less likely to be questioned. That’s classic social engineering.

The security loopholes at large companies, combined with how easy it is to buy things like social security numbers, almost makes you not want to use the Internet anymore (sadly, this wouldn’t make much difference anyway).

Quick thought: Does the fact that we call programs on mobile devices ‘apps’ have any correlation to how cheap people become when debating buying one for $2.99?
By truncating the word application, I wonder if it loses some of its weight and professionalism. It’s like the difference between taxi and limousine.
People have no idea what goes into some of their favorite and best built ‘apps’. The testing, the QA, the underlying databases and coding.
No idea at all.

I’m an avid listener of 5by5 Radio. Particularly: Build & Analyze, Hypercritical, Amplified, The Critical Path and Back to Work.
I often hear 5by5’s creator, Dan Benjamin, promoting the web hosting service Squarespace. I’ve known about Squarespace for a few years and have heard good things about them, but knowing Dan puts his money where his mouth is with many of his advertisers, I decided to give SquareSpace a shot with my new portfolio site, Famous But Unknown.
Short answer: SquareSpace is pretty great.
Their admin area is easy to use, with great features like being able to drag images into your browser window to create a gallery page. No clicking on BROWSE and traversing the directories on your computer. Right now it’s a bit too ‘sand-boxed’ for my nerdy, backend-craving taste, but they plan on opening their developer platform soon, according to their Developer FAQ page.
For the last 13 years of being a professional web designer (and sometimes developer), I’ve grown comfortable using FTP programs like Transmit, and having direct access to MySQL databases when setting up WordPress sites for clients, or setting up this site with Movable Type (I had to teach myself how to set up cron jobs so scheduled posted would publish). Not having this granular control on Squarespace is a bit frustrating, but that frustration soon evaporates as I effortlessly curate my portfolio pages and make updates to my (other) blog.
As Dan has mentioned in his on-air plugs, what used to take hours and hours of work to do to maintain a website, SquareSpace makes easy as pie. Not only is it easy to use, it’s also extremely hard to ‘break’ (as clients are known to do with their sites).
Now the downside of Squarespace—the scaling. After a few weeks managing my new portfolio site, I thought about bringing over some of my other domains, including this site. I assumed I would have to upgrade my Standard Account to a Pro Account, but for $16/month, it was definitely worth it. What I discovered is even though you can register and redirect multiple, unique domain names to your Squarespace account, they all resolve to just one of those domains. So for instance, if I have mysite1.com, mysite2.com and mysite3.com all registered with Squarespace, if I visit either mysite2.com or mysite3.com, they’ll both redirect me to mysite1.com. Ugh. I wouldn’t be able to host multiple unique sites, with unique templates and unique content.
In order to set up multiple, unique sites I would have to set up separate accounts with different email addresses but with the same credit card. This was a non-starter for me.
I’m pretty familiar with the admin area of Squarespace and can easily envision them scaling up to accommodate my wish, but as anyone who has done web design and development knows, what you envision and what it takes to make that vision a reality are two very different things. And who knows, maybe the scaling I want isn’t in their product roadmap.
I can appreciate Squarespace taking baby steps in growing their platform, so while my goals are bigger than what they can satisfy, I’m going to do the best I can with my lone site.

From the HuffPo:

The California state legislature just moved that dream a little closer to reality by approving a bill paving the way for driverless cars to be allowed on Golden State freeways.

The bill, authored by State Senator Alex Padilla (D-Van Nuys), was passed by the state Assembly on Wednesday and then given the overwhelming thumbs up by the state Senate the following day.

If signed by Governor Jerry Brown, Padilla’s bill would legally allow autonomous vehicles on the road and charge the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles with determining the standards for self-driving cars, rules which current do not exist under the present vehicle code.

The future is now, it’s cool, but it’s scary too.
via Tyler Cowen

Very smart and interesting developments happening right now at Amazon’s Kindle Event in LA.

They’re clearly putting a lot of thought behind what reading and video-watching experiences should be (and taking advantage of their properties like IMDB in interesting ways).

But the realization I’m left with is that Amazon (still) sees the tablet primarily as a consumption device. Yes, they include Exchange email support and calendar integration, but those are secondary. Perhaps this consumption focus is due to the fact that not only do they want to sell their own content, but also because they’ve forked the Android operating system and thus can’t guarantee Android applications (ones for productivity, not consumption) will work on it.

It will be interesting to see how well these new Kindles do in the market.

Hey iTunes, this isn’t Black Star:

(I already checked with Mos Def and Talib Kweli)
And this isn’t Al Green’s Greatest Hits:

I’m not sure who’s responsible for this—Apple or whatever database they’re pulling album information from.
I found the best response to this problem on an Apple Support Community forum:

When my iPhone 4 displays the wrong album art the inner psycho in me comes out.

I know you can manually override the incorrect artwork, but I want it to be correct in the first place.
Update: At least for the Black Star album, it looks as though the CD I ripped it from might be the source of the problem. The full (correct) album title in question is, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, while iTunes shows the title as only Black Star.

Is that Nokia’s new phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Oh wait, Nokia hasn’t announced a ship date, it couldn’t be a new Nokia phone in your pocket.
Seriously though, that is a big phone:

Beautiful new phones by Nokia. With no release date.
It’s clear all of Apple’s competitors are announcing their new products ahead of Apple’s September 12 event.
The thing is, whether or not Apple explicitly announces a new product event, everyone and their mother should know when Apple is dropping a new product. Their product refresh cycle is very regular. Hell, MacRumors has a Buyer’s Guide (for at least the 8 years I’ve been visiting their site) to find out when you should expect new versions of each device Apple makes.
So we’re now into year 5 of regular iPhone releases and these clowns still aren’t ready? No excuse.

There it is. The iPhone 5 is coming September 12 (nice shadow).
via Fortune
Update: I just realized this is also 5 years since the iPhone launched. The ‘5’ in the shadow could mean a few things.

There it is. The iPhone 5 is coming September 12 (nice shadow).

via Fortune

Update: I just realized this is also 5 years since the iPhone launched. The ‘5’ in the shadow could mean a few things.

This new video from The Verge shows Windows RT and Office 2013 RT aren’t optimized for touch (yet?).
Microsoft is the kid at the dock who’s afraid to jump in the water to learn how to swim. Every time the operating system jumps back into ‘classic’ X86 mode in that video, I see Microsoft grabbing onto one of the poles on the dock because they’re afraid they’ll drown.
Windows 8 could be pretty badass if Microsoft just strapped a set of balls on and dove in.
via Jim Dalrymple

Right now I have my LG LCD television on.

…which is hooked up to the Apple TV on the shelf below it.

…which is streaming Sherlock Holmes from a 5-year-old (white) MacBook running iTunes upstairs from my wife’s iTunes account via WiFi.

…which stores iTunes content on a external, Western Digital Passport hard drive.

…which I’m controlling via the Remote app on my iPhone 4.

If I were to go back in time and explain this to my 15-year-old self, this would have sounded not only impossible, but incredibly inefficient. But to my 35-year-old self right now? It makes perfect sense. And it’s all working seamlessly.