Hi everyone, and welcome to the third edition of Plaintext. I hope that this newsletter has become one more good reason to look forward to Friday. (I now look forward to Friday because it means the newsletter is done and I don’t have to worry about the next one until … Sunday?) If you are…
DetailsAny device or service that gets people out of a fossil-fuel-guzzling, congestion-creating death machine (er, car) is great. But when it comes to e-scooters, I’m a big fan of owning your own, rather than renting one.If you own your own scooter, you’re more likely to be familiar with its operation. You won’t be thrilled by…
DetailsLast June, at a swanky, strobe-lit event in Washington, DC, Brendan Blumer, the 33-year-old CEO of a blockchain company called Block.one, unveiled a new product with Steve Jobs-like theatrics: a social network called Voice. A year earlier, Blumer’s company had raised $4 billion selling a crypto token called EOS. It was, by far, the largest-ever…
DetailsA few years back, Mark Zuckerberg began a listening tour across America that looked to all the world like the prelude to a run for office. Many guessed 2020 as the year that a billionaire startup founder would make his case for disruptive leadership on behalf of the American people. In fact, the social media…
DetailsNothing exists in pop culture without a mutation. Artists have borrowed (or happily stolen) from their contemporaries for centuries, but with the way meme culture raucously spreads online, every bit of today’s pop art—rap songs, Marvel characters, memorable scenes from Bravo reality shows—ends up repurposed by fans through add-on. A 25-second clip from The Real…
DetailsLast month, the cryptographer and coder known as Moxie Marlinspike was getting settled on an airplane when his seatmate, a Midwestern-looking man in his sixties, asked for help. He couldn’t figure out how to enable airplane mode on his aging Android phone. But when Marlinspike saw the screen, he wondered for a moment if he…
DetailsApple is designing the antenna module that will be used in its 5G iPhones in-house because it was unhappy with the version that Qualcomm designed, reports Fast Company, citing a source with knowledge of Apple’s plans. Apple reportedly “balked” at the design of the QTM 525 5G millimeter-wave antenna module offered by Qualcomm because it…
DetailsThe Apple Watch outsold the entire Swiss watch industry in 2019 – CNN
DetailsWant to spice up the bedroom without paying for pills or awkward visits to a sex therapist? A new app called Lover lets you take a sexual personality quiz, explore carnal knowledge tutorials and discretely figure out which turn-ons you share with your partner. Built by board-certified sexual medicine clinical psychologist Dr. Britney Blair, Lover…
DetailsThere’s treasure buried deep beneath the viridescent foothills of Tuscany’s Apennine Mountains, where the stark metal trusses of the Venelle-2 drilling tower mark its location like an X on a map. This geothermal well reaches nearly two miles beneath the surface to a region where temperatures and pressures are so high that rock begins to…
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