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Want. NYC to bring fast public WiFi

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Finally, a use for those strange kiosks with payphones in. They’re going to be converted to be wifi stations – and not just any old slow wifi, but gigabit wifi. For gigabit read fast and for fast read when will it be done here too?

New York City today unveiled an ambitious plan to roll out a free city-wide municipal Wi-Fi network that officials say will be the fastest and most wide-reaching network of its kind in the world.

At a press conference at City Hall, the city unveiled LinkNYC, which will rely on thousands of kiosks that will be deployed at locations currently occupied by pay phones. The kiosks will be installed in as many as 10,000 locations throughout the five boroughs and will offer Wi-Fi service of one gigabit per second within a radius of 150 feet. They’ll also offer free domestic voice calls to all 50 states. The first of the kiosks is expected to begin service in late 2015.

New York City to Offer Free Gigabit Wi-Fi in 2015 – Arik Hesseldahl, Re/code (17 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

As The Imitation Game reaches UK cinemas…

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…this is the story of the man who got the UK to acknowledge how brutally badly it treated Alan Turing. Andy why?

This man, younger than me, killed himself because at the time homosexuality was illegal and having been prosecuted he was chemically castrated in an attempt to ‘cure’ him.” Graham-Cumming noted that it was not until 1994 that the government parceled out any honor to the man who had arguably done more than any other in the 20th century to preserve the nation — and then by naming a stretch of the A6010 road in Manchester, his hometown, “Alan Turing Way.”

The Man Who Made the UK Say “I’m Sorry For What We Did To Turing.” — Backchannel — Steven Levy, Medium (14 November 2014)

That’s actually from John Graham-Cumming’s blog which this article by Steven Levy explains went on to change the UK.

It doesn’t make it right. But it makes it better than it was.

Read the full piece.

Sort of a good deal: iA Writer down to 69p

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I say this is sort-of a good deal because I learnt of the price drop, remembered how enthusiastically people had recommended this app to me and I bought it on the spot. And it was only as I tried writing in it that I looked through the controls and found a line saying “Buy the Pro version”.

The Pro version is only £2.99 but you just know that all the enthusiasts were enthusing about that edition so the one I’ve got isn’t the one they meant. It’s only 69p but I was on the fence about trying to take on another word processor so I find I’m unwilling to go plop down £2.99 until I know what the differences are.

But whether you look at the 69p one or the Pro £2.99, go take a look in the App Store. You can’t believe how much praise I’ve heard for iA Writer.

Beaten to it: the Christmas productivity gift guide

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Well, it’s really the techie or geeky Christmas gift guide. And there’s much in it that I wouldn’t have thought of, let alone picked. But if they only picked the things I would, there’d be no point telling you about them.

And them is Katie Floyd and David Sparks of MacPowerUsers. The latest edition of the podcast is their annual gift guide. They have a thing about not repeating gift recommendations from previous years and I see the point but I don’t see the point: if it’s still the best thing to buy, it’s still the best thing to buy.

Still, here are the best things to buy for Christmas according to MacPowerUsers.

If Omni makes, it’s worth a look

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I don’t honestly know what OmniGraffle is for. Hang on:

OmniGraffle is for creating precise, beautiful graphics. Like website wireframes, an electrical system design, a family tree, or mapping out software classes. For artists, designers, casual data-mappers, and everyone in-between.

OmniGraffle – The Omni Group blog (XXXXXX)

Thanks. For some reason I read that, I understand it, but I forget it. And the next time there’s a new version of OmniGraffle, I get to wondering: what in the hell is OmniGraffle?

It’s not for me, that’s the other answer and it’s the explanation. I don’t need graphics like this, I don’t create them, I can’t create them. So in my productively-focused brain, it wouldn’t get into my head and it wouldn’t get a spot on The Blank Screen. But it’s by the Omni Group.

I am wedded to this company’s To Do software OmniFocus. If it ran on Windows and Android, I would skip a whole chunk of my workshops and just recommend OmniFocus to everybody. As it is, I recommend OmniFocus to everybody. Buy a Mac first, if necessary.

Then if I’m wedded to that, I’m having a fling with OmniOutliner. This is the outlining software that changed my mind about outlining. I used to do it solely when contractually obligated. Now I am still an explorer on the page but if I have to do anything quickly, I whack down some thoughts in OmniOutliner and let them grow until they find their own form. I’ve done books like this. Interviews. Events. I’ve done things where having juggled the outline around until I’m happy, I’ve then sent that outline directly into OmniFocus where it’s become a whole series of tasks.

I am now planning a lot more events and I’m toying with OmniPlan chiefly because it’s made by the same firm. So when the Omni Group announces a new version of OmniGraffle, I notice and am compelled to tell you about it. I’m just rubbish at actually telling you anything about it. So do go read the full piece on the Omni blog.

The coffee pot that only works in windy weather

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Seriously. Coffee when it’s windy. Not because it’s cold outside and the coffee is warming. Instead because it’s windy outside and it’s the power from a turbine that’s warming the coffee. Researchers at Lancaster University have developed the Windy Brew, a kettle which can only boil when there is exactly enough energy from a nearby wind turbine.

Read more about how and in particular why.

Jony Ive: design education is so poor it is “tragic”

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He’s surely the most famous living designer in the world and what he’s famous for is the highest of high tech. But Jony Ive says colleges are failing students by giving them too many computers. It’s more than an observation, it’s the result of difficulties the current education system is causing for industry. We keep hearing that arts projects are bollocks and colleges should teach practical disciplines that get jobs but right now education isn’t doing that:

“So many of the designers that we interview don’t know how to make stuff, because workshops in design schools are expensive and computers are cheaper,” said Ive.

“That’s just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.”

Design education is “tragic”, says Jonathan Ive – no writer listed, DeZeen Magazine (13 November 2014)

Read the full piece. Actually, scroll down a bit first: the top is an article about Apple designer Jony Ive’s talk at London’s Design Museum but underneath it is a fuller transcript and puts some of the quotes in a better context.

Weekend read: a tale of two supermarkets

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Well, it’s Tesco and Sears. Both have supermarkety bits to them, both do more, both have interestingly turbulent times. I’m just terribly interested when unstoppable companies stumble: IBM was invincible and now it’s still gigantic and successful but you barely think of it. Microsoft, much the same. Now Tesco, surely royalty of UK supermarkets if not yer acksual king, has taken a kicking.

There’s a schadenfreude element, I suppose, and I’m not embarrassed by that when, for instance, the company falling from a dizzy height only got to that height through blatant copying of another firm. (Did you hear the joke when Apple’s Tim Cook came out as gay? Word was that the head of Samsung was going to come out as more gay.)

But speaking of Apple, I’m also interested really interested when big companies turn around. Apple was within 90 days of bankruptcy and look at it now. Maybe this all speaks to me because I’m a freelancer and a writer: I don’t have a multi-billion dollar business nor, crucially, thousands of employees but we get the ups and downs, we really get them.

So this pair of unrelated but oh-so-very-related articles from the Harvard Business Review makes an absorbing read. First this about Tesco’s woes:

Tesco’s chairman has resigned in disgrace. The company’s market value has more than halved to an 11-year low as it acknowledged overstating profits by hundreds of millions of dollars. And a humbled Warren Buffett, after opportunistically raising his stake in the company after a surprise profit warning, confessed to CNBC: “I made a mistake on Tesco. That was a huge mistake by me.”

Tesco’s Downfall Is a Warning to Data-Driven Retailers – Michael Schrage, Harvard Business Review (28 October 2014)

And now one about how Sears has faced stumbles before but manages to get up and have another go:

It’s easy to suggest that perhaps it’s simply run its course; after all, over the last 50 years, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has shrunk from about 60 years to less than 20, as more than one business thinker has pointed out. Founded in 1886 as a mail-order watch retailer, Sears was already 71 when it became an original member of the S&P 500 in 1957. At the hoary age of 128, it had beat the odds twice over when it lost its place to chemical maker LyondellBasell at close of trading this year on September 4th.

But perhaps its current woes are just a blip in a long, long history of facing and rising to challenges. A trip through the HBR archives shows just how cutting-edge the company has been in so many ways for so long

Sears Has Come Back from the Brink Before – Andrea Ovans, Harvard Business Review (28 October 2014)

Buy of the week: Email – the MacSparky Field Guide

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I use email every minute of every day and so do you. I thought I understood it and I really thought I was using it well but the original version of this book gave me so many Damascus moments. I’ve made tiny changes to my email now that get me more time to write and keep the distractions away.

And the new edition, just out, has been updated with new sections on services to mass unsubscribe you from all or your choice of those endless emails companies send you. Lots on the new changes in iOS and Mac Mail. gmail. Outlook 2014.

The best version of it is an iBook: that’s what I have and it’s gorgeously designed and readable. But you can only get that on iPads, iPhone and Mac and the email advice applies to every one of us, everywhere. So there is also a PDF version. Have a look on author David Sparks’s website for details.

Evernote’s new Context feature isn’t for you

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Well, the odds are that it isn’t. This is the new feature that scans your entire Evernote database and tells you exactly how many relevant articles there are in the Wall Street Journal. I could tell you that now: none. Ever. Not a one.

I can also tell you, though this is more of a guess, that Context scans your Evernote notes really slowly. Because when the new feature appeared in an automatic update on my iPhone, Evernote became unusable for hours. Buttons wouldn’t respond, screens wouldn’t scroll. I filed a bug report and I’m a premium user – I pay for various extra bits above the very good free offering – so I knew I’d get a response and maybe a solution within 24 hours. That didn’t help me right there and then when I needed some information in order to get where I was going.

And it didn’t help me within 24 hours, either. I got my first support response back at just under 240 hours. But in fairness, they apologised and extended my paid premium subscription by a few months.

And the app had righted itself by then. So I suspect that the slow down was due to Context indexing the articles but I can’t prove it and there’s little point asking an idle fact when a support request that says Evernote has been rendered literally unusable gets ignored for ten days.

The result of that indexing, by the way, was of course nothing. There never will be any relevant article in the Wall Street Journal and I could’ve told you that. I did tell you. Moments ago. But now I can tell you with gusto because it didn’t find any to flag. Maybe, though, things are going to change now – because the Japanese media firm Nikkei has joined the party. Any second now, Evernote will go looking through my notes to find relevant articles there. What are the odds?

Nikkei is the first international news source that has been integrated into Evernote Context and the partnership is expected to become available to Evernote Premium and Evernote Business subscribers by early 2015.

Evernote Context looks at data in your files and feeds you news articles and other information that it thinks you will find relevant. As TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden noted last month, this builds into Evernote’s attempt to build its content discovery play, a similar strategy to the ones taken by Facebook and Twitter as they seek ways to encourage people to spend more time on their sites. Libin has said that Evernote is considering an IPO within the next few years.

Evernote’s partnership with Nikkei is also interesting because it’s a reminder that a good portion of its international user base comes from Japan.

Evernote Raises $20M From Japanese Media Giant Nikkei, Forms Content Partnership For Evernote Context – Catherine Shu, TechCrunch (9 November 2014)

Cool. But I hope the Evernote users who do have anything that could be called relevant to Nikkei or the Wall Street Journal like the fact that they do. And that the rest of us can switch the stuff off.