The story is a bit misleading – there’s no actual information on how the tulip was engineered – but it’s still a great story about the remarkable affection and friendship the Dutch have for and with Canada. You can see the Canada150 tulip at the Canadian Tulip Festival this weekend in Ottawa and buy it for your own home garden at Home Hardware stores this September.

As you can see, we’re big fans of marble and complicated machinery videos here at The Loop (check out Dave Mark’s “The amazing Marble Mountain machine” post from earlier today). While this one isn’t a continuous shot video (so it doesn’t qualify as “Rube Goldberg-esque”), it’s still fascinating to watch and imagine the ingenuity of the creator to come up with the tricks shown.

If you are a fan of baseball, you owe it to yourself to listen (you don’t even have to watch) Dodgers games that Vin Scully is broadcasting. If you are a podcaster, listen to how Scully does his job. Listen to his cadence and the way he uses his voice. I’m not even a Dodgers fan but I will often listen to their games just to hear the sound of Scully’s voice and marvel at how he can talk almost constantly for the entire game and be entertaining the whole time.

What an incredibly clever kid. I think at 15, I was still learning to tie my sneakers properly.

The D&D nerds out there (a group I am proud to be part of) are undoubtedly trying to figure out a way to use these. If nothing else, at only $12 each, I’d buy a couple just to add to my dice collection.

I’m a big fan of Adobe’s Lightroom but these online tools can do a lot of what desktop apps do.

Is it just me or does this seem less “patriotic” and more “weird and pandering” to anyone else?

Great news for my fellow Canadians.

I love this guy’s videos.

As a Nova Scotianer, I’d love to be buried at sea off the coast of my home province. After all the food the ocean has provided me (I’ve eaten hundreds of pounds of lobster), I think it’s only fair I feed the little fishies right back.

As a stutterer myself, there is some great advice in this piece if you know anyone who has a stutter. Patience is the key.

I’ve only ever seen skywriting once, when I was a kid, and I distinctly remember being utterly fascinated by it and driving my father nuts with questions.

I’ve never heard of an electret microphone but this is a fascinating story.

In honor of the NHL playoffs on now (I’m halfheartedly cheering for Nashville and Pittsburgh – both cities I used to live in), this is a really interesting back story of one of the greatest action photos ever taken.

This is insanely cool. Make sure you click on the menu in the lower left and go through some of the viewing options. But make sure you don’t have anything to do for the next hour.

I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler but this latest version of the very popular SketchParty now supports both the Apple Pencil and the new Apple TV. I still won’t be able to draw but it does look like a fun game for families.

I know developers, big and small, who have products in the Apple Retail Stores. The common refrain is, “It’s the best and worst thing to happen to your company”. Apple’s attention to detail extends outwards to vendors who want to sell in their stores.

Some of these photos are so spectacular, they make me want to throw away my camera gear because I know I’ll never come close to capturing the beauty of travel in the way these shooters have.

Tom is the “Grand Old Man” of the Mac Community. He and his lovely wife Dori have been involved on many levels – users, authors, speakers – for decades. Both of them are wonderful, kind, funny, smart and fierce people. I’m proud to know them and even prouder to call them friends. This is terrible news but, Tom being Tom, he will handle it with the dignity and intelligence for which he has always been admired. My thoughts are with both of them as they go through this awful ordeal.

One of the complaints from developers is that there’s just no there there. In other words, there’s just not enough to the Apple TV to make developing for it worth the effort, particularly for smaller developers working on iOS.

This kind of photo-illustration just melts my brain. I can’t even conceive of the concept let alone have the incredible skills this guy has, both in the camera and on the computer.

These lists are always fun/interesting and congratulations to Apple for having the iPhone named as #1 but, is it just me or does anyone think of the iPhone as most certainly not a “gadget”?

There is a lot of justifiable doom and gloom surrounding Apple in general and the iPhone in particular so far this year. A lot of it is incomprehensible to those of us who use and enjoy the products the company makes. Personally, I don’t think there’s any need to push a panic button but the company does have some serious challenges ahead for the rest of the year and into 2017.

I’m a big fan of printing off some of your photos. Along with the reasons included in this post, there’s just a certain “something” about holding your photos in your hand in a tangible, physical form and a sense of pride to be able to take your own work and hang it on your wall or to give to a friend.

This might be a serious blow to Apple’s plans in India. The Indian consumer is much more price conscious and less concerned with brand image than China and Apple was counting on refurbs to help them get a foot in the door.

Like most people, I hate flying but I love the view of our world from a plane’s window.

If you or someone you know is in the market for an entry level DSLR, you can’t go too far wrong with the Canon Rebel line. At the “DSLR for Beginners” photography classes I teach, well over 75% of the students use some variation of the Rebel.

I have no interest in actually doing it but watching glass being blown has always fascinated me.

I remember being in Akihabara during the last Macworld Expo Toyko. Utterly mind blowing space. At 6’3″ tall, I felt like Godzilla wandering through the cramped electronics aisle and being overwhelmed by the amazing variety of everything electronic you could imagine. If you’re an electronics or gadget fan, you owe it to yourself to visit.

Oh man. Now I want an RC helicopter.