Huge thanks to the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office for helping out with the train wreck that is the DMCA. This week we get exemptions for to allow us to monitor and analyze our own cars and to play games with dead authentication servers. From Jalopnik: Specifically, the Copyright Office said such copies and mods constitutes “noninfringing activity as a matter of fair use and/or under the exception set forth insection 117 of the Copyright Act, which permits the owner of a copy of a computerprogram to make certain copies and adaptations of the program.

Mindmeister is one of my favorite collaboration tools on the internet. It’s incredibly easy to share maps with a group of people but also provides granular edit and view permissions to control it. We keep the Nerds on Draft podcast outlines and show schedules in Mindmeister. Version 6.5 is out this week for iOS and it adds some nice enhancements. Notably for me, it adds split view support for the iPhone 6 Plus.

The latest Nerds on Draft is out. We go against our better judgement and drink a pumpkin beer and talk about photography. Coincidentally the new Mac Power Users cover photography from the professional angle but come to a lot of similar conclusions. Take a listen to both if you like to take pictures with an iPhone. It also looks like the latest Overcast update now works with Squarespace podcasts like Nerds on Draft.

Agate looks like a really great data analysis library for Python. It’s readable and powerful. Made by a journalist for journalists. As journalists, we not only need to solve these problems for practical reporting purposes, but also for philosophical ones. How can we assert that our numbers are correct if we performed a series of manual processes in a spreadsheet exactly once? Do it that way and the only record of how it was done is the one in your head.

The University of California has made a significant policy change regarding its research: Building on UC’s previously-adopted Academic Senate open access (OA) policies, this new policy enables the university system and associated national labs to provide unprecedented access to scholarly research authored by clinical faculty, lecturers, staff researchers, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and librarians – just to name a few. Comprising ten campuses, five medical centers, three national laboratories and nearly 200,000 employees, the UC system is responsible for over 2% of the world’s total research publications.

Flowingdata.com is a great site. They also have good taste in beer. Taking the route above, a trip to 70 breweries, you get about 197 hours of drive time across 12,299 miles. You stop in 28 states and pass through a total of 40.

The today screen in iOS is one of those dividing features that you either love it or you forgot about it. I love it. My most used features of the Today and Notification screens are the widgets provided by apps like Fantastical and Drafts. By far my most used widget is from an app named Launcher (see this previous overview). The latest version of Launcher extended the relatively simple app launch actions of version 1.

From NYPost: CIA Director John Brennan’s private account held sensitive files — including his 47-page application for top-secret security clearance — until he recently learned that it had been infiltrated, the hacker told The Post. Later about the hacker himself: “I think they’ll want to make an example out of him to deter people from doing this in the future,” said a source who described the situation as “just wild” and “crazy.

Taskmator continues to be one of the best all-in-one iOS apps for working with TaskPaper formatted lists. Version 3 brings some great new features to the party with saved filters and integration with Reminders.1 Now I can create a saved filter for any TaskPaper search which means quick and easy access to just the information I want. Tapping a saved filter applies it instantly but it also populates the search field so I can tweak it if I need to.

18 months ago I wrote about the state of iOS 7: iOS7 should be an enormous embarrassment for Apple management. They set a timeline that pushed iOS7 out half-baked and I hope they regret that decision. I still have bad memories about iOS 7 that make me second guess every iOS update. A bad taste still lingers as I watch the Apple announcements. However bad iOS 7 was, iOS 9 gives me tremendous satisfaction for sticking with it.