Linked List: July 15, 2015

Wednesday, 15 July 2015

Video Shows Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Escaping From Prison 

Joshua Partlow, reporting for The Washington Post:

In his last moments as Mexico’s most important prisoner, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman paces his cell, past his single bunk with rumpled sheets, the plastic water jugs on the floor. He seems particularly interested in what’s behind the waist-high wall of the shower stall, as he keeps bending down to look at the floor.

It is Saturday night, near 9 p.m., inside Cell 20 of the Altiplano maximum security prison, and the video surveillance camera captures Guzman’s shadow as it traces across the walls. The 60-square-foot room is inside the wing for the country’s most dangerous criminals, where the drug lord Guzman has spent the past year and a half in solitary confinement under 24-hour-surveillance, a monitoring bracelet on his wrist.

As the video shows, Guzman sits down on the edge of his bunk and slips off his shoes. He pads back to the shower, kneels behind the wall and disappears.

Altiplano is apparently run in a similar fashion to Arkham Asylum.

The New iPod Nano 

Very curious: the UI still looks iOS 6-style.

Update: Word from a few little birdies is that what remains of the iPod software team is now working on Apple Watch — the Nano UI wasn’t updated to look like iOS 7 because there’s no one left to do it.

The New iPod Shuffle 

Cool new button — VoiceOver:

Say you’re listening to a song and want to know the title or the artist. Just press the VoiceOver button on top of your iPod shuffle, and it tells you. You can even use VoiceOver to hear the names of playlists and switch between them.

Supports 29 different languages. Update: Apparently I’m an idiot, and this button has been on the Shuffles since 2010. I still think it’s a cool feature, though.

Apple Introduces New A8-Based iPod Touch 

Fascinating. First, the previous iPod Touch was introduced way back in 2012, alongside the iPhone 5 — a lot of people had reasonably assumed the iPod Touch was dead. Apparently not. Second, it’s jumped all the way from an A5 to an A8 — from outdated to state-of-the-art. Third, unlike the iPhones 6, the screen didn’t get bigger. Lastly, why introduce this mid-July with a press release? Why not do it in September?

The obvious answer: Apple cares enough about the Touch to update it, but not enough to spend even a few minutes on it during the September new iPhone event. Same for the refreshed iPods Nano and Shuffle. Apple’s website no longer even lists “iPod” as one of the top-level menu items.