TidBITS:

OS X 10.10.1 Yosemite has been out for a bit now and while it is working fine for many people, there are still a variety of complaints making the rounds on the Internet. Here then is a collection of five problems and solutions (or at least workarounds) that we’ve either experienced or had reported to us.

Not all of these will be applicable to everyone but some might help speed things up for you.

Popular Mechanics:

What a lovely video. What a delicate and sentimental homage to an elder statesmen of the land speed wars. What a beautiful, pastoral day, perfect for rolling out a… What uh…. What are they doing with the…. DEAR LORD. IT RUNS.

It’s called “The Beast of Turin” and it looks and sounds like the car Satan would drive. Thanks very much to Glenn Ramsey for the link.

Priceonomics:

To counterbalance its simplicity, the Slinky has an utterly complex backstory. The toy has dealt with a slew of uncanny circumstances — an inventor who fled to South America to join a religious cult, a seven-figure debt, a mind-boggling reemergence under unlikely leadership — and has somehow managed to persevere with very little redesign.

I don’t know how popular the Slinky is outside of Canada and the US but is there anyone who didn’t get one of these for a gift at some point? And how long did it take you (or your rotten little brothers) to break it?

Dan Frakes:

A couple months back, I tweeted that the iOS 8 share-sheet extension I really wanted was one that would let me send myself an email—in other words, to share the current thing via email, but to have the resulting email message pre-addressed to me.

Like Dan, I do this frequently on iOS and have been using and liking this little extension.

Jim and Shawn talk about drum loops, Home Screen apps, the CIA and David Lee Roth!

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Reuters:

An anti-discrimination bill championed by Alabama’s only openly gay lawmaker will bear the name of Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook, a native of the state who came out as gay in October.

Democratic state Representative Patricia Todd said on Wednesday the technology giant was initially hesitant about having Cook’s name on her bill but later embraced the idea.

Very happy to see Apple changed their mind regarding this. The bill won’t pass though.

Petapixel:

This September, Airbus took to the skies to capture photos of five of its massive test and development A350–900s. The photo shoot was meant to celebrate the certification of the company’s latest twin-engine, wide-body jetliner.

It was also probably one of the most expensive photo shoots we’ve ever come across.

At a cool $300 million for each of the five A350–900s, the cost of the subjects alone totals $1.5 billion dollars.

Any five element photo shoot is complicated. An airborne photo shoot is a thousand times more complicated. Doing it with five massive, quarter of a million-pound aircraft is utterly remarkable. Great video.

Colossal:

Ontario-based photographer Stephen Orlando is fascinated with human movement and uses programmable LED light sticks attached to kayak paddles, people, racquets, and other objects to translate that movement into photographic light paintings.

As I photographer myself, from an artistic point of view, these photos are fascinating. But the technical aspect of capturing the images in this way are equally interesting.

Twitter:

In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we’re enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to “block”.

This issue is a giant hairball for Twitter but one that has been long overdue for them to address. I’m looking forward to seeing this rolled out. I’m not looking forward to seeing how it will inevitably be abused.

Tech Republic:

Jonathan Zufi decided to take some of his thousands of photos of Apple products and collect them into a giant, self-published coffee table book. The result was Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple, a 350-page tome filled with gorgeous pictures of products from Apple’s 30-year history.

I don’t think it’s the ultimate gift (a working Apple I would be), but I have this book and it is gorgeous. It would certainly make a great gift for any Apple fan.

Medium:

Every day tens of thousands of high-speed optical recognition cameras silently snap digital photos of plates, capturing in milliseconds an image of each tag and sometimes the driver as well. They are difficult to see if you’re not looking for them, but the sleek devices can be found clamped to patrol cars and the vehicles of debt chasers as well as mounted along streets and highways and in parking garages and shopping centers. A single reader, once activated, works furiously without assistance, capturing thousands of plate scans per shift.

But there are bugs.

We are being spied on in ways we don’t imagine, for reasons we can’t fathom and by “authorities” with little to no oversight.

The New York Times:

The technology, which has a microchip in the card and requires consumers to enter a PIN at checkout, has been required in Europe and some countries elsewhere for about a decade. Now, Americans retailers and banks are preparing for the wide release of the technology, in a wholesale security upgrade that will cost billions of dollars. The change will start next year and is expected to take several years to complete.

It can’t happen fast enough. Most of the rest of the world is already protected by this tech.

The Globe and Mail:

The first Shaw Fire log – Canada’s answer to what had been a sensation in New York since the 1960s – dates back to 1986; a way to broadcast content on a round-the-clock channel in Edmonton so employees could take Christmas off. Every year, Shaw’s vice-president of community programming invited his employees to his house for a party, and they taped a new fire log, which ran on a continuous loop over the holiday. It caught on elsewhere.

I’d be embarrassed to tell you how often this video plays on my TV during the holidays. Thanks to Lesley for the story link.

Tekrevue:

So, what does this mean? At best, it means only very modest improvements for some models, certainly less than most would expect from a system as old as the 2012 Mac mini. At worst, it means a dramatic decrease in performance, with some 2012 configurations absolutely destroying their 2014 counterparts in multi-core workflows.

The good, bad and downright ugly of the latest Mac mini. Not a machine I have a lot of faith in recommending.

The Independent:

Turn off the spine-tingling music and forget everything you thought you knew about this solitary, “mindless killing machine”. Sharks have individual personalities. They socialise, choose best friends and create social networks of unusual complexity. They can be trained by humans to complete simple tasks, much more quickly than rabbits or cats, for instance, and retain the knowledge for much longer.

Sharks also teach each other new tricks: how to find food, identify predators and charm mates. Like sea turtles, some travel huge distances to return to their own birthplace, again and again, to give birth themselves. Most don’t need to swim continuously to survive. And rather than being near-blind and reliant on smell, which is the general perception, they in fact have advanced sight. They feel pain. And the boldest sharks face a greater risk of dying before adulthood.

Why does any of this matter? Well, we’re killing about 100 million sharks every year, 11,000 an hour.

Like many of us, I have been fascinated by sharks since first seeing the movie “Jaws” as a kid. But, far from giving me nightmares, it instilled a lifelong fascination with these amazing animals.

Animagraffs:

Speakers push and pull surrounding air molecules in waves that the human ear interprets as sound. You could even say that hearing is movement detection. So what makes a speaker travel back and forth at just the right rate and distance, and how does that make sound?

I thought I knew how speakers worked. After watching this cool web page, I realized I had no clue how speakers worked.

The Roosevelts:

2014 is coming to an end and if you didn’t get all the majestic locations checked off your travel bucket list this year we have 50 photos that inspired awe and wonderment in 2014.

Spectacular images showing the awesome beauty of our planet.

The Passion of Former Days:

A terrific set of cigarette cards depicting a flight from London to Amsterdam in the early days of commercial air travel. The images (each “from an official photograph supplied by Imperial Airways”) are accompanied by text detailing “our” flight, from check-in and take-off, to views over the Channel, France, and Brussels (where we land for lunch), to the final landing in Amsterdam.

I’ve included the backs with the text, as the little details are fascinating insights into a time when planes held “as many as” 20 passengers, reached cruising altitudes of 3,000 feet, and got from London to Brussels in “only” two and a half hours.

For the vast majority of us, flying is an awful experience but, in the 1920’s, if you could afford it, flying was a lot more genteel. The descriptions on the backs of these cigarette cards are also wonderful insights in to how writing has evolved and how information was presented to customers of the day.

Oregon Live:

With emotions running high as speakers were addressing the crowd, he noticed a young man with tears in his eyes holding a “Free Hugs” sign among a group of people.

After talking to Devonte about such things as school, art and life, Barnum said he pointed to the sign and asked, “Do I get one of those?”

I’d seen the picture all over but the stories of the event and the people behind it, in particular Devonte, are amazing. Don’t read without a tissue or two handy.

The New York Times:

Thanksgiving weekend in 1990, I spent two hours at the loneliest place in the world for an obscure novelist — the book-signing table at a Waldenbooks in a suburban New Jersey mall.

I sat at the table smiling like a game show host. Store patrons scurried past me, doing all they could to avoid eye contact. I kept smiling. I straightened out my pile of free bookmarks for the umpteenth time, though so far none had been taken.

A lovely story about perspective.

Jim and Shawn talk about trading in your iPhone, Tim Cook, Google replacements, AC/DC, Rush and The Tragically Hip!

Sponsored by Audible (Visit the link to get a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership)!

The Wirecutter:

The holiday season is approaching once again, and that screaming you hear is the sound of Internet users everywhere becoming inundated with holiday “deals.” Thousands of deals. Tens of thousands of deals. And, as you may know from experience, most of those deals don’t actually result in any kind of savings.

In fact, they are often a waste of money due to marketing trickery or just plain bad products. In fact, according to our research so far only 0.6% of the 42,000 deals we’ve studied since early November are actually a good deal on a good piece of gear. Our attitude is dictated by a general idea: if we wouldn’t buy it ourselves or tell our friends and family to do so, we won’t list it. If the price or the item itself is not good, we won’t list it.

This time of year, we are inundated by “deals”. The folks at The Wirecutter do a great job of separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s also a great list if you are looking for gift ideas.

Vox:

I write about economics for a living, so I understand concepts of deadweight loss and depreciation and inefficiency.

That said, I still ask my parents for gift cards for Christmas every year. And I buy them for people, too.

I know this is a sacrilege, and you might, too — there are all sorts of articles out there about how gift cards are sincerely a terrible, horrible gift. And yet I keep wanting them. It could be because I’m just a bad decision-maker, but I think there are excellent reasons to get a person a gift card … provided you buy it for the right kind of person.

I think gift cards can have their place for certain people. Do you give gift cards? Do you like to get them?

Vanity Fair:

I am afraid of the cops. Absolutely petrified of the cops. Now understand, I’ve never been arrested or held for questioning. I’ve never been told that I “fit the description.” But that doesn’t change a thing. I am afraid of cops the way that spiders are afraid of boots. You’re walking along, minding your own business, and SQUISH! You are dead.

Simply put, I am afraid of the cops because I am black.

I’m not as Black as Bell but I am the same height and weight and I know the feelings he describes.

Mental Floss:

What do Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Toy Story, Reservoir Dogs, Titanic, Anchorman, 22 Jump Street, and more than 200 other films and TV shows have in common? Not much besides the one and only Wilhelm Scream.

The so-called Wilhelm Scream is the holy grail of movie geek sound effects, a throwaway sound bite that had inauspicious beginnings and was revived in the 1970s and made into the best movie in-joke ever.

Once you recognize the scream, you’ll be amazed at how many movies use it.

Twitter:

Starting today (in the U.S. only), we’re beginning to test a new way for advertisers to connect with consumers on Twitter and convert them to loyal customers in their stores, on their websites and in their apps. This feature, Twitter Offers, enables advertisers to create card-linked promotions and share them directly with Twitter users.

There is zero chance I would ever use this. Anyone else interested in giving your credit card info to Twitter?

iMore:

AC/DC’s new album is coming out next week, but you can listen to it now for free through iTunes. Rock or Bust, the fifteenth studio album from the group, can be streamed in its entirety through the iTunes Store and iTunes Radio.

The album has 11 new tracks and clocks in at a little more than half an hour and you can pre-order the album.

Listening to AC/DC brings me back to memories of junior high and high school.

Blackberry:

Trade in your iPhone 6 to a Passport and BlackBerry will give you up to $400 in trade-in value, plus an extra $150 “top up” for U.S. residents.

They’re not paying enough.

Nerdwallet:

Each year, millions of Americans head for retail stores to take part in that famed post-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza—Black Friday—with some even cutting their holiday short to get a jump on the seasonal deals.

Maybe they shouldn’t bother.

As always, shop carefully and shop smart this holiday season.

Where the reporter makes the Stupid Statement of the Day: “Let’s see how the cameras compare!” Here’s a little hint – they don’t. They can’t. Not even remotely. Stop trying to force the comparison.

He does offer a couple of good tips on proper shooting though. So it’s not an entirely worthless video.