AgileBits:

We are announcing that, for Mac and iOS users, our updates coming this fall for Apple’s OS X Yosemite and iOS 8—yes, including our awesome new Safari and in-app extension—will be free for current owners.

We’ve put 1Password for desktops on sale for 30 percent off, and 1Password for iPhone and iPad on sale for a whopping 40 percent off (1Password 4 for Android remains free-to-try through August 18!).

Get 1Password for Mac for just $34.99 and 1Password for iOS for just $9.99.

I personally highly recommend 1Password.

Epicurious:

Whether you’re making breakfast in an office or a college dorm room, the only kitchen tools you’ll need are a microwave-safe mug and a fork. From fast scrambled eggs to tomato sauce “baked” eggs, here are five tasty ideas for how to make eggs in a mug in 90 seconds.

I’m not much of a cook (but I do make a pretty tasty pasta sauce), so I’m always on the look out for quick (cause I’m lazy) and easy recipes. This looks like it would fit the bill.

The Atlantic:

For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning?

It’s a question that has been on many minds since 2010, when Apple released the iPad and schools began experimenting with it. The devices came along at a time when many school reformers were advocating to replace textbooks with online curricula and add creative apps to lessons. Some teachers welcomed the shift, which allowed their students to replace old poster-board presentations with narrated screencasts and review teacher-produced video lessons at any time.

Four years later, however, it’s still unclear whether the iPad is the device best suited to the classroom.

It’s an interesting article from the other side of the question. Before you knee jerk react to the headline, read the story. It certainly does make some interesting points.

The Daily Dot:

We hear about distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks all the time. Now, thanks to a new map, we can see how often these attacks occur, who’s getting targeted, and who’s doing the attacks.

The map, called IPViking Live, comes from a company called Norse that specializes in monitoring malicious online activity. The map is not comprehensive; it shows “a small subset” of DDoS attacks aimed at servers that Norse has set up as dummy targets. These “honeypots” collect information about the automated attacks that stream in from countries like China, Thailand, and Russia. Hovering over a location will show you attacks originating from that site.

Mesmerizing. And a little scary.

Super Vancouver:

Taking your $3,000 Canon 5D camera, mounting it on a tripod and waiting until 10:00 pm to film the Celebration of Lights fireworks now seems rather basic compared to the effort put into this clip.

The team behind the Youtube video titled “Sparks: A Honda Celebration of Light Story” took the time to create a story, shoot at multiple Metro Vancouver locations and artfully edit together the video perfectly.

I have lived in Vancouver for many years and have seen a lot of videos – Vancouver is the most beautiful city in North America and gets filmed a lot – and this is, without a doubt, one of the top 5 best I’ve ever seen.

Macworld:

Good backups are essential for every Mac user. Tools such as Apple’s Time Machine, included as part of OS X, make it easy to store multiple versions of every file from your computer on an external drive or an AirPort Time Capsule. And if you want the security of off-site backups without having to physically move drives around, an online backup provider such as CrashPlan is a good option.

But while both these forms of backup serve important purposes, I also recommend maintaining a clone (also known as a bootable duplicate)—a complete, identical copy of your startup volume, stored on an external drive in such a way that you can boot your Mac from it if necessary.

I’ve always recommended multiple backups. Using these apps will make the process relatively easy.

The Verge:

There are countless tablets available for purchase today, and we’ve surveyed all of the models you might come across in your local electronics store or on Amazon’s virtual shelves. It’s almost a tie for first place, but not quite.

Obviously, this doesn’t surprise anyone at The Loop but take a look at The Verge’s third choice. Their description of the Asus Nexus 7 doesn’t seem to warrant its score.

Chicago Sun-Times:

This past week my husband and I took the Live the Wage challenge in solidarity with hard-working families who are trying to make ends meet on a minimum wage salary. Our allotment was $77 each for the week to cover all food, transportation and other expenses excluding housing, insurance, and support for dependent children (which I don’t have). It didn’t take us long to realize that $7.25 an hour is not enough to live on. We didn’t quite make it.

To anyone who thinks this challenge is just a gimmick, I say “Try it.”

As someone who has lived at this level his entire life, I can vouch for the fact that it ain’t easy.

Gizmodo:

Times Square is one big, busy machine. Powered by American ingenuity and more than a few megawatts of electricity, these six square blocks stay bright 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ve seen Times Square in movies and on TV a million times.

A lot of you have probably seen it in real life, teeming with chaos and glowing with capitalism. But how exactly does all that work? The shops and restaurants are one thing, but what exactly makes Times Square such a functional, perpetual spectacle?

The amount of technology, both digital and analog, involved in putting on the “show” that is Times Square is mind boggling. Even more so in Tokyo’s Ginza District.

NFL:

NFL Now delivers a personalized video stream of your favorite NFL teams, players and coaches right to your iPad or iPhone. Get exclusive interviews and stories about your team, breaking news on your fantasy players, and unlimited access to your favorites in the NFL Films Archives.

The unlimited access to the NFL Films Archives would be pretty cool but what made me sign up instantly was “Live stream of NFL RedZone on Sunday afternoon”. You’re not a true football junkie until you’ve sat in front of your TV for nine hours straight watching the NFL RedZone non-stop.

Macworld:

When you look at an Apple ad, it makes an effort to include women. Apple and its employees talk to us like human beings, and not girls who know nothing about technology. It’s important to me, and it’s why Apple has my business and (I suspect) the business of countless other women.

But it’s very hard for me to reconcile this consumer-facing Apple with the development company that put no women on stage this year for either the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference keynote or the more-technical State of the Union. It’s difficult to connect this Apple I know and trust with the endless sea of white, male faces I saw at Yerba Buena Gardens during this year’s WWDC Bash. Women buy Apple products. We develop on Apple hardware. But we’re still not yet well-represented in Apple’s developer community.

It’s a shame this issue keeps coming up but there’s a reason why it does. Outside of “The Usual Suspects”, other groups, races, genders, etc., simply aren’t well represented in Tech. Some will be annoyed by this piece but it serves as a reminder that we still have a long way to go.

TUAW:

Who was not a happy camper when Foursquare suddenly decided to take their self-named app, rip the fun part — check-ins — out of the app, and put it into a new app named Swarm? Me, that’s who.

It really torqued me off that an app that I had enjoyed for years was suddenly breaking into two apps. Hell, that’s almost as bad as what Facebook did, forcing users to load another app (Facebook Messenger) to do something they’d always been able to do from within the iOS Facebook app. Well, the new Foursquare app, AKA version 8.0, arrived today, so I decided to take a hit for the team and install it.

I’ve never been a Foursquare user (I have no friends I want to track and vice versa) so, while I’ve heard a lot written about this subject, I have no personal experience. How about you? Has Foursquare made things better or worse for you?

Vox:

Slater had traveled to Indonesia to do a wildlife shoot. While he was there, he left one of his cameras unattended, and a crested black macaque monkey began playing with it. She took dozens of photos, most of which were blurry shots of the ground or the sky. But the photos included this crystal-clear selfie.

Slater says he owns the copyright to the photograph and asked Wikimedia to take it down. In its first-ever transparency report, the Wikimedia Foundation says it refused because it doesn’t believe Slater owns the copyright.

On one level, this is a funny story but, as a photographer, it’s very interesting to me. We’ve usually said that whoever actually took the photo owns the copyright. But what if the “photographer” isn’t human?

Sam Sung:

I came across one of my old business cards the other day when it fell out of a book.

So, with a view to raising money for a very deserving charity, I’m auctioning the only “Apple Sam Sung” business card I have left and I’m going to donate ALL of the proceeds [minus eBay fees] to Children’s Wish, BC & Yukon – a not-for-profit that grants wishes to sick children.

You may remember the funny story a while back of the Apple employee named “Sam Sung”. He no longer works at Apple Retail but is auctioning off some of his Apple employee gear for a (local to me) good charity.

CNET:

Apple and Samsung announced late Tuesday that they have agreed to settle all lawsuits filed against each other outside the United States but said patent lawsuits filed in the US would be unaffected by the deal.

“Samsung and Apple have agreed to drop all litigation between the two companies outside the United States. This agreement does not involve any licensing arrangements, and the companies are continuing to pursue the existing cases in U.S. courts,” the companies said in a statement.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be future lawsuits.

Re/code:

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs loved to walk around his neighborhood in Palo Alto, California. And after his pride and joy, the iPhone, was born, he naturally took it along with him on walks. The first iPhone had a lousy, sluggish, cellular-data network, but it also had a much faster data option: Wi-Fi. It even had a feature (still present, but much less touted) that popped up a list of nearby Wi-Fi networks on the screen, so you could always find one in range.

But, he once told me, there was a big problem with that technique, one that he wanted to fix: Most of the Wi-Fi networks that popped up on his screen couldn’t be used, because they were secured with passwords. Jobs said he understood the need for security, but he was determined to figure out a way to make free, safe, Wi-Fi sharing from homes and small local businesses not only possible, but common.

Interesting idea. Would you open your home WiFi if it could be configured easily and in the way described in this article?

The Daily Dot:

The government is planning to issue a proposal that could ban people on flights from either sending or receiving voice calls on their mobile devices—using those devices for non-voice activities, such as playing online games or tweeting about the crying baby in the back row, would likely still be allowed.

To answer the question posed in the headline: Hell yes.

Flying is already a horrible process. Let’s not make it worse by being forced to listen to one side of a conversation for hours on end while trapped in an uncomfortable seat inside a metal tube.

Jalopnik:

You never really get a good night’s sleep in jail. In the middle of my second night inside, I woke up on the uncomfortable plastic mat in my cell, my neck and back aching. I looked down at my orange jail scrubs and up at the buzzing fluorescent light and thought, “I am here because I drove too fast in a Camaro ZL1.”

Three days in jail for speeding? Yikes. That’s harsh. I’ve driven my motorcycle on some of the Shenandoah Valley roads the writer describes and I know I was speeding for at least some of the time (OK…most of the time). I guess I got lucky but warning issued – don’t speed in Virginia.

Monday Note:

When Apple announced its 64-bit A7 processor, I dismissed the speculation that this could lead to a switch away from Intel chips for the Macintosh line for a homegrown “desktop-class” chip. I might have been wrong.

I don’t know enough about this end of the industry but it’s hard to argue with Gassee’s line of “Secondly, the Mac line is suspended, literally, by the late delivery of Intel’s Broadwell x86 processors.” The “end of MacIntel” is certainly a possibility to be on the look out for.

Metropolis:

Farmer N’Da Alphonse grows cacao and has never seen the finished product.

“To be honest I do not know what they make of my beans,” says farmer N’Da Alphonse. “I’ve heard they’re used as flavoring in cooking, but I’ve never seen it. I do not even know if it’s true.”

We take chocolate for granted and most of us probably can’t remember our first taste of it. Imagine being one of these cacao farmers and tasting it for the very first time.

Engadget:

Hitchbot, the yellow glove- and Wellies-wearing robot, has started bumming rides across Canada, and by the looks of it, its hosts are having a blast ferrying it to its next drop-off point.

The machine with a perpetual LED smile began its journey in Halifax, and it’ll travel 4,000 miles until it reaches Victoria, British Columbia. People who pick up Hitchbot are pointed to a website where they can find instructions on how to handle it and where to drop it off. On the way, Hitchbot chats with its host, thanks to its speech recognition capability, or chatters away on its own in case its tablet-and-Arduino brain can’t parse what its companion’s saying. It also takes pictures every 30 minutes or so to send back to headquarters and upload to its social media accounts.

What a wonderfully odd experiment. I’m definitely following @hitchBOT on Twitter.

The New York Times:

A vaguely defined ecosystem seems to exist within the community, with subspecies divided by costume type: The Disney, Pixar and “Sesame Street” characters gravitate toward one another, and the superheroes hang out with other superheroes.

The cartoons, superheroes and other assorted characters are a bizarre, fascinating yet annoying as hell part of what Times Square has become.

FiveThirtyEight:

I analyzed the data to find out exactly what Ross, who died in 1995, painted for more than a decade on TV. The top-line results are to be expected — wouldn’t you know, he did paint a bunch of mountains, trees and lakes! — but then I put some numbers to Ross’s classic figures of speech. He didn’t paint oaks or spruces, he painted “happy trees.” He favored “almighty mountains” to peaks. Once he’d painted one tree, he didn’t paint another — he painted a “friend.”

I can’t paint a straight line with a ruler but watching Ross was absolutely mesmerizing. This analysis is interesting from a numbers point of view but it doesn’t capture or explain the wonderful presentation style Ross had.

Elia Freedman:

Let’s say that together now: the dearth of many viable iOS indie dev businesses is not Apple’s problem.

It’s ours.

Whether we like it or not, the game has changed. Trials are out. They’ve been out for six years now and we have no idea if they are ever coming back. Upgrades are out, too. Again, we have no idea if they will ever come back. Ask yourself, do you really want to sit here and wait another 10 months to find out if we will get trials and upgrades, and then wait another three months after that to see it available? Hell, no. I need to make a living now.

It’s time for us to adapt.

We’ve seen quite a bit of writing regarding this issue over the past week. I’m just a user so I have no idea of the issues involved but it is good to hear from another side of the equation.

The Roosevelts:

It is being reported that Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx has agreed to portray Mike Tyson in an upcoming biopic that is written by Hollywood bad-ass Terence Winter.

There is no way a paring of Terence Winter and the fascinating story of Mike Tyson couldn’t be good so enjoy the following super cut compilation to show how vicious Mike Tyson really was in his prime.

I was a boxing fan during Tyson’s prime and for all of his failings, he was an absolute beast in the boxing ring. The sport is justifiably vilified now but this super cut might help to explain why seemingly rational, mostly non-violent people like myself loved to watch him turn people’s brains off.

Colossal:

To commemorate the centennial of Britain’s involvement in the First World War, ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper conceived of a staggering installation of ceramic poppies planted in the famous dry moat around the Tower of London. Titled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” the final work will consist of 888,246 red ceramic flowers—each representing a British or Colonial military fatality—that flow through grounds around the tower.

Volunteers began placing the poppies several weeks ago and the process will continue through the summer until a final flower is symbolically planted on November 11th.

The poppy flower is very symbolic to me as a Canadian and the proud son of a Canadian Navy veteran. I’d love to be able to see this installation in London.

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. won preliminary approval of a settlement in which it could pay $450 million to resolve claims by U.S. states and consumers that it led a conspiracy to fix prices on electronic books.U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan said today that there’s “probable cause to find that the proposed settlement agreement is within the range of those that may be approved as fair and reasonable.”

I wonder if Amazon is rubbing their hands in glee?

Apple:

Today we are excited to officially welcome Beats Music and Beats Electronics to the Apple family. Music has always held a special place in our hearts, and we’re thrilled to join forces with a group of people who love it as much as we do. Beats cofounders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre have created beautiful products that have helped millions of people deepen their connection to music. We’re delighted to be working with the team to elevate that experience even further.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this goes.

Priceonomics:

The rarity and temporality of truffles have made them — at €4,400 to €11,000 per pound for Italy’s prized white truffles — the most expensive food in the world. In 2007, a Macau casino owner set a record by paying $330,000 for a 3.3 pound truffle unearthed in Tuscany.

The combination of these two trends — the desire for a convenient, ever-ready supply of an ingredient and a hunger for the traditional, the rare, and “real food” — led to what would seem to be a remarkably successful scam on foodie culture: truffle oil.

While in Italy, I had truffle very sparingly sprinkled over pasta. Sublime.

FiveThirtyEight:

In the long and varied history of sports heroes — from Pheidippides to Johnny Football — none has signed his name more often, nor more energetically and whimsically, than Pete Rose. Signing for dollars has been at the core of Rose’s livelihood, and lifeblood, since he was banned from baseball 25 years ago.

For years now he has appeared four days a week, in five-hour shifts, at a memorabilia shop in a Las Vegas mall. The crowds don’t swarm, but they do come, steadily. An autographed ball costs $99, a bat $200, a jersey $40. Items are also bundled and sold in packages. It’s not unusual for Rose to move more than $10,000 worth of merchandise in a day.

Regardless of your feelings about Rose, his story, in particular the last 25 years, has been a fascinating one.