Apple, like most companies, has most, if not all manufacturing taking place in China. While this has been debated hotly in the US for decades if it’s good to do, COVID and the inability to make things have hit the tech sector hard. Apple is now doing something about it. Arnold Zafra at The Mac Observer has the ways Apple is working to make sure they can continue to build at scale. According to Nikkei Asia, Apple suppliers Luxshare Precision Industry and Foxconn started test production of the Apple Watch in northern Vietnam. With the level of sophistication that making…
Read to the end to really whip the llama’s ass. Hey there and welcome to today’s issue of TimeMachiner. A shout out to everyone new from Escape from Clowntown and Scott’s Newsletter! Thanks for giving me space in your inbox. 🙌🏻 I’m back from some time off, which included a trip to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. This mecca for hoops was a lot of fun to visit and to read up on so much of the sport’s history. Yes, seeing displays from the greats was amazing, but there was a lot of history that was told by people most…
If there is one subset of PC hobbyists that can simultaneously become a rabbit hole and an obsession, it’s those who are enamored with mechanical keyboards. These fans create custom keyboards, cobbled together from bespoke keycaps and individually suited switches in order to make their perfect input device. It is a fun hobby and can be an expensive one. For those looking to level up, Scharon Harding at Ars Technica has the story of an awesome keyboard in Elvish, the fictional language from Lord of the Rings. The Drop + The Lord of the Rings Dwarvish and Elvish Keyboards ($169) are the first to gain official Lord…
In an event that wasn’t leaked beforehand or tipped off to any insiders, T-Mobile made a big announcement last week. The company, which merged with Sprint recently, will partner with Starlink to fill in gaps within their coverage map. The coolest part? It will work with existing cell phones without the need to buy special equipment. Eli Blumenthal at CNet has more. …with this program T-Mobile users should be able to connect to the SpaceX satellites through a “new network, broadcast from Starlink’s satellites using T-Mobile’s midband spectrum nationwide.” Although the company hasn’t yet offered specifics on where the network…
With the rise in remote learning, partially due to COVID, there have been a fair number of companies working to get in on this new way of education. Many colleges and universities have purchased service agreements with electronic proctoring companies in order to achieve some form of honesty amongst test-takers. However, the means by which these companies are conducting themselves have run afoul of the law. Monica Chin at The Verge has a story about one student who fought back. Chemistry student Aaron Ogletree sat for an online test in the spring 2021 semester. Ogletree was asked to show the…
Coffee that is brewed by laser beams. What better combination could there be? Well, fantasy is becoming a reality thanks to Anna Rosa Ziefuss. She is a German scientist who has invented a speedy way to make cold-brew coffee. Total time? Three minutes! Jesus Diaz at FastCompany has the scoop. Ziefuss and her colleagues used a stock, ultrashort pulse laser from the lab, arranging a series of optical lenses to enlarge the beam and point it at a vessel that contained the coffee powder. While regular cold brew sits undisturbed for several hours, in Ziefuss’ method, the solution gets stirred,…
The phrase “OK, Boomer” is nearly played out, but still makes a point to an older generation about the way to do things. Playing on this, Bronwyn Petry at MoneyWise makes a list attempting to equate “old things” with “don’t do this anymore” or “this is a good skill to have”. The weirdness of Petry’s list is that it tries to ride a line between “things we don’t need” and “things you should still know how to do”. However, it is lobbed into a single list. Many of these are things modernized by current technology while others are things that…
Read to the end for the ideal airplane workspace. Hello. It’s great to bring you a new edition of TimeMachiner this Tuesday. A big welcome to my newest subscribers. Thank you for giving me space in your inbox. 🙏🏻 I’m trying something new this week with the layout of TimeMachiner. As you can see, there’s a small table of contents to let you know right at the start what’s in today’s issue. I don’t know if this is useful or not, but I figure why not try something different, right? Trying new things is always an endeavor. As kids, we can be…
Notable and famous people come from nearly every town in the world. Sure, you likely know some famous people in your area, but most people don’t know anyone just outside that area. Now, Topi Tjukanov has gone ahead and made an interactive map letting you zoom in and out to see all the famous people from any area. Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most “notable people” around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank. The map interacts…
Google launched a new campaign two weeks ago that looks to do two things: The first is to tout how far RCS has come since Google began pushing it a few years ago. The second is to shame Apple into supporting it on iOS. Google will fail. That isn’t simply my opinion. While it is true I am an iOS user and I do prefer Apple’s products above Google’s, I also have seen this before. Let us hop in the Delorean and go back to 2004 when Real Networks (remember them!?!) waged a similar campaign against Apple, but that time…
Atari was a fascinating company, responsible for both the rise of home video game consoles in the US and also the market crash of the same industry. The legendary 2600 was everywhere in the early 80s and there was certainly no shortage of software. The company may be a shell of itself these days, but Ben Edwards at How To Geek has a great interview with its founder Nolan Bushnell. When it came time to develop and release a more advanced home video game console with cartridges (the 2600), Atari needed capital, and Bushnell sold his company to Warner Communications.…
Read to the end if you’re over 30. Hello. It’s great to bring you a new edition of TimeMachiner this Tuesday. A big welcome to Ron, Jeff, Jessica, and my newest subscribers to TimeMachiner. Thank you for giving me space in your inbox. 🙏🏻 The week has been a doozy in “Real Life Land” between politics, the environment, and the endless drumbeat of sobering news. However, there are bubbles of good to still find. As Jason Mraz says, Look for the Good. A little league player showed kindness and compassion and every student in California public schools now gets free meals in order…
Weird Al is one of those national treasures of incredible talent. The man has been making parody music for over four decades and he hasn’t stopped. Most musical eras contain clever parodies of his and original music that easily gets stuck in your head. Recently, there’s a video has hit YouTube with an entire alternate take of his Eat It music video. The three-and-a-half-minute song is here in full, but you can see the camera work is a continuous take. It is obvious that this film would be cut and spliced with other takes and scenes used in the music…
There’s the saying “Better late than never” but this definitely takes it to a whole new level. At the Sheffield Cathedral, a building that is 800 years old, now has finally received back its 300-year book loan from a patron. David Kessen has more over at The Star. Now the book, The Faith and Practice of a Church of England Man, is set to go on display at the church, which was well known for its library until Geogian times. The Reverend Canon Keith Farrow, vice dean and canon missioner at the cathedral, said when it was still a church it…
Back in November, Netflix announced it was getting into the gaming business. A slate of five titles was rolling out to start, which is really nothing. However, there was no extra charge for it. Now here we are 3/4 of a year in the future and basically, nobody’s using it. Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku has more of this not-surprising news. Data shows that less than one percent of its users are actually playing any of these games. And while the streaming giant has announced more games coming to its service, very few of its over 200 million subscribers will likely…
Read to the end for climate control. Clicking the Publish button is a finality. Every thought, opinion, piece of news, or rabbit hole ends with me clicking on a blue button. It sends my words into the world and eventually to your inbox. I clicked PUBLISH for the first time here on August 11, 2021, at 5:19 PM. That article was the beginning of my experiment to see if writing a newsletter was for me. Prior to this, I’d spent over a decade giving fiction a try. I’d written five short stories and a novel. Each one was a spark…
On this anniversary of TimeMachiner, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite stories of the past year. There have been many random happenings I’ve written about that I think are still funny, insightful, and interesting today. The archive has filled up nicely since I started and I want to share with you the stories I think are the best. Let’s dive in. “Best Sellers” Trailer Gives Entire Movie Away (8/21/21) – A true pet peeve of mine is when you can watch the preview for a movie and then not even bother with going to see it because…
There are musicians and then there are musicians. Leave it to the Barcelona Guitar Trio to do something truly spectacular. This group of four men uses a single guitar to play Michael Jackson’s famous song, Billie Jean. It’s truly a sight to watch and listen to them play. The song sounds great and I could only imagine the immense practice they went through to put this performance together. You can watch the video here and if they allow it to be watched on other sites sometime in the future, you will be able to watch it directly below.
In a world where there’s always enough money to spend and enough companies to buy, leave it to Amazon to buy one of the biggies. News broke late last week that the World’s Largest Bookstore has acquired iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba. The price tag? A cool $1.7 billion. Brian Heater at TechCrunch has more. “Since we started iRobot, our team has been on a mission to create innovative, practical products that make customers’ lives easier, leading to inventions like the Roomba and iRobot OS,” CEO Colin Angle said in a release. “Amazon shares our passion for building…
Read to the end for ocean front property. Hello. It’s great to bring you a new edition of TimeMachiner this Tuesday. A big welcome to Amit, Aaron, Arjan, Jon and my newest subscribers to TimeMachiner. Thank you for giving me space in your inbox. 🙏🏻 The dog days of summer are officially upon us. There’s been only small drips of things going on in the world that are not all doom and gloom. It’s an interesting lull in the cycle of tech and home entertainment where even these big companies know they don’t have a grip on our attention during these months. It’s…
Animals and internet videos are a great mix. Nothing new there. We’ve had countless animal videos go viral over the years. This time around we have an unusual species gain the TikTok spotlight: Emmanuel the emu. Taylor Blake runs a hobby farm called Knuckle Bump Farm. She has a variety of animals there and that includes Emmanuel the emu. Blake has posted over 200 videos to her TikTok account. Lately Emmanuel has decided to crash the party and hog the spotlight. @knucklebumpfarms Emmanuel and I wanted to pop in and say THANK YOU for all of the love and support!…
A terrible loss in the sci-fi world this past weekend as Nichelle Nichols has beamed up to join some of her fellow Enterprise crewmates. Nichols, best known for playing Lieutenant Uhura, was active throughout the years between Trek shows and movies. Nichols was a groundbreaking performer, sharing American television’s first scripted interracial kiss with “Star Trek” co-star William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk, in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Nichols also used her celebrity to shed light on the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. In an interview for the Archive of American Television, Nichols explained how she wanted to…
The Nissan Leaf was one of the first electric cars to sell en masse. The automaker made a big splash in 2011 with a car that was somewhat affordable, but also had decent styling. Now, the Nissan Leaf is no more. The company has announced they will be phasing out the car by 2025. Nathan Bomey at Axios has the story. After its debut in 2011, the Leaf quickly became the best-selling EV in the world. But it soon ceded the throne to Tesla, and never came close to achieving the vision laid out by former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn:…
It’s no secret that Amazon is pushing hard into grocery. Here on Long Island, there are no less than six Amazon Fresh stores under construction. One innovative aspect of Amazon stores are their “Just Walk Out” system that tracks your items and auto-bills you for them when you leave. That works great for convenience store items, but what about grocery? That’s where the Amazon Dash Cart comes in. James Vincent at The Verge has more about this. The cart’s main feature is a sensor array in the rim that uses AI-powered cameras and barcode scanners to identify whatever you put…