Tina Roth Eisenberg:

The Smart Rope counts your jumps and shows them in real-time with a futuristic LED display that appears right before your eyes. Pretty cool idea!

This is indeed a cool idea.

Court records released on Tuesday show the U.S. Justice Department has in the last four months sought court orders to force Apple Inc to help investigators extract data from 15 iPhones in cases across the country.

As you can see in the story, Apple has complied with court orders to help law enforcement when it could do so.

I thought these were great. They even have the poop emoji.

It’s time for another exciting Mighty Deal Exclusive! This super mega bundle from Tom Chalky includes 57 hand-drawn fonts, 230 textures and brushes, and hundreds of extra design elements! If you were lucky enough to snag Tom Chalky’s mega bundle in early 2015, you know how fabulous these design assets can be. You also can take advantage of this year’s Mighty Deal as it contains all new pieces!

I’ve never met her, but she sounds like an amazing woman.

For your enjoyment, a new episode of my podcast, with special guest Jim Dalrymple. Topics include the Apple/FBI legal showdown, the debate over Apple software quality, and more.

I had a great time chatting with John.

My thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Track time. Invoice. Get paid. Billings Pro is a time tracking and invoicing app made exclusively for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. By yourself or in a team, Billings Pro makes it easy to track time from all your apple devices. Whether you’re tracking time on your iPhone, invoicing on your Mac, or adding a payment on your iPad, all your devices stay in sync.

Marketcircle, the makers of Billings Pro, just released Billings Pro 2.2 for iOS with a significant UI revamp and new functionality on the iPhone.

New for Billings Pro on iPhone

Whip up estimates and invoices from scratch right from the Home Screen. Start building an invoice with one tap when you launch the app.

Compare billable time over the last 14 days using the Activity Graph. See how many hours you’ve tracked and the value that time adds to your business.

Stay on top of your invoices. See any overdue and unpaid invoices right from the iPhone Home Screen. Swipe to scroll through recent invoices or tap to jump to all.

Billings Pro 2.2 also offers the ability to view all invoices, estimates, projects and clients, sorting options for clients and invoices, and adds support for Apple Watch OS2. Learn more about Billings Pro 2.2 for iPhone and iPad and read what freelancers and small businesses are loving about Billings Pro.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey:

We stand with @tim_cook and Apple (and thank him for his leadership)!

It’s about time. Most other companies are too scared to take a stand on this issue. Good for Twitter for standing with Apple.

Matthew Panzarino:

The point is that the FBI is asking Apple to crack its own safe, it doesn’t matter how good the locks are if you modify them to be weak after installing them. And once the precedent is set then the opportunity is there for similar requests to be made of all billion or so active iOS devices. Hence the importance of this fight for Apple.

That is exactly right. All devices, even newer ones, will be susceptible if the government is successful.

It is always fascinating to read, or listen, to Tim and Jony.

Imagination is our window into the future. At NASA/JPL we strive to be bold in advancing the edge of possibility so that someday, with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future. Click on any of the thumbnails below to learn more and download a free poster sized image.

Very cool, NASA.

Om Malik:

Over the past few days, though, I have been contemplating if it is time to get Instagram off my home screen as well. Why? Because it has been infesting my feed with too many ads — and not just any ads but terrible ads. Video ads. Ads that make absolutely no sense to me. Ads that have less relevance to my feed and me than dumb follow-me-everywhere banners on the web.

Sometimes companies force us to make decisions. I’m not saying Instagram shouldn’t have ads, they just shouldn’t allow bad ads.

This debate will rage for a long time now. Neither party is going to back down.

Apple must provide “reasonable technical assistance” to investigators seeking to unlock the data on an iPhone 5C that had been owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, Judge Sheri Pym of U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said in a ruling.

Apple has said they can’t unlock iPhones running iOS 8 or later—the shooter’s phone was running iOS 9. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, but clearly the government doesn’t believe Apple can’t break into the phone.

Ozzy and Randy.

Track time. Invoice. Get paid. Billings Pro is a time tracking and invoicing app made exclusively for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. By yourself or in a team, Billings Pro makes it easy to track time from all … Continued

Jim and Merlin talk about guitar amps, TaskPaper, and Metallica’s “Too Heavy for Halftime” show.

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links

• Marshall JCM800 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Orange Amps | Dark Terror Head
• TaskPaper — Simple to-do list software for Mac
• Questions about taskpaper history – TaskPaper – Hog Bay Software Support
• Introduction | TaskPaper User’s Guide
• Why TaskPaper? | TaskPaper User’s Guide
• Hog Bay Software Wiki — TaskPaperArticles
• Taskmator – TaskPaper Client, Reminders, Task, To-Do List, Outliner in PlainText on the App Store
• Airplane Mode
• About — Airplane Mode
• Huffduffer
• huffduff-video
• Steve Allen show, Frank Zappa Playing music on a Bicycle 1963 – YouTube
• Live Review + Interview: Metallica at AT&T Park, San Francisco (2/6) | Consequence of Sound
• Set list: Metallica rocks AT&T Park – San Jose Mercury News
• Metallica – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Master of Puppets – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Metallica (album) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Metallica – Fuel [The Night Before – San Francisco 2016] HD – YouTube
• Loveless (album) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow – YouTube
• My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO) – YouTube
• My Bloody Valentine – To Here Knows When (Live) – YouTube

A great new album from a couple of my friends, Dave Wiskus and Joe Cieplinski. They also happen to be developers and podcasters in the Mac and iOS world. I’m listening to the album right now and it’s really good. Congrats guys!

This is a podcast you really need to listen to today. According to Gruber:

It’s a wide-ranging discussion, and includes a bunch of interesting scoops: the weekly number of iTunes and App Store transactions, an updated Apple Music subscriber count, peak iMessage traffic per second, the number of iCloud account holders, and more.

Immersion, a company that develops and licenses haptic touch feedback technology, today filed a lawsuit against Apple and AT&T accusing the two companies of patent infringement. Citing technologies like 3D Touch, Force Touch, the Apple Watch Taptic Engine, and vibration patterns for ringtones and notifications, Immersion says multiple Apple devices use its intellectual property.

Another interesting case.

Pandora has the largest number of users for music streaming, but the competition is encroaching. Spotify is said to be arming itself with another $500 million in capital, and Apple Music recently surpassed 10 million paying users. Pandora’s users peaked at 81.5 million at the end of 2014, declining to 78.1 million in the third quarter.

Pandora has the best algorithmic stations around. I’m surprised they’re shopping themselves around after taking over the Rdio assets last year, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

I’ve used parallel processing on drums in my mix before, but this is another interesting usage.

Samsung already warned it was going to be a rough year—news like this is going to hurt them even more.

The ENCRYPT Act, sponsored by Democratic Representative Ted Lieu and Republican Blake Farenthold, would prevent any state or locality from mandating that a “manufacturer, developer, seller, or provider” design or alter the security of a product so it can be decrypted or surveilled by authorities, according to bill text viewed by Reuters.

Very smart, I hope this passes. Governments have to understand that any weakness will be exploited—there is no backdoor just for law enforcement.

I am suspicious of any for-profit company arguing its good intentions and its free gifts. Nothing — and I do mean nothing — in this life is free. You always pay a price.

Om Malik makes some valid points here.

Since first writing about Apple Watch, and the follow-up on my weight loss using the device, I’ve been answering questions from readers about my progress. I thought I’d take a minute and give you an update. […]

This is a fascinating story. Academics do the research for free, but they have to buy back their papers through expensive subscriptions from publishers. Enter the dark web.

I love this bag. It’s quality from top to bottom and the leather artisan even signs it.

It’s no surprise that lawyers are considering suing Apple, but this is an interesting case.

People who have iPhones running iOS 9 sometimes see “Error 53” when trying to restore the phone through Apple’s iTunes software after being prompted to connect the device to a computer. The error, which prevents the user from using the device, seems to occur on the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6S, and iPhone 6S Plus after their Touch ID sensors are repaired by unapproved retailers.

I can understand Apple’s reasoning, but perhaps they should have been more proactive in letting people know before they updated.

That’s certainly original.