Linked List: April 9, 2018

Monday, 9 April 2018

Apple Introduces Product Red iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus 

I’m fully on board with the iPhone X, but these look amazing. The black face looks so much better than the white face on last year’s Product Red iPhone 7 models.

Magic Leap’s Fallback Plan: Patent Licensing 

Rachel Metz, writing for MIT Technology Review:

Few people outside the company have seen the device, let alone tried it. In March, Magic Leap released software tools for developers to start making apps for the device; those without access to the device have to use a software-based simulator to get a sense for what their creations will actually look like through the lenses of the headset.

The company has built up a trove of dozens of patents over the past several years that could be licensed to other companies as a sort of fallback plan if the headset fails.

There’s no “sort of” about it — becoming a patent troll would definitely be a fallback plan.

HP Goes Up Against the iPad Pro With Its $599 Chromebook X2 

Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:

The Chromebook x2 seems to have a lot of potential, but there are some big questions — and not just about whether the hardware is as good as it looks. The real open question is whether Chrome OS is cut out to work on a tablet. Google has been overhauling the operating system to work better with touchscreens for a couple years now, but it’s still very much a desktop system. (It’s based on the Chrome desktop browser and its display of desktop websites, after all.) That’s likely to limit how useful it is, especially in comparison to an iPad, which was designed for touch from the ground up.

How good is Chrome on a tablet is my question exactly. And whatever happened to Google’s project to merge Android and Chrome OS into one operating system? Is that still a thing?

Maelstrom Still Runs 

Speaking of video games, Brent Simmons reminded me that Maelstrom — the excellent Asteroids clone originally created for the classic Mac OS by Ambrosia Software — still runs natively on Mac OS X. I just played for the first time in probably at least 10 years and scored over 47,000. Not bad. Can’t say much for the graphics when running full-screen on a 27-inch display, but it’s still damn fun.

Brian Krebs on ‘Security Questions’ and Facebook Surveys 

Brian Krebs:

Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.

I’m willing to bet that a good percentage of regular readers here would never respond — honestly or otherwise — to such questionnaires (except perhaps to chide others for responding). But I thought it was worth mentioning because certain social networks — particularly Facebook — seem positively overrun with these data-harvesting schemes. What’s more, I’m constantly asking friends and family members to stop participating in these quizzes and to stop urging their contacts to do the same.

Krebs is right (as usual), but at the end of his post he points to the real problem —  the fact that so many websites, particularly banks, still rely on questions like these for verifying your identity. It’s not secure at all.

Firewatch Is Coming to the Nintendo Switch 

Campo Santo:

When will it be out? All we can say is “soon!” Reengineering the sprawling meadows and towering trees of Firewatch’s wilderness to play perfectly on new hardware is no small engineering task. We’ve been hard at work stripping much of Firewatch’s tech down to the studs and rebuilding it to render the world more quickly, to stream and load faster, and to generally be more responsive. Nearly everyone in the Campo Santo office has a Nintendo Switch (and the rest want one). We know what a good Switch game feels like, and want to make sure Firewatch feels like one too.

Plus, we’re hoping to throw in a couple surprises just for the Switch release.

I don’t spend a lot of time playing video games, but I absolutely loved Firewatch. It’s great to see so many games coming to the Switch.

The Looptail Lowercase G 

Lauren Sigfusson, writing for Discover:

Most of us learn the ABCs in our youth. We see and say the letters so many times they eventually become etched in our minds.

But researchers from Johns Hopkins University discovered that many people don’t know what the most common lowercase print version of the seventh letter of the alphabet really is. Heck, some didn’t even know there were two types.

There are two ways people write the lowercase letter G. The looptail, which we tend to read because it’s used in easy-to-read fonts like Times New Roman, Cambria and Calibri, and in most printed and typed material. The second is the opentail, which is the one we tend to write.

Go back to the top photo: Can you determine the correct looptail?

I got this correct, but if I had been asked to draw a looptail ‘G’ from memory I’d have failed. It is a really weird letter shape when you stare at it. Anyway, be sure to read through to the very end, for a fun editor’s note. (Via Paul Kafasis.)