Call it a comeback: This 25-year-old is turning a profit selling pencils

One morning in February 2016 a man sat down at his computer and ordered $4,000 worth of pencils designed to look like John Steinbeck’s favorite, the Blackwing 24.

“It’s probably the most iconic pencil ever made in America,” says Caroline Weaver, whose shop on New York’s Lower East Side, C.W. Pencil Enterprise, took the order of 1,920 pencils. C.W. carries more than 200 types of pencils, including the Blackwing (also favored by Walt Disney), as well as a dozen erasers and sharpeners and zero mechanicals.

SEE ALSO: How an Internet cat craze became a toy empire

“Mechanical pencils, they don’t smell like anything. The lead is so small you can get no line variation out of it,” says Weaver, 25. “Though it is a little bit of work to use a wood-cased pencil, most people appreciate that. There’s a physical connection you can draw between how often you have to sharpen your pencil and how much work you’ve done.” …

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Call it a comeback: This 25-year-old is turning a profit selling pencils

The lucky 500: applications open for the Ford GT supercar

Ford

The Ford GT: the company’s birthday present to itself for finishing 1-2-3 at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. There’s a 3.5L turbocharged EcoBoost engine that’s good for more than 600 horsepower.

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So far, we’ve seen the new Ford GT in Forza, at auto shows, and on the track at Daytona. Deliveries of the 600hp (447kW) supercar begin later in the year, but with just 500 cars planned, many have wondered how they will be allocated. On Wednesday morning, the Blue Oval revealed its plan; customers will be chosen from online applicants, and if you have $400,000 and want a GT in your garage, you have until May 12th to apply.

On Tuesday afternoon, we spoke to Henry Ford III about the program. He told us there had been plenty of internal discussion on how to allocate 500 GTs across the 10,000 Ford dealers in the US and 18 other countries. “We want to put the car in the hands of people who are true brand ambassadors for Ford,” he told us. That means people who will drive their GTs—to track days, to Cars and Coffee, and the like—rather than lock it away, or worse, flip it for a quick buck.

Senior management at Ford will review the applicant pool and make some hard choices after the May deadline. The lucky few will be guided through the ordering process by a concierge service that will liaise between the local Ford dealer and Ford Performance, the new division that is responsible for developing and building the GT (as well as some of Ford’s other more interesting vehicles).

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The lucky 500: applications open for the Ford GT supercar

The Samsung Galaxy S7 now officially features a display scaling setting

Through the latest update for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, TouchWiz on Samsung’s current-gen flagships now offers a display scaling setting. Essentially, the setting allows you to activate a ‘Condensed’ display mode that shrinks the on-screen size of the UI elements, allowing for more content to be displayed at any one point.

Note that the Samsung Galaxy S7 update that officialised what was previously a hack is actually the same one that patched touch stability and skewed photos. Samsung just didn’t mention the new feature in the changelog, which is why it took a few days for the change … – Source

The Samsung Galaxy S7 now officially features a display scaling setting

Unknown flaw found by hackers helped the FBI unlock dead terrorist's Apple iPhone 5c

It ended up being a major coincidence. On the day that the FBI announced that it had finally unlocked the Apple iPhone 5c used by deceased terrorist Syed Farook, a contract was discovered online. This contract appeared to show that Israeli software company Cellebrite had been paid $15,000 for services done for the FBI. Putting it all together, it appeared that it was Cellebrite that cracked the code for the FBI, allowing them to look inside the terrorist’s handset for evidence and clues. But as it turned out, Cellebrite was not involved at all.

According to the Washington Post, a group of … – Source

Unknown flaw found by hackers helped the FBI unlock dead terrorist's Apple iPhone 5c

Report: The FBI Paid Some Dodgy Hackers a One-Time Fee for a Zero-Day to Unlock the San Bernardino Phone

I was kind of tired of the FBI vs. Apple story, but now it has a secret collective of morally ambiguous hackers, and I’m into it again.

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Report: The FBI Paid Some Dodgy Hackers a One-Time Fee for a Zero-Day to Unlock the San Bernardino Phone

Fresh imagery recharges Adobe Post app for quick graphic design - CNET

Adobe wants your business even if you’re not a full-on Photoshop user. Post 2.5 is for iPhones and iPads but its design wheel will remind you of early iPods. – Source

Fresh imagery recharges Adobe Post app for quick graphic design - CNET

USB-IF battles malware and bad chargers with Type-C Authentication spec

USB-IF

The new USB Type-C Authentication spec.

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So far, adoption of the versatile, reversible USB Type-C connector has been going pretty well. It’s hardly universal, but it’s showing up in an increasing number of smartphones and laptops, and the number of cables and other accessories that support it is slowly growing. One of the problems that has emerged as the port has grown in popularity is non-compliant cables and power adapters, accessories that look like they ought to work but might actually end up frying the device they’re plugged into.

That’s one of the problems the USB-IF is trying to solve with the USB Type-C Authentication specification, announced today at the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China. When you connect a power adapter, cable, or accessory that supports the specification into a host device (like a phone or laptop) that supports the specification, the host device can verify the accessories capabilities and whether the accessory has been fully certified by the USB-IF. This information is transmitted to the host using 128-bit encryption before an actual data or power connection is established, and the specification is designed to work even if your charger and cable are only providing power and not a data connection.

We’ve already seen some companies make USB Type-C chargers that don’t work universally with all USB Type-C devices, as outlined in this PC World article from late last year. A supplemental specification that makes verifying the capabilities of chargers easier should hopefully put a stop to this sort of thing. The USB-IF also continues to encourage OEMs and accessory makes to use the various USB logos to clarify the capabilities of their devices, though the use of those logos on actual real-world devices is hit-or-miss at this point.

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USB-IF battles malware and bad chargers with Type-C Authentication spec

Mysterious mutants: 13 masked people should have devastating diseases—but don’t

(credit: Jeremy Brooks)

With a deluge of DNA sequences pouring in from various studies, researchers diving in are finding that Mendelian genetics may be a lot muddier than expected. Wrinkled peas aside, certain bad mutations may not always be bad.

After sifting through the genetic codes of nearly 600,000 adults, researchers discovered that 13 of them were healthy despite carrying mutations that were thought to guarantee devastating childhood disorders, such as cystic fibrosis and those that cause severe skeletal malformations. The authors, led by Stephen Friend of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, hypothesize that these 13 apparently normal adults have other genetic elements that compensate or buffer the effects of those mutations. If that’s true and researchers can pinpoint the source of their genetic resilience, the findings may offer critical information about how to cure these diseases in the not so genetically lucky, the authors report in Nature Biotechnology.

Most research in the past has focused on finding the cause of a disease, Friend said in a teleconference with media. But, he added, “finding the gene that is causing the disease is not the same as trying to find a way to prevent those symptoms.” A few years ago, he and a colleague came up with the idea of looking for cures not in the sick, but in people who should have gotten sick—people who look healthy and normal.

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Mysterious mutants: 13 masked people should have devastating diseases—but don’t