Crossfade preventing play count updates in iTunes 11

Crossfade preventing play count updates in iTunes 11: If your iTunes 11 installation will not update play counts, then its crossfade feature may be to blame. [Read more]

YES! I noticed right after it was released.

Still not fixed.

Make use of the built-in VPN service in OS X

Make use of the built-in VPN service in OS X: In addition to client support for VPN, OS X contains a fully fledged VPN server [Read more]

Moog Updates Its Far-Out Synthesizer App for iPad

Moog Updates Its Far-Out Synthesizer App for iPad: Moog Music's Animoog synthesizer -- the iPad's most spaced-out, most diabolically fun musical instrument app -- just got a big upgrade.

Roku adds Spotify, Vevo to its streamed channel offerings

Roku adds Spotify, Vevo to its streamed channel offerings: Channels for the popular music streaming and video services added to the home set-top box steaming platform. [Read more]

Path Wants to Become Your Social Search Engine

Path Wants to Become Your Social Search Engine: Path lets you bring in updates and photos from Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare. Now, it's letting you search all those social memories too.

Google+ mentions make their way to Blogger

Google+ mentions make their way to Blogger: Now, Blogger users can put a "+" before a person's name, and have a link to their Google+ profile automatically included in their post. [Read more]

The 2012 App Gems Awards | Macworld

The 2012 App Gems Awards | Macworld: Apple rightly takes a lot of pride in the size of its App Store—more than 750,000 apps are available for the iPhone and iPad, according to the company’s last count. But the risk of having such a massive emporium for mobile software is that the sheer volume of not-so-hot apps pushes the truly great offerings out of the spotlight. Not to worry, though: Plenty of iOS apps still combine great design and must-have features to help you get even more out of your iPhone and iPad. We’ve discovered nearly two dozen apps in the past year that remind us how the App Store and the iOS universe are about quality, not just quantity.

Forget JavaScript, It's Time for Browsers to Speed Up Images

Forget JavaScript, It's Time for Browsers to Speed Up Images: Images make up roughly 60 percent of the data downloaded with the average webpage. It's great that browser makers have been focused on improving JavaScript, but if we really want to speed up the web it's time to tackle images as well.

MakerBot purges 3D printable gun parts from Thingiverse

MakerBot purges 3D printable gun parts from Thingiverse: Citing its Terms of Service, MakerBot has removed designs for AR15 and other weapon components from its 3D printing file library. [Read more]

Instagram Claims Mix-Up, But for Some Photographers the Damage Is Already Done

Instagram Claims Mix-Up, But for Some Photographers the Damage Is Already Done: After a loud outcry from people across the internet, Instagram seems to be backpedaling on the changes to their new terms of service. But even if they agree to back off, some photographers say they've been left with a bad taste in their mouths.

'Interactive Guide' Teaches the Basics of Good Web Typography

'Interactive Guide' Teaches the Basics of Good Web Typography: Have a blog, but don't understand the finer points of good web typography? No problem. Thanks to developer Tommi Kaikkonen's interactive guide to blog typography you'll be an expert in no time. Your readers will thank you for it.

2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President | TIME.com

2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President | TIME.com: Later that night, Vietor read the specials scribbled on a chalkboard at a bar. The Obama was a shot of Jack Daniel’s and a Pabst Blue Ribbon for $7. The Romney was a shot of Johnnie Walker Gold and a bottle of 1995 Altamura cabernet for $870. The message was breaking through.

Review: Evernote 5.0 for Mac improves an already-indispensable service

Review: Evernote 5.0 for Mac improves an already-indispensable service: Evernote is an Everything Box

Instagram: On being the product

Instagram: On being the product: Update 5:13 pm ET — Instagram has just released a response in which they say, among other things, “Legal documents are easy to misinterpret,” and claim it’s all a misunderstanding.
I call BS. It’s easy to misinterpret a legal document, but the language of Instagram’s TOS was exemplary in its clarity.

If Instagram is backing down, that’s great. They should just say so, rather then blaming their customers for misunderstanding. And they should (quickly) release some equally clear legal language rectifying the situation. They’ve promised to “remove the language that raised the question.” Great, but what they’re doing now is just damage control until they release the new document. Let’s see it.

You have a new TV. Now what? | TV and Home Theater - CNET Reviews

You have a new TV. Now what? | TV and Home Theater - CNET Reviews: Now that you've bought your shiny new TV, make sure you get the most out of it with the right settings, cables, and placement.

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos | Politics and Law - CNET News

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos | Politics and Law - CNET News: Reginald Braithwaite, an author and software developer, posted a tongue-in-cheek "translation" of the new Instagram policy today: "You are not our customers, you are the cattle we drive to market and auction off to the highest bidder. Enjoy your feed and keep producing the milk."

One Instagram user dubbed the policy change "Instagram's suicide note." The PopPhoto.com photography site summarized the situation by saying: "The service itself is still a fun one, but that's a lot of red marks that have shown up over the past couple weeks. Many shooters -- even the casual ones -- probably aren't that excited to have a giant corporation out there selling their photos without being paid or even notified about it."

President says he won't go after Washington over legalized pot

President says he won't go after Washington over legalized pot:

President Barack Obama says he won't go after Washington state and Colorado for legalizing marijuana.

Arts & Letters Daily (14 Dec 2012)

Arts & Letters Daily (14 Dec 2012):

Do you sneer at things predigital, use words like "disruptive," tap the wisdom of the crowd? Get a grip: You've become a cyberguru... more

Before Hobbes, political thought was historical thought, much of it wacky. Since Hobbes, political thought was about ideas, many of them preposterous... more

Marcel Duchamp was ambivalent, even embarrassed, about producing art. He was in search of a medium untainted by aesthetics. He was, in short, a Romantic... more

Gene Wolfe wins grand master award for science fiction and fantasy | Books | guardian.co.uk

Gene Wolfe wins grand master award for science fiction and fantasy | Books | guardian.co.uk: "It's not that Gene Wolfe is, in the opinion of many (and I am one of the many), our finest living science fiction writer. It is that he is, in the opinion of the Washington Post (and of me, too) one of our finest living writers," said Gaiman. "He has been our uncrowned grand master for a long time, and now the rest of the world will know as well."

Four short links: 14 December 2012

Four short links: 14 December 2012: The Web We Lost (Anil Dash) — so much that has me thumping the table bellowing “YES!” in this, but I was particularly provoked by: Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn’t yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren’t about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.

Dropbox acquires music streaming service Audiogalaxy

Dropbox acquires music streaming service Audiogalaxy: Service will be shutdown in this apparent "acqui-hire," suggesting that the file-sharing service may be getting ready to tune up a music streaming service. [Read more]

The unlikely persistence of AppleScript | Macworld

The unlikely persistence of AppleScript | Macworld: AppleScript first appeared in System 7.1 in October 1993, as the first and eventually canonical Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) scripting language. The idea was that OSA would provide a low-level architecture for both inter- and intra-application scripting—in other words, a consistent, system-wide mechanism for multiple applications to communicate and exchange data with each other, and for users to automate tasks within any scriptable application. Instead of each application creating its own incompatible macro language, there’d be one universal way for Mac apps to be automated.

AppleScript was not originally intended to be the only OSA scripting language, but it was. The idea was that OSA was language-agnostic, and the plan was for there to be several of them eventually. AppleScript was the friendly language, derived from HyperCard’s HyperTalk (therein another story entirely) and intended for use by non-programmers. The theory being that a programming language that looked like prose rather than code might enable a broad swath of “non-programmers” to, well, program.

A Eulogy for #Occupy | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

A Eulogy for #Occupy | Wired Opinion | Wired.com: We were trapped in endless war and financial crisis, in debt and downward spiral that our leaders bickered about, but did nothing to stop. It wore away at people with the implacability of geological erosion. The American empire we never wanted in the first place was crumbling slowly, and nothing we did in our lives seemed to matter. We had learned in the past 10 years that we couldn’t change our fates, not with hard work, taking on debt, education, or even trying to live healthy. Even when we wanted to, we could not stop wars, rein in banks, repair our crumbling infrastructure or take care of each other. We couldn’t control medical costs or the price of an education. Gas was going up, temperatures were going up.

Americans themselves lived quiet lives of untold loneliness, socially isolated. But, as we’d come to learn, we’re always watched by our infrastructure’s silent machines. Lonely, but never alone. It had become an authoritarian failing state, but without the authority, or even the sense of change that comes with total failure. We were dying by bits and pieces, going numb and fading away.

It was as if so many of us, myself included, were looking at the protestors and saying, “Please, let something matter again.”

We took blows and kicks from riot police and SWAT rather than step on the people behind us that had slipped in the mud. We had relearned in each argument and every pitched tent that the fundamental job of humans is to care for one another, to keep each other whole and safe.

It was this drive which linked arms and quietly waited for violence in front of a thousand TV cameras the world over — this, and nothing more.

There was no real cynical distance in this movement. It was the opposite of politics that way; it was dirty and smelly and dark, and if you scratch past the patina of personal cynicism, every heart was made of crazy-glued porcelain. Every body was made of scars.

No one walked away from Occupy the same person. The occupiers will always say “we learned so much,” and the simplicity of the words belie how deep the change runs. We all learned so much in the season of Occupy. We learned there is a hostile army threaded through our nation. We learned that children can be casually brutalized, just to keep traffic from being inconvenienced.

We learned that Americans can come together and care for one another. We learned there is a great and terrible spirit in this land, the sleeping giant of our spirits summed together.

How we read - FT.com

How we read - FT.com: As the world of print recedes, what is lost and what is gained?

WB Debuts Full Trailer for Snyder's "Man of Steel"

WB Debuts Full Trailer for Snyder's "Man of Steel": Warner Bros. has released the first full trailer for Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel" that contains all the gravitas of the teasers and touches upon many of the same lofty themes. The Superman reboot bows in theaters June 14

Tim Cook to Be Profiled on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams Next Week

Tim Cook to Be Profiled on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams Next Week: Tim Cook will be the center of a feature on NBC's Rock Center news show next week, the first major interview the CEO has given. Steve Jobs was famously camera shy, preferring to let Apple's products speak for themselves.

In this brief preview, Williams notes that Tim Cook was able to walk around Grand Central Station unrecognized until he got to the Apple Store there.


The full show will air on NBC next Thursday, December 6th.