I previously linked to ProtonMail back in March. I’ve been using it sparingly for the past couple of months and the service is proving to be a dependable and convenient tool for secure email. ProtonMail requires two layers of login to access the mailbox. First the account login and then the mailbox decryption. This is true of the iOS app and the web application. Without the mailbox encryption key there’s no way to get access to existing messages.

Derek Lowe has some smart things to say about how the humnan genome is portrayed in the media now and how that’s going to be changing. …the steadily increasing power and scope of sequencing technology is allowing us to really get to work in the zone between those two concepts. That, as it turns out, is where a lot of the promise that attached to the original human sequencing really resides.

This week’s Mac Power Users is terrific. Teddy Svoronos has some great ideas for using iOS to capture lecture notes and give presentations. What I particularly like is that all the tips are practical with almost no “hacking.”

I still depend on Hazel and it’s one of my top five Mac applications. Version 4 is out today (after some website hiccups) and adds live rule preview and rule syncing through Dropbox. Hazel is one of the things that I most miss when I’m on iOS. Heck, Macdrifter probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for all the time Hazel saves me posting screenshots and publishing articles. It’s also still the heavy lifter in my photo management workflow.

I love concept maps. I love notes. So, of course I’d love the idea behind Octopus Note. It’s a mapping app that also links to detailed notes. It’s in beta now. Brought to me by my bearded friend who really gets me.

These macro photos are a really incredible use of cameras, microscopes, and computers. By way of Twitter

From RT.com: Coming out of the Stone Age, the chieftain and his descendants controlled the population and reproduction through a new hierarchical system of powerful elites which, much like his bloodline, continues to this day. The gifs in the article are particularly rediculous but it’s an interesting finding. It also has a pretty good summary at the end. The study also proved that all of us, no matter what race, nationality, or religion, are cousins from Africa, as 100 percent of the men tested descend from just one man who lived 190,000 years ago, more than a centamillennium before humanoids left Africa to explore the planet.

ChronoSync is an excellent backup utility for the Mac. It’s long been a favorite of mine for selective on-premise file backup for my Mac. The next release (4.7) is being teased on YouTube with syncing to Amazon S3. I certainly hope Amazon Cloud sync as well as Google Drive and WebDAV are on the way too, but this is a nice step forward for a proven app I like. The embedded demo video is below.

Episode 65 of Nerds on Draft is freshly canned and includes one of the best IPAs I’ve ever had and a bunch of discuss about task managers (again). Jeff and I check in on how it’s going with 2Do for iOS and Mac and talk about rough edges and favorite features.

This week, Dropbox announced a new offline storage option similar to BitTorrent Syncs selective download. Specified files are synced to a connected computer while other files can be downloaded on demand right from the file system. This is the kind of stuff Dropbox should be leading with. I’d be happy to see them exit email and note-taking and focus on a better Dropbox. This is potentially a huge step forward for the service.