history

Shift Happens, a book about keyboards, is now 400% funded on Kickstarter. This makes it the second-most funded non-fiction book ever on the crowdfunding site. The book, by designer/writer Marcin Wichary, “tells the story of keyboards like no book ever before, covering 150 years from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets,” according to the project website.

Shift Happens is available on Kickstarter until March 9. Donate $150 and you can get the two-volume hardcover set inside a slipcase.

New Apple TV+ docu-series Lincoln’s Dilemma delivers a fine history lesson in classical PBS form. The four-part series, which premieres today, brings you the story of Lincoln’s presidency and the ways in which he approached the issue of slavery, from his first dealings with the issue until his death at the hands of a Confederate sympathizer.

Stewarded by executive producer/directors Jacqueline Olive and Barak Goodman, executive producer Jelani Cobb and a host of historians and activists, the series’ form is likely too sturdy and utilitarian to change the way anyone views Lincoln.

However, the filmmakers’ intent is admirable. They set out to neither oversell nor undersell Lincoln and his views on slavery, how history has sought to simplify the political figures of the 1860s, and how the Great Emancipator was and was not an adequate moniker for the 16th president of the United States.

The website is an incomprehensibly vast trove of information. When you want to save that information for later, it usually means saving a bunch of bookmarks or remembering the right search terms. But what if instead you could index and sort your own personal web archive?

You can now ask the Google app on iOS to automatically wipe your location and activity history.

The new feature, which was showcased during Google I/O in late May, takes the hassle out of covering your tracks. You only have to set it up once and it will take care of itself going forward. Here’s how to get started.

Have you got some embarrassing entries in your Safari browsing history? Or maybe it’s a question of security: You don’t want your iPad’s history to fall into the wrong hands, etc.

Smutty jokes aside, there are plenty of legit reasons to clear your Safari history on your iPhone or iPad. And the good news is that Safari for iOS has some great tools for doing so. For example, did you know that you can clear just the last hour of browsing history, or the past couple of days?

Get ready to learn how to sanitize your Safari history on iOS devices.

The latest Shazam update is out now on iOS, giving users the ability to see exactly when they last searched for a certain song. Simply scroll through your history of Shazams and you’ll find a date and time alongside each entry.

iCloud has been caught storing “deleted” browser history from Safari for well over a year.

Even after users clear their data, it can be found in iCloud using software that’s readily available to anyone. But has Apple been quickly trying to clear its tracks?

The world’s biggest Apple museum — featuring around 10,000 Apple and Apple-related artefacts — is set to open its new permanent home in Savona, Italy, following 13 years of moving from location to location.

You know nothin’, Jon Snow. Especially how much more full of shifting alliances and intrigue The Wars of the Roses was than your epic television series is able to show. Game of Thrones superfans may already know that 15th-century England inspired much of the structure of George R. R. Martin’s overarching book series, but having it all laid out — lovely animations and visuals to support the historical information — is our first exposure to that fact.

The short animated video, written by Alex Gendler and animated by Brett Underhill, even illustrates how Game of Thrones matches directly to historical facts with some fun Pop-Up Video-style flourishes. You’ll love it.

Okay, so all eyes are currently trained on the Apple Watch, which arrives later this month. But April also represents another important benchmark for Apple: five years ago today the iPad went on sale for the very first time.

To celebrate, we’ve scraped the dark recesses of the Cult of Mac archives to bring you a whistle-stop tour of the glorious 60 months we’ve spent in the company of Apple’s breakthrough tablet.

Whether you’re after a zero-gravity Garage Band symphony or a reminder of the time the Queen of England bought an iPad 2, keep reading for a trip down memory lane.

Brian Williams may be waiting for the brouhaha to wear off his “mis-remembering” of which helicopter he was in during the 2003 war in Iraq, but the internets will just not let it go.

He might have conflated his experience as a reporter with that of the actual soldiers who were fired upon, but the meme police are making sure this faux pas lives on forever, creating hilarious photo “evidence” that not only was Williams at Gettysburg, but also present for the first moon landing and riding along with O.J. in his white Bronco slow roll.

Check out some of the choicest photographic “evidence” of the disgraced news anchor below, from some of the funniest minds on the interwebs.

If your idea of high comedy is waggling your hind parts at people with a smarmy smirk, Jib Jab’s new funny video is right up your, well, alley.

“2014, You Are History” is a celebrity character-filled musical video in which the biggest names of the year sing a parody song set to the melody of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

Watch the video below and remind yourself of this silly year, including ice bucket challenges, hacked celebrity nudes and Kim Kardashian’s shiny hindquarters.

If you’ve been alive in the past fifty years or so, you’ve played a video game. It’s a primarily visual art form that uses current-day technologies to provide ever-evolving gaming experiences across generations.

This new series of short, ten-minute videos written and produced by Stuart Brown aim to take a closer look at the evolution of video game graphics, from the simple monochromatic lines of Pong to the incredibly rich and detailed photo realism of today’s games like Crysis, Destiny, and Far Cry 4.

“Graphics are absolutely important,” says Brown in the fifth and final video. “They are an essential part of video games. A window into another world and a prime indicator of the technology that powers it.”

Check out the first two installments below.

If you’ve spent enough time messing around in Terminal, you’ll know one thing for sure: re-typing the stuff you’ve laboriously typed in with only minor differences is tedious. And it happens more often than we’d like.

The Terminal does, however, keep a history of all the commands you’ve typed into it. To see this in action, you can cycle through the last few commands you’ve typed in, simply hit the arrow keys up or down when in Terminal.

There are a few more less intuitive commands to make the best use of your Terminal history, however.

There’s been a lot written about Steve Jobs here and elsewhere – but if you want to get even deeper insights into the man and his legacy, then Cult of Mac Deals has assembled a video bundle that will help you do just that.

https://youtu.be/zut2NLMVL_k

A video from 1994 that has purportedly never been seen by a mass audience before features a bushy-bearded Steve Jobs discussing his legacy during his so-called NeXT wilderness years. And surprisingly, the egocentric and charismatic founder of Apple believes that in two hundred years, he will be forgotten.

IOS Fonts is the most concisely-named website of the day. It shows you all the fonts available on your iOS device, lets you search them and even preview your chosen text in them. I love it… and yet I’m struggling to find any practical use for it.

With all the sites we visit on a daily basis on our iPhones and iPads, we are capturing and storing where we visit in the background of every web page we see. You may want to clear your browsing history or other stored web data from your iPhone from time to time, if you’re of a security or privacy turn of mind.

iOS makes it fairly simple to do so; here’s how.

This Day in the Rolling Stones is the latest app for music lovers of a certain age who want to find out exactly what Mick and the guys were up to every day of their careers. It wants to be all Hot Stuff) but ends up more like a Biggest Mistake.

New on the App Store, and just in time for a Christmas gift to a Beatles fan, is this rather lovely app collating 250 of John Lennon’s letters. It’s been made with affection for the great man, and provides an interesting insight into his mind.

At first glance, it looks as if someone’s raided a high street Apple Store, stolen all the iPhones and iPads and MacBooks Air, and dumped a load of retro computers in their place.

Look closer, and you’ll begin to understand what a remarkable achievement this place is.

Welcome to the Moscow Apple Museum, owned and operated by 46-year-old computer engineer Andrey Antonov. If ever you felt the need to explain to your kids how Apple got where it is today, this is the place to take them.

Does Instagram really make your photos better? If you’re shooting them with the crappy camera in the original iPhone – for which the app’s grungy filters were designed – then the answer is yes. But what about the iPhone 4S, or any other camera – even film?

Allen Murabayashi decided to find out. He grabbed a handful of famous images from the web and ran them through everybody’s favorite photo grungifier. From Neil Leifer’s iconic 1965 shot of Ali vs Liston through Steve McCurry’s Kodachrome-tastic Afghan Girl to a shot from the royal wedding, all of them suffer from being Instagrammed.

Those of us over a certain age have a lingering hangover from the days before digital: actual photographs. If you’re lucky (and extremely well organized), yours are neatly displayed on the walls and in labelled albums. If you’re unlucky (or plain lazy, like me), they’re shoved in cardboard boxes and left in cupboards to rot. That’s not how it should be, is it?

Ever wanted to check out the ghost of your city past? Interested in experiencing the history of the spaces around you? Well, you just may be able to do that with this free app from Enlighten Ventures, LLC.

If you’ve been following along at home, you’ll have made several changes to your Mac via the Terminal app. Surely you’re tracking all these changes on a spreadsheet, right? I mean, what if you wanted to go back and find out what changes you’ve made? How else would you track it than by laboriously typing out each change by hand in some sort of database? Well, today’s tip will show you how to automate this process and put all your changes into a text file automatically.