Linked List: June 19, 2014

Thursday, 19 June 2014

Washboard: New Startup Sells $10 Rolls of Quarters for $15 Each ★

If today being National Martini Day hasn’t driven you to pour a stiff drink yet, this will. Jiminy.

Joshua Ho, writing for AnandTech:

To be clear, iOS 8 will expose just about every manual camera control possible. This means that ISO, shutter speed, focus, white balance, and exposure bias can be manually set within a custom camera application. Outside of these manual controls, Apple has also added gray card functionality to bypass the auto white balance mechanism and both EV bracketing and shutter speed/ISO bracketing.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: Apple has become one of the leading camera companies in the world, and quite possibly the most innovative. The image quality from the iPhone camera is an ideal example of hardware and software being inextricably tied in Apple products.

Sweethearting ★

2005 idea from Jason Kottke:

Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. If you call your husband on the way home from work every night and say the same thing each time, perhaps a ping would be better…you wouldn’t have to call and your husband wouldn’t have to stop what he was doing to answer the phone. You could even call it the “sweetheart ping” or “sweethearting”… in the absence of a prearraged “ping me when you’re leaving”, you could ping someone to let them know you’re thinking about them.

Sounds a lot like Yo, except somehow Kottke’s idea seems nifty and Yo sounds douchey. (Thanks to DF reader Mark Ott.)

The Martini FAQ ★

Given today’s holiday, Brad Gadberry’s The Martini FAQ is well-worth a re-link. It is a delightful and comprehensive resource, and as I noted previously, I’ve never seen anyone so deftly navigate the gin/vodka divide.

In that spirit, as five o’clock rolls westward across the continent, may I also direct your attention once again to Jim Coudal’s Perfect.

‘Did You Put Fucking Zunes in Our Lockers?’ ★

A peek at Steve Ballmer’s Gmail inbox, from Justin Halpern at Grantland.

The Near-Death of Grand Central Terminal ★

Kevin Baker, writing for Harper’s:

Still unsatisfied, New York Central proposed in 1961 to build a three-level bowling alley over Grand Central’s Main Concourse, which would have required lowering the ceiling from sixty feet to fifteen and cutting off from view its glorious blue mural of the zodiac. This, too, was stopped. Foiled again, New York Central resorted to plastering the terminal with ads and bombarding travelers with canned Muzak, complete with commercials, over the public address system.

Good lord.

Yo ★

Another day, another app pre-installed on the phones they give you in hell.

Apple TV as HomeKit Hub ★

Christopher Breen:

Wouldn’t it be better if each home had a small, power-efficient, always-on, platform-agnostic, Wi-Fi-enabled computer that could talk to your devices both remotely and over a local network?

Yes it would. Clever thinking.