Strong strain-relief collars help the PowerLine cable last longer.
The MFi-licensed Anker PowerLine Lightning cable offers everything we look for in a cable at a great price. It can charge every Lightning-equipped device except the iPad Pro at full speed, and it is built to be sturdy. Plus, Anker stands behind its products more than most companies do.
Most Lightning cables look alike, but when you look closely at the PowerLine, its benefits show. The most evident is the sturdy housing around the USB and Lightning connectors. Each has a hard plastic casing holding the plug, with a slightly more flexible material joining the housing and the cable itself. According to Anker, the cable is designed to have a 5,000-plus-bend lifespan. Though we haven’t independently verified this number, this is some of the best construction we’ve seen in reasonably priced cables. (Overengineered models exist, of course, but we consider them overkill—and they usually cost more than most people want to spend on a cable.) Anker also claims that the PowerLine cable is “reinforced with bulletproof Kevlar fiber.” Again, we take the company at its word on this one; what we can say is that the PowerLine cables look and feel sturdier, especially at those connection points, than some of our previous picks from Monoprice, AmazonBasics, and Aduro. We of course plan to monitor long-term durability.
The PowerLine cable’s plug housing is small enough to work with every case we tested.
Anker’s cables have always been some of the best when it comes to case compatibility. Often, the plug housing on Lightning cables can be too large to fit into some cases. We tested the cable on cases with notoriously tight Lightning port openings and found no issues. It even fit the Lightning-connector opening on LifeProof cases, although Anker warns that it won’t. And as for charging and syncing, we tested the MFi-licensed PowerLine cable with nearly a dozen iPhones and iPads running various versions of iOS 9 and iOS 8; it worked as advertised with all of them.
An included Velcro strap helps keep the cable in a loop for travel.
We verified the PowerLine’s charging speed by plugging it into a USB power monitor attached to Apple’s 12W USB Power Adapter. Then we connected an iPad Air 2, which can draw 2.4 amps. The power monitor consistently showed draw of about 2.3 amps, which matches what we’ve found with other cables (the figure is never exactly at 2.4 amps due to electrical resistance and rounding).
Anker’s warranty and customer service complement its products well. In our experience, the company has been quick to replace anything that breaks within the 18-month warranty period without any hassle.
Professional reviews of cables don’t exist at this point, but thanks to Anker’s popularity on Amazon, a large base of customer reviews backs up the company’s promises. Across 1,100 reviews at the time of publication, the PowerLine Lightning cable has a 4.8-star rating (out of five). That’s an impressive number of high ratings–only 12 percent of its ratings are below five stars. FakeSpot, a website that analyzes Amazon reviews for fakes, says the reviews as a whole seem trustworthy.
Conserve the Sound is a project aimed at the preservation of sounds from old technologies.
»Conserve the sound« is an online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds. The sound of a dial telephone, a walkman, a analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a cell phone keypad are partially already gone or are about to disappear from our daily life.
Accompanying the archive people are interviewed and give an insight in to the world of disappearing sounds.
Change management is hard. In everyday production, there are numerous factors working against embracing change. Limited preparation time, whole new show = whole new crew, innumerable planning variables, and the challenge of driving an operational plan based on creative instincts. These are problems that technology is not yet built to solve. Time, training, and education can and will make a dent in our efforts, but creative planning is nuanced, and by nature, human.
So, where do we start? What can production management technology do now to pave the way for future change? Having spent the past two years building Prodicle, our production suite of apps, we hit several pockets of success, while learning from numerous obstacles. Others have ventured down this path as well, and there are several start-ups and moderate size companies that reach out to us about their product offerings. It’s exciting to see others with the same level of passion and enthusiasm we have for improving the way entertainment gets made. After many meetings, memos, pitches and 30-day trials, there are a number of trends we often find ourselves discussing with all production SaaS providers and we think it’s worthwhile to share these key development pillars to start an ongoing conversation about how we’re thinking of pursuing these problems. Some have manifested themselves in how we’ve built Prodicle, others are ideas and pipedreams we hope to pursue in time. If you’re a SaaS provider seeking to dig your heels into the entertainment production space, here are some common themes we often discuss with our partners, our crews and our software development teams.
Modularity is key.
We built Prodicle with the intention of being modular, which is critical based on the wide variety and volume of content we produce. We are not a domestic TV studio. We are a global streaming studio, which means we need to produce entertainment that satisfies the different tastes of our members all over the world. Live action films, multi-camera comedies, weekly talk shows, global competitions, international crime dramas, documentaries about the Rajneesh — all forms of content for all audiences. This means that one giant monolithic software solution will not work — build, buy or otherwise. We are often pitched the dreamstate of software: one end-to-end solution to rule them all. While all-in ecosystems may work for smaller studios/production companies, the variables across our content slate makes it very difficult to successfully operationalize. As such, our offering will always be a modular ecosystem of connected solutions, some things built by us, other things bought from vendors, and a whole bunch of stuff in between. The beauty is twofold — products that work great on their own, products that work better together. It’s like Voltron. Season 7 now streaming.
It’s perfectly fine for a singular solution to solve one problem really well — in fact, this is often preferred. If your solution seeks to do seven things, chances are we’ve already solved for five of them — we just need the remaining two. Those two become the attractive secret sauce, and if they play well in a modular sandbox, we want to hear more! But when they don’t, and we have to go all-in on multiple ecosystems that overlap in functionality, the pain of deployment and support makes it a near non-starter. Passport is Prodicle’s menu-based portal that brings multiple solutions together in one place. It’s where we seek to grow our product offering for our crews. One modular location, many products.
Identity is complex.
It’s important to have safeguards in place to protect our content. Filmmaking is collaborative and lots of people touch the final product. Safely getting in and out of our ecosystem is important to get right. If too complex, it becomes a barrier to change management and introduces less-than-ideal workarounds. If too liberal, then we face the possibility of content leaking early. It’s an exercise in balance. Where do we start? From the product/user perspective, we need one login. We cannot have a multitude of solutions all utilizing different usernames and passwords. Retail has got this figured out, the freelance work environment needs to solve it as well. If your product doesn’t offer SSO (single sign-on) it becomes an immediate point of resistance. SSO is crucial to making security as transparent to the user as possible. Second? Roles and permissions. Our Content Engineering team has built an internal solution to manage app-to-app roles and permissions in a single administrative portal. This means we can provision users across multiple apps in one location. We’d love the ability to call your APIs and set application roles individually and in-bulk from one place. It’s a user administrator’s dream. Working with tens of thousands of freelancers around the world mandates this as a requirement. SSO and APIs for roles/permissions is a biggie.
Collaboration is key.
Netflix adopted Google Cloud’s G Suite in 2013.This means our entire corporate file sharing platform is Google Drive. Thousands of users, millions of files within the cloud — accessible everywhere. When we started the studio, we were faced with a choice: a) deviate and use a different file sharing platform, perhaps different platforms for different types of content, or b) use G Suite on our productions so corporate, studio and production are all in one shared space. This was a tough call, as the variables within our content, as noted above, are extensive. However, we felt G Suite was and is flexible enough while subscribing to our core principles of modularity. Utilizing their service within our ecosystem was the fastest way to stand-up a global file sharing platform. We have hundreds of productions using the tools within G Suite, collaborating with our studio users. Instead of trying to build our own file platform, or buying a multitude of third party platforms, we started building production-centric features on top of G Suite. For dynamic watermarking, password protection and expiring links, we built Prodicle Distribution. It sits on top of Google Drive, taking advantage of the multitude of G Suite functions that would be silly for us to build ourselves, e.g. collaboration, commenting, file previews, etc. In doing this, utilizing consumer facing tech from companies whose full-time focus is workplace solutions (our main focus is great content), we’re able to leverage what works well and add what we need to that. We don’t expect consumer tech companies to build production functionality, but if we can leverage what they do well and we build what we need for us to do well (produce great content) it gives us a significant head start. We look for this in third-party production tools all the time. Again, we want production components that don’t exist anywhere else, not another folder-based file repository to store our scripts.
Data as operational currency.
There are groups, committees, and conferences where universal data IDs are endlessly discussed. While not impossible, the effort needed for unification is tremendous. Data reconciliation will be an ongoing challenge especially when data accessibility isn’t solved. As such, availability of production and studio generated data is a must-have. The production-to-studio relationship requires the real time transfer of assets and data. When data is locked behind a proprietary file format or within data architecture with no accessible APIs, the constraints significantly reduce the data’s usefulness. Studios are hampered by the time it takes for software companies to develop their UIs. This significantly limits the software’s functionality and reduces its value at the studio level. Investing in software is a dual focus: accessibility of the data and assets generated by the software and the operational efficiencies provided by the use of the software. Both needs have to be serviced as production and studio each have different data and operational needs. However, this raises a subsequent problem of…
Serving two masters.
Most third-party production software offerings service singular needs. The products are either loved by productions and disliked by studios, or loved by studios and disliked by productions. This is a real challenge because the benefit is in the marriage of the two. But as a SaaS provider, how do you prioritize user needs? By listening to the producer, the studio exec, the production assistant? We seek to answer this question, but it’s not easy practice. Most of the solutions lie within the above — separating the data from the UX. A production UX has to be attractive to a production user — someone singularly focused on executing his/her job for one production. A studio UX is macro, servicing the needs of a multitude of productions each with their own unique variances. Does this equate to doubling the investment? Perhaps from a UX perspective, but less so from a data perspective — that is, if the data is easily accessible. If a studio can centralize pertinent micro-level and macro-level data, the UX can be agnostic — built by us or built elsewhere. This is where third-party offerings can be very attractive: solutions that offer unique operational advantages in a killer UX with data and assets that are easily accessible at the studio level for macro-level needs.
Change is bigger than Netflix.
Our entire industry is on the precipice of embracing new technologies all in pursuit of providing the best tools to our productions with the goal of empowering them to focus on what matters most — creating great stories. There are significant opportunities to partner on solving operational challenges, and there are a lot of them. We seek to utilize modern technology to solve these problems by building support for a Netflix platform that can be used on any Netflix production. That platform is modular — one to utilize an agnostic offering of SaaS products, built by us, built by others. Ideally, industry-wide discussions on normalizing the data models would be ideal. Perhaps, one stop at a time. We work to solve the gaps that no studio has yet to solve, giving our creators the advantage of cutting-edge production management software. Through this line of thinking, we want to leverage what exists to move fast in solving areas that do not yet exist. But it’s a paradigm shift — both in how the collective industry builds and how our users adopt. We are still in our infancy, having barely scratched the surface and there’s still so much to be done. It’s an exciting time to be one-part entertainment and one-part tech. For more information on this initiative, check out the Netflix media blog here.
Presumably, if you’re watching this series, you’ve already made the decision to embrace all that Laravel has to offer. However, if you’re still on the fence, give me just a moment to sell you on why I believe Laravel is the best framework choice in the PHP world.
Savage Arms announced yesterday four new versions of their Rascal, an undersized single-shot bolt-action rimfire rifle designed to offer high performance in a compact format that should be perfect for youths and smaller folks. The new versions feature synthetic stocks (and there’s a pink version of the Rascal FV-SR) and heavy, suppressor-ready threaded barrels. AccuTrigger comes standard, of course.
From the press release:
Savage is pleased to take micro rimfire rifle performance to new heights with the new Rascal FV-SR (Suppressor Ready), Rascal Target and Rascal Target XP. Shipments of these firearms have been delivered to dealers.
The Rascal FV-SR enhances accuracy with a heavy barrel featuring a threaded (1/2-28) muzzle. Like the original Rascal, the single-shot rifle cocks by lifting the bolt and unloads easily—without pulling the trigger. The design also builds superior shooting skills thanks to full-size rifle features, including a peep sight, tough synthetic stock and Savage’s user-adjustable Accu-Trigger system. The two new suppressor-ready Rascal models are available in pink or black.
The new Rascal Target is built for accuracy and adaptability, thanks to a precision hardwood stock, heavy 16 1/8-inch barrel, one-piece Picatinny rail and threaded (1/2-28) muzzle. Like the Rascal FV-SR, the Rascal Target offers full-size rifle features, including Savage’s user-adjustable AccuTrigger system and suppressor-ready barrels. Collectively, the platform offers far better safety, functionality and accuracy than competing designs.
The Rascal Target XP offers all the Rascal Target amenities in a ready-to-shoot package that comes with a mounted and boresighted 4x32mm scope, as well as a bipod sling swivel stud mount. A left-hand model of this configuration is also available.
Rascal Target, Target XP Features & Benefits
Precision hardwood stock
16 1/8-inch heavy barrel with threaded muzzle (Suppressor Ready)
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” got in its digs at tech companies on Sunday night. The show’s jab at Zillow was child’s play compared to how the host took down Facebook and the role the social giant is playing in cultures and communities overseas.
In his nearly 20-minute main story on his weekly HBO show, Oliver focused on Facebook’s impact in Myanmar in particular where internet use — and Facebook use especially — has exploded in recent years.
But the story goes beyond distracted teens and delves into serious concerns about ethnic cleansing. Certainly Facebook was not to blame for genocide in Myanmar, Olivers stressed, but the service did inflame pre-existing tensions he said. Oliver pointed to a report by independent U.N. investigators who said “Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate.”
Because Oliver is a comedian, it’s not all super heavy and he does pepper his monologue with plenty of zingers:
“Facebook: The worst place to wish happy birthday to a friend, other than a funeral.”
Mark Zuckerberg, while explaining Facebook’s early motto “Move fast and break things,” said, “Sometimes we go too fast and we mess up a bunch of stuff and we have to fix it. And that’s cool.” Oliver asked, “Is that cool? That seems like the most reckless corporate motto since the Hindenberg company’s “Flay fast and smoke cigarettes in a big bag of hydrogen!”
“Calling Facebook a toilet is a little unfair to toilets, because they make s*it go away, whereas Facebook retains s*it, disseminates s*it to your acquaintances, and reminds you of s*it from seven years ago, all while allowing corporations to put there s*it in front of you. There is a purity and integrity to toilets that Facebook seriously lacks.”
But Oliver gets at the seriousness of the issue in Myanmar and the tensions between different ethnic factions quite convincingly, and he wonders why so much hate speech in the country stayed up for so long on the site — which has rules against that sort of thing.
“No one should be judged by the worst things people say about them on Facebook,” Oliver argued.
The Breville Handy Mix Scraper was the most versatile, effective mixer of any we tried, with the most functional attachments and useful features that make it a joy to use in the kitchen. With nine speeds that can toggle from powerful to gentle, it made the best cookies, sponge cake, and pizza dough in our tests. It had the most unique and intelligent design of any mixer we tried, with a built-in timer, a button to pause mixing, a light that shines into the bowl, and rubber-coated scrapers. As a bonus, it was also the simplest to clean and store compared with other mixers. We think this superior mixer is worth its relatively high cost, but the Cuisinart Power Advantage Plus 9-Speed Hand Mixer is a steadfast budget option if you want a pared-down machine for occasional tasks.
The Breville excelled in all of our tests. It was powerful enough to blend the thick cookie dough without straining, and its coated beaters helped keep all of the ingredients from climbing up the sides of the bowl. Each baked cookie was well-mixed with an even distribution of the good, chunky morsels we wanted in every bite—chewy raisins, chopped walnuts, chocolate chips, and flakes of coconut. The sponge cake it produced had an even crumb, a delicate texture, and the least air bubbles of any we baked. It was also one of the loftiest, unlike the VonShef’s cake, which sunk in the middle and at the sides. The Breville’s dough hook was even able to mix pizza dough pretty well, whacking it around to create a single ball, whereas the VonShef and the KitchenAid created stringier doughs that we had to take out of the bowl and shape on the counter. After whipping eggs and sugar for the requisite seven minutes, the Handy Mix produced just under a quart of seven-minute frosting—slightly less than the Cuisinart— but it was still fluffy, spreadable, and delicious.
Compared with those of other mixers, the Breville’s attachments stood out for their more thoughtful design and effective mixing capabilities. Rubber-coated beaters on the Breville do a better job of scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl compared with other models’ beaters, and help with noise control. “It doesn’t make a racket if you’re mixing stuff in a metal bowl,” said Lopez, who also owns this mixer. And we didn’t have to scrape the bowl with a spatula as often as with the Cuisinart when mixing our cookie dough with the beater attachment. The Breville’s two whisk attachments actually work to whip eggs for sponge cake or meringue, while we had to use the beater attachment to get similar results with all of the other mixers, which had only one whisk. In our genoise test, we found that the Breville’s whisk attachments actually worked better than the beaters at aeration (we tried both), making a more evenly baked cake.
With its clever extra features, the Breville was by far the easiest and most enjoyable mixer to use of any we tested. A screen with a built-in timer helps keep track for time-sensitive recipes, which I found especially useful when making seven-minute frosting. The timer also has a pause button, so you can stop mixing, add ingredients or scrape down your bowl, and then resume immediately without having to speed up again. You can seamlessly transition between nine speeds with a scroll wheel, similar to one an old-school computer mouse. Even though there’s nothing wrong with pressing a button, the scrolling felt easy and familiar (and made me nostalgic for pre-Apple days). The mixer also has a light at the bottom of the machine that shines into the bowl, which I used to check if the sponge cake batter had turned the pale, glossy yellow I was looking for. None of the other mixers we tested had these features, and though they’re definitely a bonus, I didn’t think they were a gimmick—they made the baking process easier overall.
An LCD panel shows a timer and your current speed. Photo: Michael Hession
A light at the bottom of the Breville shines into the bowl so that you can easily see the state of your batter or dough. Photo: Michael Hession
A rubber coating on the Breville’s beaters prevents them from clanging loudly against a bowl during mixing. Photo: Michael Hession
Breville says that this mixer is touch-sensitive, using the company’s proprietary Beater IQ technology to adjust mixing speeds depending on which attachments you use. We didn’t notice this kicking in during testing, but the Handy Mix was sufficiently powerful to handle all of the doughs and batters we made. It seamlessly transitioned from slow to high speeds without splashing ingredients around.
Dough hooks, whisks, and standard beater attachments come with the Breville; the rubber-coated beaters help scrape the mixing bowl and are quieter than metal beaters, the two whisks aerate batters more effectively than mixers with only one whisk, and the dough hooks can knead dense pizza dough. Photo: Michael Hession
All of the attachments store neatly in a clear plastic case, so you won’t lose them to the depths of a drawer. Photo: Michael Hession
This mixer was the easiest to clean and store, too. Instead of pressing a button to eject beaters, you can pull a loop to release them, which requires much less effort than with other mixers. This is a small detail, but it makes using the Breville that much easier—in contrast, I had to put my full body weight on the VonShef’s eject button to try to get the beaters out. The Handy Mix has Breville’s patented Assist Plug (found on most Breville appliances), which has a loop for your finger so that you can pull the plug out of the wall more easily. I found myself wishing that more of my kitchen appliances and home electronics had this feature.
A loop on the Breville’s plug makes it easy to pull from the socket; it’s just one example of the mixer’s thoughtful design. Photo: Sarah Kobos
All of the beaters are dishwasher safe, and you can easily wipe down the mixer with a damp cloth (although all hand mixers have vents—to keep the motor from overheating—that can trap food). A plastic case slides cleanly onto the base of Breville for storage, whereas you have to align the Cuisinart’s storage case with the mixer’s vents to attach one to the other. The Breville’s case neatly holds all of the beater attachments and the cord. With some other mixers, you either have to save the box the machine comes in, or store components in a bag. We like that the all-in-one system keeps the mixer’s small parts together, so that you don’t have to fumble around in a drawer for a single missing dough hook.
Epicurious also likes this mixer, and Michelle Lopez told us she uses it for many baking projects. “It’s quiet, powerful, and comes with a bunch of bells and whistles that make it great for precise baking,” she said. The Breville has a one-year limited warranty. We’ll continue to test it over time to see how it holds up.
Pask Makes shows us how wood skewers are good for more than serving kebabs. By stacking, cutting, clamping, and gluing hundreds of sticks, then planing and sanding the result, he was able to create a beautiful cutting board we’d love to have on our counter.
