Things I learned lately - 22 Jul

• The movie Minority Report partly inspired the original iPhone design.
• Jon Rubinstein, who was Apple's top hardware executive when the iPhone was being developed, pushed to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini. One could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. The mini never got any traction.
• Bus drivers in Nantes, where the temperature has gotten to 38C, are not allowed to wear shorts while driving the bus. So they wore what is allowed for women, skirts.
• The war between Walmart and Amazon is so bad, Walmart has issued a warning to tech companies it does business with not to use Amazon's cloud services.
• George Clooney created a tequila company on a whim, Casamigos, and now it's being sold to Diageo for up to $1 billion.
• The winning word in the Scripps Annual Spelling Bee the year I was born was "smaragdine".
• For $50 per year, Backblaze will automatically back up all of your data online. You allocate how much bandwidth it can use, so the backup won't interrupt Netflix use. You have very granular control over which files you can restore. Backblaze can send you a 4 TB drive with your data through FedEx for $189, which they refund you if you return the drive within 30 days. Backblaze encrypts all data before it's uploaded and keeps it encrypted. You can also set up a personal encryption key, which Backblaze won't have access to, and two-factor authentication for even more security. The process is automatic, relatively fast after the first backup, and encrypted. 
• Chameleons are thought of as able to change their skin to fit any color or pattern in their surroundings. However, they mostly use this to maintain a certain body temperature and as a way to communicate with other chameleons, not to hide from predators.
• Roughly half of all PCs run Windows 7, one quarter run Windows 10.