Saturday Assorted Links

I’m digging out after being on a great vacation in Maui, Hawaii with extended family. It’s also good to be back, though. Below are some interesting articles or sentences that caught my eye recently.

1. Xiaomi rumored to launch a Windows 10 tablet in the upcoming months. I believe it’s possible. Largely because of this.

2. With Some Work, Cortana Could Be Windows 10’s Killer Application.

I have some travel coming up, and within seconds—literally—of asking Cortana some questions, I was able to check the weather forecast for my destination, find a handful of restaurants around my hotel, and find out what kind of facilities are offered there. I also quickly found a couple of specific recipes online, search for some images, launched some applications, and added a handful of reminders to my calendar. I even had Cortana remind me to get up and walk around every couple of hours, so I wasn’t glued to my office chair for too long each day.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. The first system-wide assistant on a large-scale OS.

3. Tiny sensor tells you when your favorite places are crowded.

The tiny infrared detector is effectively a smarter, more connected pedestrian traffic sensor: it tells apps how many people are entering or leaving a building at any moment, giving you a good sense of whether that restaurant is packed or blissfully empty.

It’s going to be a sensor-filled world. It’s just a question of when.

4. Why the ‘ruthlessly efficient’ editor-in-chief of The New Yorker never tweets.

“I don’t tweet, mainly because I’ve noticed that some of the other people with jobs like mine have either ended up doing all promotional tweets, which is boring, or writing something half-thought-out that would be better used in a more considered piece of writing,” he told Business Insider.

Words to ponder.

5. You Need More than ‘Natural Talent’ to Make it as a Photographer.