Category: Tech

Apple I To Be Recycled Fetches $200,000

A South Bay recycling firm is looking for a woman who, in early April, dropped off boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her house after her husband died. About two weeks later, the firm, Clean Bay Area, discovered inside one of the boxes a rare find: a vintage Apple I, one of only about 200 first-generation desktop computers put together by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne in 1976.

The recycling firm sold the Apple I this month for $200,000 to a private collection, Vice President Victor Gichun said. And now, because company policy is to split proceeds 50-50 with the donor, he’s looking for the mystery woman who refused to get a receipt or leave her name.

“We are looking for her to give her $100,000,” Gichun said.

→ San Jose Mercury News

Moving Averages and the iPad

There are myriad other ways to smooth a graph without switching to cumulative figures. One of the simplest is the moving average. In this technique, instead of plotting the raw data, you plot the average of a few data points in the neighborhood of each time value.

For many data sets, the best size of this neighborhood is not obvious. With Apple’s sales figures, though, I think it’s clear that the best choice is to average over four quarters: the quarter that you’re plotting and the three previous. This smooths over the seasonal jumpiness while not including so much past data as to ignore real trends.

→ Lean Crew

My Quantified Email Self Experiment: A failure

Paul Ford on looking back, digitally :

My big idea was: If I can quickly look through all of my old emails I will be able to observe how my thoughts have evolved. I’ll learn something fundamental about myself and how I’ve grown as a person —for example, the difference between being in my early 20s and being 40.

This seemed like an interesting thing to do, so I did it. But the experiment was a failure, and not very edifying.

→ Medium

The Man Who Broke The Music Business

The dawn of online piracy :

Glover enjoyed both albums, but he was in an unusual position: he had the power to influence the outcome of this feud. If he leaked “Graduation” and held on to “Curtis,” Kanye might sell fewer records. But if he leaked “Curtis” and held on to “Graduation”—well, he might make 50 Cent retire.

→ The New Yorker

Robots Can’t Dance

A great interview with Ken Goldberg :

There are so many aspects of human unpredictability that we don’t have a model for. When you watch a ballet or a dance or see a great athlete and realize the amazing abilities, you start to appreciate those things that are uniquely human. The ability to have an emotional response, to be compelling, to be able to pick up on subtle emotional signals from others, those are all things that we haven’t made any progress on with robots.

→ Nautilus