FeedCity

• Marco visits Siracusa's house and the car-assaulting tree.
• Transcendental Money.
• Square Cash.
• B2W 120 on financial "safety nets".
• Tumblr, Yahoo, and not screwing it up.
• Cloud hosting and moving up the stack.
• The modern game console's role. the Xbox One's hardware design, and the messy world of TV-connected boxes.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Use coupon code ATP5 for 10% off.
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Our theme song by Jonathan Mann -- follow his Song A Day on YouTube, and check out his site if you or your company would like a catchy, fun song. Thanks for the ATP theme song, Jonathan! Casey and Marco get deluged with to-do app recommendations. The difficulty in getting p...

• FU on Apple's tick-tock pattern.
• Marco's PHP framework and sponsor-tracking web app, and why both exist.
• Usability and security implications of passwordless login systems.
• The Mac Mini's seemingly accidental success.
• Podcasters who hate the word "podcast", its quality connotation, efforts to invent alternative names, and barriers to entry.
• Brent Simmons' 30 Minutes To Sync proposal.
• Building web services on Apple's infrastructure.

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• Mac Mini Vault: Colocate or rent your own Mac Mini. Use promo code ATP50 for 50% off your first three months.
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• The WWDC ticket lottery and potential solutions, or a merit system.
• Why Marco sold Instapaper. (See also.)
• Prospects for replacing Instapaper's income.
• Speculating on today's app market.
• The Magazine's app and Newsstand quality.
• Motivation, development, and homework.
• iOS 7's rumored visual overhaul and other speculation.
• The transition away from Steve Jobs' influence.
• What's left for iOS 7 to add?

Sponsored by Squarespace: Use discount code ATP5 at checkout for 10% off.

• Laptops in school.
• Getting a tech job with and without a college degree.
• Running mail servers in today's spam environment.
• Steve Jobs' unauthorized talking points.
• The WWDC announcement and trying to get tickets.
• Going to WWDC vs. a ticketless trip vs. watching the videos at home.
• Apple's Q2 earnings and hints dropped during the call.
• The tech industry's holding pattern with bored consumers.
• Marco's mom buys her first smartphone, ignoring Marco's advice. Which one did she get?

Sponsored by MailRoute and Hover.

• Why are PC sales down?
• Why and when people have bought new PCs in the past.
• Forgoing or neglecting PCs today.
• PCs in businesses.
• Apple and IT departments.
• Last decade's Tablet PCs.
• The outlook for Windows 8 tablets in businesses.
• What will change if Microsoft Office is released for iOS?
• What AirPrint and black CD-Rs have in common.
• Still using (and abusing) Jonathan Mann's awesome ending song. Follow him and check out his other songs on YouTube.

Sponsored by Squarespace: Use code ATP4 at checkout for 10% off.

What if the moon were just a jump away? In this short, a beautiful answer to that question from Italo Calvino, read live by Liev Schreiber. 

Hi Radiolab listeners, we want to hear from you! Take this podcast survey and let us know how you feel about the show. It only takes about 20 minutes and your feedback will help us make our podcast better! There are no wrong answers, we want your honest takes. You can help out by taking the survey here (www.radiolab.org/survey).

• Giving Dave Morin the benefit of the doubt on that Vanity Fair trainwreck.
• Who Facebook Home is for and why Facebook made it.
• Whether Facebook, Amazon, Samsung, etc. could or should make their own OS or maintain completely diverged Android forks.
• Google forking WebKit, Chrome vs. Safari, and the fork's likely implications for Apple and web developers.
• Debug #11: Don Melton and Safari
• WebKit contributors by company
• Panic's new Status Board app (and IAP reaction).
• We included Jonathan Mann's ending theme song again. Thanks, Jonathan!

Sponsored by Igloo Software.

I’ve posted this before, but it’s so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work.

(via @stevenstrogatz)

[This is a vintage post originally from Apr 2013.]

Tags: cars · science · video

Improv comedy puts uncertainty on center stage -- performers usually start by asking the audience for a prompt, then they make up the details as they go. But two actors in Chicago are taking this idea to its absolute limit, and finding ways to navigate the unknown.

Hi Radiolab listeners, we want to hear from you! Take this podcast survey and let us know how you feel about the show. It only takes about 20 minutes and your feedback will help us make our podcast better! There are no wrong answers, we want your honest takes. You can help out by taking the survey here (www.radiolab.org/survey).

• Summly's acquisition by Yahoo, and what could have justified its price. (Marco, WSJ)
• The quality of speech recognition.
• Challenges of big tech companies such as Apple hiring and retaining great talent.
• Why iCloud sync works so badly for developers and whether it's fixable.
• Why developers shouldn't use iCloud even if it worked.
• Jonathan Mann's ATP Ending Theme Song and the More Bleeps version.

Sponsored by Squarespace: Use code ATP3 at checkout for 10% off.

This hour, we walk the tightrope between doubt and certainty, and wonder if there's a way to make yourself at home on that razor's edge between definitely...and not so sure.

Hi Radiolab listeners, we want to hear from you! Take this podcast survey and let us know how you feel about the show. It only takes about 20 minutes and your feedback will help us make our podcast better! There are no wrong answers, we want your honest takes. You can help out by taking the survey here (www.radiolab.org/survey).

• How Marco buys a TV (unlike how John does).
• Regular people noticing and caring about high-DPI screens.
• The amazing Mac lineup that few care about.
• Which Mac would we tell people to buy?
• Marco revisits the Microsoft Store.
• The Surface Pro's uniqueness.
• Why GarageBand's adoption of Audiobus is so interesting.
• How exposed filesystems and iCloud's document model both fail users.

Sponsored by Squarespace: Use code ATP3 at checkout for 10% off.

This spring, parts of the East Coast will turn squishy and crunchy -- the return of the 17-year cicadas means surfaces in certain locations (in patches from VA to CT) will once again be coated in bugs buzzing at 7 kilohertz. In their honor, we're rebroadcasting one of our favorite episodes: Emergence.

Hi Radiolab listeners, we want to hear from you! Take this podcast survey and let us know how you feel about the show. It only takes about 20 minutes and your feedback will help us make our podcast better! There are no wrong answers, we want your honest takes. You can help out by taking the survey here (www.radiolab.org/survey).

• The upcoming Google Reader shutdown.
• The market for RSS today, and the way forward.
• Client-side vs. server-side feed crawling.
• Addressing excessive demand for WWDC and Google I/O tickets.
• Apple pessimism is at an all-time high, even in the mainstream.
• What could Apple do to turn the pessimism around?
• Apple and web services.
• The Apple TV's interesting new A5.
• Diversifying the iPhone line.

• The role of the Mac Pro today.
• How Apple might manage the launch of a bigger iPhone.
• App design and auto-layout if the iPhone moves to multiple sizes and resolutions.
• Visual Studio's learning curve vs. Xcode and Interface Builder.
• The future of Objective C and the challenge of migrating a platform's API to a new language.

• The Nifty MiniDrive
• The challenges of small-camera design
• Sony RX1 and Sony's camera-business revival
• Apple in the gaming market and the evolution of casual gaming
• Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the first time anyone has mentioned FreeCell in 2013
• The bad old days of Game Boys, lead-acid "portable" computers, and mouse-pointer trails
• iOS' refusal to let you pick default browser, email client, calendar app, etc.
• Mini-web-browsers inside of iOS apps
• How iOS could adopt Contracts or Intents, and the problems that might arise

In the 1970s, choking became national news: thousands were choking to death, leading to more accidental deaths than guns. Nobody knew what to do. Until a man named Henry Heimlich came along with a big idea. Since then, thousands and thousands -- maybe even millions -- have been rescued by the Heimlich maneuver. Yet the story of the man who invented it may not have such a happy ending.

Hi Radiolab listeners, we want to hear from you! Take this podcast survey and let us know how you feel about the show. It only takes about 20 minutes and your feedback will help us make our podcast better! There are no wrong answers, we want your honest takes. You can help out by taking the survey here (www.radiolab.org/survey).

The PS4 announcement, the Xbox 1, old LAN gaming, Transport Tycoon, early CD-ROM adventure games, dumping old games onto iOS, dial-up modems, and the annoyance of gaming occasionally on a modern console.

Speculation on what a bigger iPhone's screen might be and why.