Apple Event Next Tuesday; Amazon-Remote Work Choice Up to Team Head; Twitter Unwanted Follower Tool to Desktop; Woz Co Wants to Be Google Maps of Space; Chevy Bolt Battery Recall Underway

Apple today announced that it will be holding a special event on Monday, October 18 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The event is set to take place at the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, and macrumors.com notes it will once again be a digital only event.

In their latest policy move, Amazon has said they will leave remote work decisions to individual team leaders. According to geekwire.com, Amazon had initially planned to bring all corporate employees back to the office in January. Amazon had previously planned for 3 days in the office, and two days remote as part of an ‘office-centric’ policy. There is one caveat…employees must be close enough to be able to easily travel into the office for a meeting on a day’s notice. Some companies have continually pushed back their return to office date…Microsoft, for instance. Numerous articles have been written about the excitement of executives about having offices filled back up, but the major lack of enthusiasm by most employees…who have enjoyed being productive without burning up hours a day (to say nothing of burning up money) commuting to and from an office. 

Now, all Twitter users can remove a follower without having to block them. Engadget.com reports that Twitter started testing a new tool last month to do this, and as of now, everyone has access to it. To quietly stop someone from seeing your tweets in their feed, go to the Followers tab on your profile, click the three-dot menu next to the user in question and select the “Remove this follower” option. The feature is part of Twitter’s effort to remove harassment from the platform. Blocking trolls and jerks often leads to retaliation, while this will be more like hiding someone from your news feed on Facebook without ‘unfriending’ them, which can be seen if they have a third party plug in. 

Recently, it was revealed that Steve Wozniak was involved in a space startup called Privateer. Now, it turns out that the company he co-founded with Alex Fielding won’t really be a direct competitor with SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin. Techcrunch.com says they intend to become ‘the Google Maps of space.’ Privateer plans to map every piece of space junk orbiting the earth, so the mess of space crap we have launched into orbit over the past decades can be removed. Fielding pointed out that orbital clean up companies would like to get started, but don’t have the resolution to locate everything accurately….they only have a resolution of about 3-400 km. From the clean up of junk, Woz and Fielding really do intend for the company to be the Google Maps of space…precisely locating everything within range, which should go a long way in making space exploration safer and more achievable. 

The recall of virtually every single Chevy Bolt has started. The huge black eye to GM’s small EV is expected to cost Almost $2 billion, as they replace every single battery pack after a software fix failed. Arstechnica.com notes it will be a 2 day job at the dealerships, and LG, which supplied the defective battery packs, will shoulder nearly all of the cost. The new battery packs will be covered by an 8 year, 100,000 mile warranty. This is probably the biggest recall due to fire danger since the Ford Pinto in the 1970’s. GM is proceeding full speed ahead on electrification, but it remains to be seen if the Bolt will survive. The Bolt small SUV generally got rave reviews before the fire hazard emerged.