Linked List: January 10, 2018

Wednesday, 10 January 2018

Wired: ‘How Outlier, the Underground Fashion Label for Nerds, Got Cool’ ★

Adam Rogers, writing for Wired on indie menswear maker Outlier (a former DF sponsor):

Pants tough enough to deal with anything became Outlier’s signature play — trousers “for the end of the world,” as the folks at GQ put it. “We were trying to solve a specific cycling problem,” Burmeister says. “How to not look like a cyclist but still perform.”

They started going to textile conferences — Outdoor Retailer, then in Utah, was a big one. They wanted to find out where big companies, which they assumed used all the best stuff, got their supplies. But it turned out that the big companies of the world actually used the best cheapest materials.

As for the actual best, well, “we found that there was all this stuff nobody was touching. We were stunned. Like, nobody is using this? Nobody is using this?” Burmeister says. Military fabrics, equestrian fabrics, industrial fabrics — they were all for sale, or had been. They found, for example, a doubleweave with Cordura-grade nylon on one side and a softer nylon/polyester blend on the other. It seemed like it would make really great pair of jeans.

Outlier’s clothes aren’t cheap, but once you wear them, you realize how cheaply made most other clothes are. (Via Greg Koenig.)

Android Central: ‘Essential Phone Review, Four Months Later: The Sun Is Setting on This Experiment’ ★

Andrew Martonik, writing for Android Central two weeks ago:

It all starts with just general app instability. Apps crash — a lot. More than I’ve experienced on any other phone. They freeze, stutter, lock up and force close. Sometimes you tap an app to open it, and nothing happens for multiple seconds. When an app calls up another one through a share action, it takes the same egregious delay. Sometimes apps open and switch just fine, but then randomly slow down to a crawl with inordinately long splash screens or loading animations. And it isn’t tied to just one app, it’s all apps.

The app issues seem to come as a result of general system instability that I haven’t seen in a high-end phone in years. Touch response is very slow, making everything simply feel sluggish as you tap and scroll around every day. The phone will often struggle to open or close the camera and can fail to save photos if you close the camera too quickly. I’ve had the entire phone go unresponsive for several minutes and require a force reboot (hold the power button for ~15 seconds) multiple times. […]

The camera app is slow and unstable and lacks basic features like viewfinder grid lines or any sort of customization or “pro” mode. HDR mode doesn’t really seem to do anything but take photos slower, and toggling it on still inexplicably turns the flash to “auto” mode. The slow performance directly contributes to missing shots, and the fundamentals of a small sensor with no OIS mean you get grainy and blurry low-light shots regularly. The Essential Phone’s camera is still so far from the competition.

In short, the Essential phone is a disaster.

(Yet oddly it has the same score from The Verge — 8/10 — as the iPhone 8.)

‘The Good War’ ★

Thought-provoking graphic essay by Mike Dawson and Chris Hayes.

MacOS 10.13 High Sierra’s App Store System Prefs Panel Can Be Unlocked With Any Password ★

This one is relatively low stakes:

These settings are unlocked by default for admin users.
Entering a bogus password only works if you’re logged in as an admin user.
The settings in this panel aren’t particularly sensitive.
It’s apparently already fixed in the current High Sierra developer betas.

But, still, this is embarrassing given what we just went through with the very serious root-access-with-no-password bug. As a wise man once said, “Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… You can’t get fooled again.”