Author: Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

🎧 This Week in Google: #413 You Never Know What’s Not Going to Happen | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #413 You Never Know What's Not Going to Happen from TWIT.tv
Today is the Net Neutrality Day of Action. Go to BattleForTheNet.com and write your congressperson. Also, The Pixel XL 2 may feature a squeezable frame. Allo is coming to the desktop in "a few weeks." Android 7.1 has "Panic Detection" mode. Facebook will sell ads in Messenger. Amazon Prime Day sales up 60% over last year's record-setting haul - with Echo Dot as the top-selling item. Samsung Galaxy Note 8 may explode onto the scene on August 23rd. Make Nokia great again. China teleports matter to space. Jeff's Numbers: Google spends $800,000 on newsbots that write 30,000 articles a month in the UK. Google doesn't owe France 1.1bn euros in back taxes. Danny's Stuff: Silk Vault Slim Wallet Case, The Big Sick Stacey's Thing: Fibaro HomeKit Sensors

👓 Giving you more characters to express yourself | Twitter

Read Giving you more characters to express yourself (Twitter Blog)
We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
I’m sure I could say something flip, like my own website doesn’t impose any arbitrary limits like this on me, but honestly, where Twitter is involved, it’s just become painfully old.

I have taken to always posting on my own website(s) first–where the sky is the proverbial limit–and only then syndicating out to places like Twitter. While Twitter’s got a reasonable network and there are lots of interesting people who might not otherwise be online interacting, I really haven’t been using Twitter as much in the past two years as I had previously. This change isn’t going to affect me at all from a publishing perspective. There are much more valuable tools to be using now. (Though I do wish the rest of the web would catch up on some of the new technologies they’re really missing out on.)

I do appreciate that it will allow some others who don’t have their own websites some more flexibility. I’m hoping that the Twitter apps that handle notifications add the extra content as Twitter’s own mobile app notifications cut off even before the 140 character limit, which makes them painful to use from a UI perspective.

If nothing else, it’s nice to see them iterating a little, but they need to be doing it at a faster velocity.

👓 Secret Service protection for Donald Trump Jr. reactivated: report | The Hill

Read Secret Service protection for Donald Trump Jr. reactivated: report by Rebecca Savransky (The Hill)
Jr. reportedly has his Secret Service protection back, sources told CNN. The news comes after a previous report that Trump Jr. gave up his protection from the Secret Service because of privacy concerns. A senior administration official told The New York Times earlier this month the Secret Service had stopped protecting Trump Jr.
I’m curious what prompted the de-activation and then a subsequent re-activation so close to each other. Makes me wonder which body(ies) he may have disposed of in the interim?

👓 Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Facebook

Read Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js by Adam Wolff (Facebook)
Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons. This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.
This won’t bode well for large portions of the web…

🔖 Stamp for music playlist portability

Bookmarked Stamp | FREE YOUR MUSIC (Stamp)
Stamp moves tracks and playlists across various services - Apple Music, Spotify, Google Music and others!
How awesome this portends to be! I’ve been wanting this type of functionality for a long time. I’m curious how long it stays up?

Too many music services don’t make it easy to transport your playlists as it’s one of the methods they use to lock you into their service (and their recurring subscription fees). It looks like it supports .csv formats, but it would be nice if there were a better standardized data format to let users own all of their own data. How great would it be if I could maintain my own playlist on my own website and then authorize services to access it to play what I wanted? Then I could have one central repository and take it to any subscription service out there.

It looks like it supports Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music, Pandora (Pro only?), Amazon Music, Groove, YouTube, rdio, Deezer, and Tidal.

Stamp | Free Your Music

🎧 This Week in Google: #411 Dinah Won’t You Blow | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #411 Dinah Won't You Blow from TWIT.tv
EU fines Google €2.42 billion, Canada demands global de-listing. Google News' redesign causes Jeff concern. YouTube Party. Amazon Show unboxing. Facebook hits 2 billion users. Petya ransomware may be retaliation for Russian cyberwarfare on Ukraine. Jeff's report from Vidcon.

https://youtu.be/bRI078mWrxg

🎧 This Week in Google: #410 Addicted to Convenience | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #410 Addicted to Convenience from TWIT.tv
Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods and how it could change grocery stores. The transition from an economy of goods to one of experiences. Uber and Lyft get their way in Texas after refusing to comply with an ordinance requiring fingerprint background checks for drivers. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigns and whether or not the corporate culture of Uber was necessary for its success. Stacey's Thing: Radical Technologies - The Design of Every Day Life by Adam Greenfield Mike's Number: 18, the number of Girl Scout badges introduced for cybersecurity education Leo's Tool: Search for "Spinner" on Google

I enjoyed the discussion of the purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon. I had described a big chunk of the value there as Amazon buying up a lot of the only warehouse space available in housing zoned areas while they described it as solving the last mile problem in local delivery. This is essentially the same thing, though they didn’t mention Amazon’s experiments with delivery via drones which could easily become a reality with not only warehouse space, but landing pads and bases in every big neighborhood with a Whole Foods located within them.

It was cool to hear the news about Girl Scouts adding lots of cybersecurity badges to their list.