Leo Laporte learns about Samsung’s elegant sense of design

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This is just so very delicious. News of the amazing Galaxy Note 5 stylus design fail has been making its way around the blogosphere over the last few days. If you haven’t heard, Samsung’s latest and greatest, designed to take on the iPhone 6 (more on that in the next post), was released in the US on August 21st.

One slight problem, though. As you’ll see in the video below, if you insert the stylus wrong way in (and that appears to be pretty easy to do, as Leo demonstrates), the stylus gets stuck, held in place by a mechanism inside the phone. If you remove the stylus by force, you’ll permanently damage the sensor.

How to disable El Capitan cursor shake-to-zoom feature

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In OS X El Capitan, when you shake the cursor (rapidly move the cursor back and forth), the OS will replace the cursor with a much larger version until you stop the shaking. This is really useful if you have a hard to see cursor (like a cross hair cursor, for example) or encounter a software bug that temporarily makes the cursor invisible.

Don’t like the feature? Perhaps you are an avid gamer and find it comes up at an inopportune time? No matter, easy enough to make it disappear.

Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs” – An insider’s view

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In this post, you’ll meet Michael Stuhlbarg, who played Andy Hertzfeld (not sure why they insisted on putting a ‘t’ at the end of his name.) and hear his thoughts on the structure of the movie and the rehearsal process.

A salute to solo programmers

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Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note, offers praises to solo programmers from long ago, leading up to this heaping praise for the newest solo gem, written for the Mac.

How much is music really worth?

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This is a truly epic post from Pitchfork. It digs into the history of music valuations and explores the conflicts that emerge when trying to pin a value on something created as art. A fantastic read.

Laso Schaller’s Insane 193 foot (59 Meter) Cliff Jump

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From the YouTube page:

Remember the first time standing on a high-dive at your local pool? It was a little terrifying, right? Maybe 10 feet high? Imagine what it would be like to stand on a platform nearly 59 meters high, taller than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and perched on a cliff above a tiny natural pool of water. Yeah…no thanks. But don’t worry, Laso Schaller’s POV of the jump is enough to make your stomach flip. Take a look at the man’s world record cliff jump, and prepare yourself for one of the gnarliest POV shots ever.

The whole thing was great to watch, but that POV shot at the end was thrilling. Full screen this puppy.

Real life first person shooter

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From Kottke.org:

These folks created a real-life first person shooter game and invited strangers on Chatroulette to control the action.

This is not quite the way it sounds. It made me laugh, and puzzle over how they pulled this together. Well done.

How the world of cars is about to change

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Fantastic post. Take the time to read the whole thing. It makes me excited about the future of cars and helps me understand why Apple would and could get into this market.

Apple Music, the Ultimate Guide

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Serenity knows her stuff, there’s a lot of detail on setup and troubleshooting, it looks great, and it’s only $4.99.

Rolling Stone: The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time

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It’s a list, so there will be much arguing, teeth gnashing, and hand wringing.

But don’t get too wrapped up in all that. All the usual suspects are there. Who cares who’s on top?

It’s the bottom and middle of the list that I really found interesting.

Major League Baseball and Apple Watch

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This is interesting:

After concerns were raised during the game about whether Yost wearing an Apple Watch in the dugout gave his team an unfair advantage over its less-connected adversaries, Major League Baseball told MarketWatch it is not banning smartwatches during games.

The Gartner hype cycle

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The hype cycle is a series of five steps that much emerging technology goes through. There’s a great chart that should crystalize this for you. Interesting read, definitely clicks for me.

Who pays the price for click fraud in streaming music?

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Fascinating read. Really dig into that last part, understand who pays for this fraud. It is not Apple Music, not Spotify. It comes out of the pool of money paid in by subscribers and out of artists’ pockets.