Many of us have a soft spot for Dungeons and Dragons, even if we don’t play it anymore and I always like reading stories about how it came to be. FYI, I was a 200lbs Dwarven Fighter-Thief with a drinking problem and a hatred of any humans over 6ft tall. Caused all kinds of problems. I still have my D&D dice.

Guy Martin races his Superbike against David Coulthard’s Red Bull F1 car on the track in Silverstone in the UK.

As some of we lonely voices in the wilderness keep trying to point out, Apple is a remarkably successful company even without huge iPhone sales numbers (and keep in mind, last quarter’s iPhone numbers, while lower than what Wall St wanted, are still on par with Apple’s most successful ones) and in particular when you keep in mind where Apple has come from. It really brings to the fore the fact that Apple Inc is completely different from AAPL.

Interesting video showing several tests of the various iPad iterations.

Leaving aside the “…if industry estimates are accurate…” (they’re not), the media in general and the tech media is particular always seem to need to see everything in absolute terms. The Apple Watch is most certainly not a flop – nothing that sells millions of copies at $500+ a pop can be called that.

This was Prince’s signature song. The video is fascinating especially if you watch the movie afterwards, as I did last night. You can definitely hear how the audio from this video is used in the movie. Speaking of the movie, as I said on Twitter last night, “I learned something disturbing tonight I didn’t know 30 years ago. “Purple Rain” has some classic tunes but it’s a crappy movie.” It really is poorly acted. But the musical performances more than make up for the deficiencies.

In my opinion, the single greatest, most electrifying Super Bowl halftime show ever performed.

All of Canada is in mourning because none of our NHL teams managed to make the playoffs this year. You can sooth the pain with some of these. The number one movie is obvious but I highly recommend the surprisingly sweet “Goon”, shot partially in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

For those of you thinking about making the switch, this may help. Typinator is a well regarded piece of software.

A question many outside security experts will ask is, what took the FBI so long? Supposedly, the phone had been unlocked a couple of weeks ago.

Apple will continue to get these request from both foreign and domestic governments which is why they are working hard at locking down security in iOS so these requests become moot.

Is it just me (and this feels weird to say) but does $25 million seem like not a lot of money to settle this lawsuit?

The press release is typical marketing speak. Bottom line is a lot of good people lost their jobs today.

I read Shakespeare in High School English and, while I enjoyed it, it wasn’t until I heard it on stage and in film that I really appreciated the beauty of Shakespeare’s language. Looking forward to seeing this on the App Store on April 23 – the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

Sadly, this kind of incredible penmanship is a dying art in the age of keyboards and iPhones (I literally can’t remember the last time I wrote more than a few words on a piece of paper) but it is fascinating to watch a master calligrapher create.

I don’t know what this means for Mac users (hopefully, nothing) but it’s sad to see the demise of what, for Apple, was supposed to be its next great platform. Myself and others were encouraged directly by Apple (but behind the scenes) to develop and use QuickTime. Apple sent me a QuickTime Streaming Server (back in the days when there was such a thing) in order for me to broadcast my show using QuickTime 4. But, over the ensuing years, it became obvious that Apple was losing interest in developing QuickTime much further. This issue is yet another sign of that.

I’m sorry but I’d have to put the Spider-Man theme number one if only because it was the only song my brothers and I ever sang at the top of our lungs every time it played. Drove my mother nuts.

Apple has always had this obsessive attention to detail. I love that some of these are so subtle you’d never notice them but Apple went to the effort to create them anyway.

How many of you had “sea monkies” when you were a kid? I remember seeing the ads in the back of almost every comic book I read but not believing for a second they looked as pictured. Sure enough, some kid in our neighborhood managed to convince his parents to let him buy the package and they were just as disappointing as I had imagined they would be.

Spirit of the West was/is one of my favorite bands. I saw them often when I was in college here in Vancouver and they were very approachable, often sitting with us after gigs and chatting. The song, “The Crawl”, was seen as a challenge to us college boys. We wanted to hit all the pubs in the song in one evening. We tried many times but my friends didn’t have my Nova Scotia stamina for heavy drinking. And check out one of their most well known songs, “Home for a Rest”. Very sad to hear of their myriad of health issues and even sadder I won’t get to see them one last time.

I absolutely hate these blast dryers. Now there’s scientific evidence for my hatred.

This is such a bizarre and useless accomplishment but, having wasted countless hours on this game, I can certainly appreciate the effort.

This is a really well done video that does a great job of showing the issues that are only now being slowly resolved go back much farther than most Americans realize.

This was pretty obviously what was going to happen when Motor Trend started pimping this on Twitter yesterday. But many ClickWhores expectedly left their common sense at the door and happily “reported” the “Exclusive”. Sure enough, today’s “news” showed Motor Trend knows nothing about the mythical Apple Car. But many in the tech media won’t say that – they’ll just re-report uncritically because that’s so much easier than actually thinking.

With Smile Software making significant changes to its shortcut utility, lots of folks have been looking at and for alternatives. I was a big fan of TypeIt4me long before I ever used TextExpander.

Few of us give much thought to the innards of our electronics but the supply chain process of getting all that stuff into your hands is remarkable. It’s also why we see so many rumors of individual components. The devices have become far too complex for Apple to keep a lid on everything.

As an older brother (to eight), I can definitely understand and appreciate playing this kind of prank on a younger sibling.

I think this is where self-driving vehicles will really take off and drive adoption. There are still a lot of hurdles to overcome but businesses like trucking have a lot of incentives to getting greater acceptance of self-driving technology.

I had no idea you could even do this kind of stuff with a top.

This is such a weird, funny and sweet thing. Sadly, because of the internet, I bet random jerk offs will ruin it fairly soon.