Category: Weekly digest

Busy busy at the moment. looking forward to some time off at Easter.

• The Journalist and the Troll: This Man Spent Two Years Trying to Destroy Me Online
• I’m 16. Five months ago, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer – Such a great article and puts so much into perspective when we moan about shitty little day to day things.
• Why Do We Work So Hard?
• What Have They Been Smoking at Apple Music? – Some of the playlists are really good. I still get Rolling Stones recommendations though…every fucking time I open the app.
• Apple Encryption Engineers, if Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist – Big week ahead.
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016 Results
• Satoru Iwata Game Developers Choice Awards Tribute
• Firewatch: One Month Later – Such a great game and good to see it sold so well too.
• Here’s why Google’s Tilt Brush may be virtual reality’s killer app
• Cuba On The Edge Of Change – Stunning photo article
• Glasgow – Raymond Depardon – Photo’s from 1980’s Glasgow that were never published. Feels like my childhood when I look at these.

• Dunblane: Our Story – 20 years since the tragedy in Dunblane and this program is an emotional watch. Always sticks in my head that I was euphoric coming back from a sea trial at work on the day this happened. Sailed down a misty Clyde and went into the office at night and we were all so happy and then the wind was taken right out our sails when a colleague shared the news. No mobiles, no news, no idea…a bombshell.
• What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget?
• Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism – Why resisting the UK snoopers charter is so important.
• The Obama Doctrine
• 1988: The Year Donald Lost His Mind
• Lack of sleep alters brain chemicals to bring on cannabis-style ‘munchies’ – Might explain the hunger I’ve been feeling the last couple of weeks as my mystery illness flares up again.
• Why Am I Right-Handed? – I’m left handed but write with my right hand thanks to my Gran tying my left hand behind my back when I was wee. Lefties were the work of the devil seemingly.
• An Apple Pencil-drawn review of the Apple Pencil – So good. Still want an iPad and Pencil.
• The Making Of Playstation VR – Not long now.
• videoGaiden Episode 1
• Television Has A Business Model Problem. And It’s Killing Good TV
• Coming Soon
• Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War – Trailer 2 – Looking good
• Game of Thrones Season 6: Trailer – Looking good too
• Orkestra Obsolete play Blue Monday using 1930s instruments – BBC Arts

A bumper update as I took a break last week.

• Exclusive Q&A : Apple CEO Tim Cook
• Naughty words – Fucking bollocks
• Tumblr Porn
• Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1
• Atlas, The Next Generation – Terminator one step closer
• The Elephant In The Room – Web design work drying up
• What’s Next in Computing? – great read
• Winners of the 2016 World Press Photo Contest – Some powerful images
• Photographer Greg Armfield on how he missed mating rhinos at Nairobi national park
• Do cool things that matter – stories from the software engineers at Google
• Meet the 63-Year-Old in Charge of Approving New Emojis
• Life and Death in the App Store
• The Writer Who Made Me Love Comics Taught Me To Hate Them
• Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must fight it. – Microsoft is playing hardball with games developers and also in forcing the upgrade to Windows 10.
• Photos of the Glasgow High-Rises That Are About to Disappear
• The painful what-if that haunts ‘Ghostbuster’ Ernie Hudson
• GHOSTBUSTERS FanCUT Teaser Trailer HD (RECUT) – So much better then the official trailer.
• Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story
• The Lonely Launchpads and Rusted Rockets of America’s Abandoned Space Facilities
• The Complete Conceptual History of the Millennium Falcon – Long but rewarding read.
• How we made Angry Birds

• Why Michael Gove is wrong on Europe – He’s never been right on much to be honest
• A Message to Our Customers
• Apple, FBI, and the Burden of Forensic Methodology
• Apple Versus The Fbi, Understanding Iphone Encryption, The Risks For Apple And Encryption – Apple’s stand in an increasingly strange and important test case.
• Apple and Fashion: A Love Story for the Digital Ages
• The Most Important Apple Executive You’ve Never Heard Of – Core of much of Apple’s competitive advantage comes from this decision.
• The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens
• Too many people have peed in the pool – Twitter drama
• I Want to Know What Code Is Running Inside My Body
• Which Type of Exercise Is Best for the Brain?
• The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people – Whoever named this program Skynet and didn’t think it could go south has a lot to answer for
• The superhero of artificial intelligence: can this genius keep it in check?
• Hard Drive Reliability Review for 2015 – Backblaze put this report out each year – fascinating read.
• The Daily Mail Stole My Visualization, Twice – Thief’s!!!
• How Renegade Filmmaker Casey Neistat Breaks Rules, Reinvents Himself, and Gets Thanked For It
• How One Mashup Artist Got Legal Permission to Pair Calvin & Hobbes with Dune
• 10 Adventure Trips Every Photographer Should Take
• If company slogans were honest
• Inside the Artificial Universe That Creates Itself – Still looking forward to this game

I’ve been floored with manflu since Friday so i’m a bit behind with reads but there’s still enough good stuff this week. Onwards.

• Uber is no better than an old-fashioned gangmaster – so London’s cabbies are striking
• Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
• Piled Higher and Deeper – Great explainer on Gravitational Waves and why their discovery is so important. So easy to read too!
• Farage’s vile views are dominating the Europhobe pitch
• Andrew Marr: the loss of the Independent means the loss of a community – There is an inevitability about this.
• An old-school reply to an advertiser’s retro threat – two fingers form a journalist – brilliant.
• Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge
• George Galloway: I Am The Spiritual Son Of Tony Benn And Jeremy Corbyn Is Making A Very Big Mistake On The EU – Twat
• Jeremy (H)unt Compilation – Jeremy Cunt
• Putting out the Twitter trashier – Hopefully Twitter implement some if not all the suggestions listed here.
• Visions of the Future – Beautiful posters from Nasa.
• The Trouble With Superman
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Official Final Trailer – Better trailer but we’ll find out next month how good the film actually is.

A bit behind on my reads this week due to work but still some interesting posts and a great Star Wars video. Enjoy.

• My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours -Want!
• The Futility of Pleasing All Users
• The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical Rebranding – Still looks bizarre to me
• Is this the perfect save icon?
• Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot
• A Mac for all seasons: Why the Mac has so much staying power – Still love Mac’s
• Not the oignon: fury as France changes 2,000 spellings and drops some accents
• Centriphone – an iPhone video experiment by Nicolas Vuignier
• The F-35’s Terrifying Bug List
• We got 10 CEOs to tell us their one killer interview question for new hires
• Wolfsburg sign young British player – as their official Fifa gamer – Still see e-sports as a massive growth area
• ‘Star Wars’ Recut as a Grindhouse Film – Glorious

2016 really has got off to a pretty shit start. Maybe it’s just January? Here’s hoping.

• From Eurovision to Radio 2: Terry Wogan’s best quotes – So sad to hear of Terry Wogan’s death today.
• Electoral reform: Party leaders call for pact to achieve alternative voting system after next election – I’d love to see this happen but infighting will lead to failure I fear.
• Spannergate – Are you Brian Spanner? If so how dare you go against the SNP and will of the minority in Scotland.
• Two columnists depart from Glasgow’s Herald in row with Rangers
• Without Fear or Favour – The Herald but more importantly Rangers come out of this looking awful. Rangers are a disgrace. Run by crooks for years and with a support that is decades out of touch with modern society. Officially disowned.
• Why the calorie is broken
• More details emerge about motorised doping at cyclocross worlds – From bad to worse.
• Amazon’s customer service backdoor – This needs fixing
• Inside Facebook’s Decision to Blow Up the Like Button
• The App Store as an Economy
• The 2015 Panic Report – Great write up on 2015 form Panic but his is sobering – More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS — we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform — and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.
• The End of Twitter
• How Facebook Squashed Twitter
• Project Skybender: Google’s secretive 5G internet drone tests revealed
• AlphaGo: Mastering the ancient game of Go with Machine Learning
• World’s Fastest Rubik’s Cube Solving Robot
• Last Land Rover Defender rolls off production line
• The Times Square snowboarding video: Why it went viral
• We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you – The beginning of iPlayer.
• Glittering Blue

The weeks are passing quickly at the moment and I’ve a couple of blog posts sitting in draft that I need to move on. Busy busy.

• The Tennis Racket – This massive story broke just before the start of the Australian Open. Is any sport really clean?
• Oxfam says wealth of richest 1% equal to other 99%
• An increasingly precious metal
• A message from Stewart Butterfield to Slack employees
• How Fujifilm’s cameras and lenses are Made in Japan – I love my Fuji X-T1 and the lenses are gorgeous. This is a great photo story behind the scenes at Fuji.
• Cuba’s Internet Is F*cking Insane. And the Ways Cubans Use It Are Genius.
• So, Uh, Here’s The Full Text Of Sarah Palin’s Bizarre Trump Speech – American politics is jus bat shit crazy at the moment.
• Anywhere but Medium – Own your content.
• Desktop Neo – Current desktop operating systems have become stagnant. This is a great rethink.
• Star Wars – Deaths
• Gillian Anderson was offered half of David Duchovny’s salary for the X-Files revival – So the better actor by far gets offered less money due to her sex. Wow.
• Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet
• Blue Origin Relaunched the Rocket it Landed in November – Loving this new space race, all played out on Twitter too.
• Why You Should Fix Your Inconsistent Sleep Schedule
• Fuck working hard
• Horizontal History
• The Full History of Board Games – Long but glorious read.
• Opie and Anthony – Billy Connolly The Cunt joke – Billy Connolly is a master.
• Tian Tian – Too cute

Such a sad week. Fuck cancer!

• Bowie Gif – Helen Green – Shared everywhere last week for all the wrong reasons
• A David Bowie Playlist
• Skratch Bastid – David Bowie Tribute “Let’s Dance” routine
• LBC’s James O’Brien demolishes Boris Johnson’s argument about junior doctors
• Martin Lewis Writes A Damning Open Letter To David Cameron Over Retrospective Student Loans Hike
• Britain is on the verge of an IT crisis
• The driverless, car-sharing road ahead
• Inside the Hidden World That Handles Your Holiday Returns
• The slowly fading art of flying—and maintaining—Cold War fighter jets
• The tube at a standstill: why TfL stopped people walking up the escalators
• Girls go missing
• The Letterboxd Year in Review
• Adele Carpool Karaoke

Far too ugly a start to 2016…only some Star Wars rescues the mood this week.

• It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences?!
• You say advertising, I say block that malware
• Media coverage of protests sure looks different when demonstrators are white
• Thank You Twitter – By Unverifying Milo Yiannopoulos, You Are Standing Up for Women Online
• The Search For The Killer Bot
• Who Controls Your Facebook Feed – Interesting post but I find Facebook less and less interesting.
• The Deep Space of Digital Reading
• Labour complains to BBC over Stephen Doughty resignation – What a fucking mess. The Tories can’t believe how lucky they are.
• Artificial intelligence: Can Watson save IBM?
• Apple in 2015: The Six Colors report card
• The inventor of the hoverboard says he’s made no money from it
• Netflix is on F****** Fire – I’m signing up
• Playing for Time – Fuck Cancer.
• At Long Last…My “Star Wars: Episode Vii” Review. The Force Awakens & The Rise Of Idiot Journalism – Great post and take down of the 40 things wrong with The Force Awakens post that did the rounds recently.
• ‘Star Wars’ Reimagined In ‘Calvin And Hobbes’ – All the best things in one handy sketch
• Meet Fn-2199, A.K.A. Tr-8R: The Stormtrooper Behind The Meme – love the depth in the Star Wars universe