These photos of NASA robots and vehicles in a minimalist cleanroom style is just gorgeous and perfect Couldn’t ask for better. These are fascinating and beautiful.

This post on Stratechery is focused on the emergence of wearables, particularly with the new Snapchat Spectacles, but its opening makes a brilliant point about why the iPhone defined the modern smartphone - it was all about timing it right: Think about everything that happened between 1992 and 2007 that, at least at first glance, didn’t seem to have anything to do with smartphones: The personal computer moved out of the office and into the home The world wide web was invented and an entire ecosystem was built from scratch Personal electronics proliferated: while by 1992 most people had or used calculators and Walkmans, the 90s saw the introduction of PDAs and digital cameras; the 00s brought handheld GPS devices and digital music players The reason why we consider 2007 as the start of the smartphone era is that while there were plenty of smartphones released before then… it was the iPhone that, thanks to its breakthrough user interface and ahead-of-its-time hardware, was able to take advantage of all these developments. ...

Free diving under ice lakes: https://youtu.be/leqyKxbOxTA What an amazing world under there. That’s still planet Earth.

This page of predictions from 1901 about what the world will look like in 2001 is remarkably prescient in some ways, and highly amusing in others. Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there is a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in newspapers one hour later. Store Purchases by tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages & bundles. ...

I’m an avowed Douglas Adams fan, and this is just pure evidence that he died way, way too soon - written in 1989: All I want to do is print from my portable. (Poor baby). That isn’t all I want in fact. I want to be able regularly to transfer my address book and diary stacks backwards and forwards between my portable and my IIx. And all my current half-finished chapters. And anything else I’m tinkering with which is the reason why my half-finished chapters are half-finished. In other words I want my portable to appear on the desktop of my IIx. I don’t want to have to do battle with cupboard monsters and then mess about with TOPS every time I want that to happen. I’ll tell you all I want to have to do in order to get my portable to appear on the Desktop of my IIx. ...