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Zakk is the reason I picked up the guitar again after a few years away from playing. He is an incredible guitarist—acoustic and electric— and having met him a number of times, he is a great person. I learned how to play almost every song he released, just so I could see how he did chord progressions and timing.

When I lived in the States, I was appalled at the ridiculously huge number of robocalls I got on a regular basis. It’s getting just as bad here in Canada. I hope these companies can band together to find an effective solution to this problem.

I’m looking forward to seeing this movie about these amazing women. The trailer looks good.

I’m one of those beer snobs. I’ve never had a “Lite” beer that was worth the price.

This has been in the tea leaves for a while. Simmons has a few more details about the shutdown of the app here.

While Tim Cook has said the company is looking to make major acquisitions, on the face of it, buying Lyft doesn’t seem to make sense, given their investment in Didi Chuxing. More than likely, any talent or technology they would get from a Lyft purchase is already available to them through Didi.

LOL!

Pandora will be streaming Metallica’s concert from U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis at 9:00 pm CT time tonight.

P.S. WTF Apple? Time to pay attention to some music other than Pop or Rap.

The launch isn’t until 2018, but it’s good that people are working on a standard now.

When I watched the race live, I was yelling at my TV, “He pushed him out of the way!” When I heard later Dunfee had been awarded the bronze, I cheered. Now that Dunfee has had his belatedly given Bronze taken away, I’m amazed. I honestly don’t think I would have reacted as magnanimously or with as much class as Dunfee has over this.

On August 2nd, Microsoft released the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 and when the bits arrived on computers around the globe, it brought with it new features and also broke webcams for millions of consumers. If your webcam has stopped functioning since the release of the Anniversary update, you are not alone but the good news is a fix is coming, hopefully in September.

September? WTF?!

I always regretted not getting one of these.

“The need to place cameras on hanging truss over the field of play in venues with no catwalks or roof access led us to working with several companies to find a way hang a camera and then be able to pan, tilt, focus and transmit images in real-time,” said David Phillip, a photographer for The Associated Press who set up the AP’s robotic and remote cameras for the 2016 Olympics. “The process is on-going as we continue to work on improving the performance and design.”

There has been some outstanding images and video from the Olympics.

Pandora has the best music algorithm in the business—the choice of the next song is almost always spot on. The app is easy to use and the service always works. I’m a paying subscriber of Pandora and I can wait for the on-demand service to hit. I’ll definitely be subscribing to that.

The Hall is also inducting documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, 20th century photographer Ernst Haas, Photoshop co-creators John and Thomas Knoll, photographer Annie Leibovitz, digital printing pioneer Graham Nash, and photographer Sebastião Salgado.

More than 30 major technology companies are joining the U.S. government to crack down on automated, prerecorded telephone calls that regulators have labeled a “scourge.”

Yes, please. I don’t know much about the technology with robocalls or how advanced it is. I’m just wondering if this is going to be a whack-a-mole situation.

iOS 10 beta 7 was released today. I haven’t seen any of the other operating system updates yet. If you have a previous beta version installed, just go to Settings > General > Software Update to download the new version.

Thanks to Igloo for sponsoring The Loop this week. Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually like. It’s 100% cloud-based, so you’ll always have the latest version and it can be accessed from any device, anywhere. It’s time to simplify work and keep people more connected than ever before.

This is going to be a bittersweet concert. From all indications, Downie, the Tragically Hip’s lead singer and soul of the band, is putting on amazing performances on his last tour.

Travis Kalanick has to get Uber’s bet on self-driving cars right.

“It starts with understanding that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous,” he told Business Insider in an interview.

“So if that’s happening, what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.”

As much as I may not like autonomous cars, from a business perspective, it’s hard to argue with his reasoning.

The source of the delay is that current cellular chips consume too much battery life, reducing the product’s effectiveness and limiting user appeal, according to three of the people. Apple has begun studying lower-power cellular data chips for future smartwatch generations.

This is an incredibly difficult problem, but anything that negatively affects battery life will be a non-starter for a lot of users. Most days, I have plenty of battery life remaining when I go to bed, but I wouldn’t want to be in a situation where I was running out of power early in the day.

Last year we began testing a quality filter setting and we’re now rolling out a feature for everyone. When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.

Twitter certainly has a lot of work to do, but anything that can help my feed is welcome.

After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.

The partnership will allow the Swedish-based carmaker, owned by China’s Geely, and ride-hailing service Uber to pool resources into initially developing the autonomous driving capabilities of its flagship XC90 SUV model. The investment will be shared roughly equally by the two companies.

I don’t think I’d ever want a fully autonomous car, but if we’re talking about driver-assisted technologies, I trust Volvo and Mercedes.

Many of us are understandably squeamish about cadavers but the story of how much good we can do after our death is a good one to know. One of my favorite books is “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” (affiliate link) by Mary Roach.

For me, this has been the best story of the 2016 Olympics.

This looks to be a nice beginner camera as long as you don’t need/want 4K recording or wifi connectivity (which is still a sore spot for me).

We Canadians are always surprised to hear that Americans don’t get time off to vote. In Canada, your employer must give you four hours off to go to the polls.

The opening photo of this long article is fantastic. I saw David many years ago in Florence and was absolutely captivated by the statue.

It’s great they made the video available.