Month: May 2016

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Apple and VocalIQ

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See this article about what (potentially) Apple’s been doing with Siri.

It’s really good to see that, apparently, Apple has been doing some serious work on Siri. I do like the tool but I find it a bit frustrating to use at times. 

I’ve done some work around the house using Indigo and Phillips Hue to automate lighting and create scenes. I find Siri to be pretty useful. The more of the work that I do with these tools, the more that I think that a tool like Amazon’s Echo with Alexa would make things just a bit easier. 

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Android’s failure to innovate?

Not sure that I agree with this article but I do think it’s great analysis.

I thought this but was pretty interesting:

While the media has grown enthralled with Facebook’s user growth (despite the fact that it paid $22 billion, or $55 per person, for 400 million WhatsApp users, who have subsequently generated 3 cents each in revenue per year), nobody in the tech media has really recognized the incredible value of iMessages. Google clearly has.

Revenue of 3 cents per USER per year from WhatsApp on a $22 Billion spend?

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I love me some ‘CEPHtmlEngineHelper’

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 I don’t know why this just start happening but the Adobe related ‘CEPHtmlEngineHelper’ just started causing the old Mac fan and CPU usage to go crazy.

Looks like it was resolved in private build by Adobe in February 2016.

Guess I’ll update the CC 2015 apps and see what happens, eh?

Update: It appears that the latest updates resolve the problems with ‘CEPHtmlEngineHelper’…

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“The train that saved Denver”

Excellent article about the new(-ish) train based transit system that Denver has been building. More impressive is the idea that the region as a whole has been working together.

I’ve always been impressed by the European model of bike, car, train and plane transportation systems working as an integrated whole. Efficient and easy to use.

See the article from Politico here.

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Building a Steinway Piano – Chris Payne

Got this link via Kottke. Really enjoyed seeing the process of building a piano, in this case a Steinway piano.

Last fall my wife and I purchased a used Piano after doing a bunch of shopping. Easy to see why new piano’s have such a cost attached to them. Anyway, we bought a used Baldwin to see how much it would get played. Good decision on our part.

Here’s the link.

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Alice the Cat

A picture of our cat, Alice. She’s a sweet, gentle little thing. In this picture I think she’s hungry. In that case she gets very, very intent on the goal. 

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How to use Apple News

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I’ve been using Apple News quite a bit. I like it. I am, however, a power user of Feedly.  

The Loop posted a link to an article about how to use Apple News. Nice article though the font face used on the site is a bit small for me. Thank goodness for ‘command-+’. 

I thought that this was an interesting idea: 

In fact I’m hoping that Apple bring News to the desktop in the next version of OS X.

See the article here.