Category: General Tech

The Studio Neat Mark One⇢

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The boys at Studio Neat have done it again:

We are back again with a new project that pairs perfectly with it: Mark One, a minimal, durable, retractable pen.

This whole journey started when we discovered a fantastic refill, beloved in the pen world: the Schmidt P8126 rollerball. It quickly became our favorite, so we thought, “we should make a great pen for this refill.” So that’s what we did.

I have an early, hand-built version of this pen, and it is as satisfying to own and use as Dan and Tom say it is. There’s no logo, no unnecessary details and is comfortable to use even for long periods of time. If you’re looking for a nice pen to add to your life, the Mark One should be it.

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A Bunch of Stuff I Meant to Link to This Week but I Ran Out of Time

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This week got away from me, so here’s a bunch of stuff I found this week that I wanted to share with you:

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Intel Smart Glasses⇢

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Dieter Bohn at The Verge got an exclusive look at Intel’s smart glasses project:

The most important parts of Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses are the pieces that were left out.

There is no camera to creep people out, no button to push, no gesture area to swipe, no glowing LCD screen, no weird arm floating in front of the lens, no speaker, and no microphone (for now).

From the outside, the Vaunt glasses look just like eyeglasses. When you’re wearing them, you see a stream of information on what looks like a screen — but it’s actually being projected onto your retina.

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Mozilla Foolishly Ships Mr. Robot Plugin⇢

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Kate Conger at Gizmodo:

Mozilla sneaked a browser plugin that promotes Mr. Robot into Firefox—and managed to piss off a bunch of its privacy-conscious users in the process.

The extension, called Looking Glass, is intended to promote an augmented reality game to “further your immersion into the Mr. Robot universe,” according to Mozilla. It was automatically added to Firefox users’ browsers this week with no explanation except the cryptic message, “MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS,” prompting users to worry on Reddit that they’d been hit with spyware.

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The 512 Pixels Holiday Gift Guide for People Like Me

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If you have a nerd in your life, let me save you some stress and suggest some holiday gifts they may enjoy:

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The Case for RSS⇢

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David Sparks, writing about bucking the trend of moving away from RSS readers:

The reason I’ve stuck with RSS is the way in which I work. Twitter is the social network that I participate in most and yet sometimes days go by where I don’t load the application. I like to work in focused bursts. If I’m deep into writing a book or a legal client project. I basically ignore everything else. I close my mail application, tell my phone service to take my calls, and I definitely don’t open Twitter. When I finish the job, I can then go back to the Internet. I’ll check in on Twitter, but I won’t be able to get my news from it. That only works if you go into Twitter much more frequently than I do. That’s why RSS is such a great solution for me. If a few days go by, I can open RSS and go through my carefully curated list of websites and get caught back up with the world.

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Intel to use Integrated AMD Graphics on Some Chipsets⇢

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Peter Bright at Ars, writing about the upcoming 8th-generation H-series chips:

The chip package will contain multiple pieces of silicon: an Intel CPU, a custom-built AMD Radeon GPU, and stacked second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). Connecting the GPU and its memory is Intel’s new “Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge” (EMIB), a high-speed, short-range interconnect that Intel has designed to join different chips within a single package. Intel says that EMIB enables the creation of faster, thinner packages, enabling the multi-chip module to fit into slimline laptop form factors.

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Hewlett-Packard Historical Archives Destroyed in Fires⇢

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Robert Digitale, for The Press Democrat:

The Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard, the tech pioneers who in 1938 formed an electronics company in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in cash.

More than 100 boxes of the two men’s writings, correspondence, speeches and other items were contained in one of two modular buildings that burned to the ground at the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies. Keysight, the world’s largest electronics measurement company, traces its roots to HP and acquired the archives in 2014 when its business was split from Agilent Technologies — itself an HP spinoff.

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App Camp 2020⇢

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App Camp is a program close to the heart of many of us in the Apple community, and they have a new big goal:

We want to start three more camps by 2020. Three new camps means we’ll be able to bring camps to an additional 60 kids per year nationwide!

In order to accomplish that goal, we need your help. Your contribution will help us buy the MacBook Pros, iPad Pros, Apple Pencils, and iPod touches necessary to running a camp like this. It will also support the growth and development of our volunteers and give us the ability to make the curriculum we teach even better.

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