The Backblaze alternative to Amazon S3 is out of beta with new support for Synology Cloud Sync. I’ll be sticking with my Amazon Cloud syncing because it works for me and is cheaper. But I have to say the Backblaze B2 option is pretty compelling. By my calculations it would only cost about $35 per month to store 7TB of data.

From Eater Unfortunately, in some industries, these thefts are not one-off occurrences. For the past five years, the agriculture community in California’s Central Valley has struggled with continuous nut heists plaguing the industry. According to CargoNet, a network of cargo shipping firms and law enforcement with a common goal of preventing losses, over the past four years, $7.6 million dollars worth of nuts have been stolen. In 2015 alone, 31 reported cases of nut thievery resulted in a total loss of $4.

This week BusyCal 3 for Mac is available and this release marks a first for BusyMac, an iOS companion app. I’ve used BusyCal for Mac since the first version was released six years ago. It’s not the best looking calendar app but it’s by far the most functional. Smart searches, banners, sticky notes, icons and built-in weather forecasts make it something rather special. Version 3 of BusyCal for the Mac brings a number of aesthetic improvements and some performance boosts.

A good deal on a bunch of excellent software. I recommend DEVONthink Pro Office, TaskPaper and Scrivener if you don’t already have them. An excellent collection of research and writing tools.

In case you haven’t followed the Scrivener blog, they’ve been hard at work on an iOS version. I’m not on the beta but I think their Mac app is one of the best all around writing tools on the market. Now I see word on Twitter that the release is likely coming in July.

From the amazing Cryptography Engineering summary: A much more promising approach is not to collect the raw data at all. This approach was recently pioneered by Google to collect usage statistics in their Chrome browser. The system, called RAPPOR, is based on an implementation of the 50-year old randomized response technique. Randomized response works as follows: When a user wants to report a piece of potentially embarrassing information (made up example: “Do you use Bing?

Pythonista 3 for iOS is now available on the App Store. It’s on sale for $5 as a new purchase. If you love Python or just want to take automation to the next level on iOS, there’s no better app than Pythonista. Version 3 brings Python 3 as well as a huge number of new modules and major reworking of existing features. There are specialized modules for interacting with iOS data sources like Reminders, Calendar and even the motion sensors.

Interesting options for ScanSnap owners: Scan to cloud services without a computer. The new ScanSnap Cloud is available on the MAS and configures the ScanSnap ix500 and ix100 to scan directly to services like Dropbox and Evernote without a computer. I think I’ll stick with my ScanSnap to DEVONthink workflow for now but I’m definitely interested to see where they take this. My ScanSnap is still one of my favorite pieces of hardware.

One of my internet-friends created something very nice. Dr. Bunsen is a data wrangler in the real world and he put his skills together to create a beer recommendation service called BeerAI. You can read about the project on his website To make beer recommendations, BeerAI uses several low rank approximation techniques in conjunction with collaborative filtering and nearest neighbor methods. The latent factor models capture hidden features of the data that haven’t been explicitly modeled, thereby providing some of the novelty in the recommendations.

Derek Lowe has some choice comments about the Google biotech Verily. Here’s the quote from their CEO: . . .We’ve done a lot, to be quite humble about it. Enough to give us great confidence that this is all likely to work. . . We know that much of this works: we’ve become very good at nanoparticle decorating, we’ve become very good at concentrating them and understanding how they behave in magnetic fields.