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Thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Makers of Winclone, the best Mac app for migrating, cloning and backing up your Boot Camp partition. This week Loop readers can use the code “theloop” to get 10% off Winclone 5, just in time to backup Boot Camp before upgrading to El Capitan. If you run Boot Camp in labs or classrooms, Boot Runner 2 from Twocanoes is a time saver for remote scheduling of maintenance reboots and an easy to use OS picker for your users. Check out the video or get the 14-day trial and see how easy Boot Runner makes managing dual boot Macs.

TechInsider:

Tonight — Sunday, Sept. 27 — you can see the first “supermoon” total lunar eclipse in 30 years. The moon will turn red, which is normal for a lunar eclipse, but this rare event will be bigger and brighter than those of the past few decades. That’s because the eclipse will coincide with a supermoon — a “very rare” alignment that won’t happen again until 2033.

Check this map to see if you live where the eclipse will be visible. If you don’t live in a visible region, or a big city with too many tall obstructions or a lot of light pollution, bookmark this page.

We won’t see the full effect here on the West Coast but if you’re lucky enough to be able to get outside and see it clearly, don’t miss it. Otherwise, like so many other things nowadays, you can watch online.

Moon Connection:

Now you can have accurate, attractive Moon and Sun details at your fingertips. View a beautiful real-time image of the current Moon phase, complete with technical data. Quickly see if the Moon is above the horizon on the Lunar Position screen, along with Moon rise and set times and precise Moon position in the sky. If you also want to know Sun rise and set times, look at the Solar Position screen.

Tonight’s total eclipse of the Super Harvest Moon could be spectacular, depending on the weather in your area. Use this free app to figure its position in your night sky.

I’ll be posting more about this camera, but I’ve been using it and it’s so great.

Walk along the bedraggled queue of people, and pillows and discarded bottles of water bore the same bright blue color and were emblazoned with the hashtag #NextIsNew.

“They were given to us by Apple,” a person in queue told International Business Times. A friend of his, however, was a little more savvy, quietly informing him: “No man, it was Samsung, I did a little research.”

What the fuck is wrong with this company? Instead of these types of stunts, why not try to build a better product—that philosophy is the one thing they haven’t copied from Apple.

Ryot:

The film tells the story of one citizen from Jalouzi, one of the largest slums in Haiti, who is determined to bring color to the impoverished area by helping paint the entire town, literally.

Believing that color has the power to transform his community, he’s helping to paint everywhere – on houses, on buses, and the entire hillside. Armed with brushes of bright blues, pastel pinks, and sunshine yellows, he’s helping to mobilize citizens of all ages, determined to turn the grey town into a rainbow full of color to lead the way to a brighter Haiti.

I don’t care much that it was shot on any particular device. But it is a wonderful film full of hope for the future of one of the most impoverished places in the world.

The Wall Street Journal:

Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Eyeo stipulates that they must comply with its “acceptable ads” policy, meaning their ads aren’t too disruptive or intrusive to users. In total, ads from some 700 companies meet the acceptable ads policy, an Eyeo spokesman said.

Eyeo is now reaching out to developers of other ad-blocking tools to cut deals that allow certain ads to pass ads through their filters, too, in exchange for payment.

(Dean) Murphy (who created Crystal, an application to help users block ads on Apple Inc.’s mobile devices) said he has taken Eyeo up on its offer, and plans to implement an option within his app whereby “acceptable” ads will be displayed to users. The feature will be switched on by default, Mr. Murphy said, and he will receive a flat monthly fee from Eyeo in return.

This is a predictable situation and it will only get worse or better depending on your point of view.

Pixelmator for iOS 2.1 update includes support for iOS 9, multitasking on iPad via Split View and Slide Over, 8K resolution support, Open in Place and Save to Photos features, and more.

I love and use Pixelmator on iOS and Mac, and have for years. These guys make great apps.

Flo Gehring made some great wallpapers available for users to download free. I really like the water droplets.

Pew Research:

Test your knowledge of science facts and applications of scientific principles by taking our short 12-question quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with a nationally representative group of 3,278 randomly selected U.S. adults surveyed online and by mail between Aug. 11 and Sept. 3, 2014 as members of the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.When you finish, you will be able to compare your scores with the average American and compare responses across demographic groups.

I got 11 out of 12. I should have aced it if I had only thought a little longer about one of the questions. According to Mental Floss, only 6 percent of Americans aced this basic science survey. How did you do?

CBC:

Mounties from the southern Saskatchewan detachment became a viral hit when they got wind of a weekend party involving local youth and posted about it on Facebook.

They warned the students they could face hefty fines if there were any laws broken, such as underage drinking or littering.

They also said officers from the detachment would show up with chips and salsa.

It turns out they weren’t kidding.

Another in a long line of reasons why I love my country.

I’ve been gone a long time. Is this really the way things are now?

On a bustling street in China’s southern boomtown of Shenzhen, more than 30 stores carrying Apple Inc’s iconic white logos peddle pre-orders for the new iPhone, a gadget that has become a status symbol among many better-off Chinese.

Many of the stores look just like Apple’s signature outlets, right down to the sales staff kitted out in blue T-shirts bearing the company’s white logo and the sample iPads and iWatches displayed on sleek wooden tables.

First, what the fuck is an iWatch? Second, I wonder if there’s anything Apple can, or would, do about this. According to the story, the stores are selling “genuine Apple products.” Interesting problem.

Jim and Dan talk about Dan’s newfound Apple love, the iPhone 6s, Watch OS 2, apps as the future of TV (and the fundamentally changing way we view TV as a medium), the iPad Pro, the Pencil, and ad blocking from the standpoint of an independent content creator.

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Samantha Bielefeld talking about The Verge:

What I would like to see is the author not afraid to bite the hand that feeds, to confront the real issue here…the problem isn’t with there being advertising on the web driven by page impressions. The issue is how awful they look, how invasive they can be (auto-play audio/video, yuck!), their attempts at deceiving your website’s audience, and tracking your every mouse click or tap around the web in order to serve their own needs while sacrificing the privacy of the customers they are seeking to gain.

Great read.

I’ve been asked about ad tracking on The Loop quite a bit since iOS 9 and its content blockers were released. I use The Deck to serve ads on the site, and have for the last few years. Jim Coudal, the owner of The Deck, and I share a philosophy that ads should be unobtrusive and respectful to the reader.

Here is The Deck’s official stance on ad tracking (spoiler: there is none):

Short version. We don’t track our readers in any way or allow any other behind-the-scenes shenanigans. We just serve useful, relevant ads in a simple, unobtrusive way to support independent publishers. Please white-list The Deck when using ad blocking software. Thanks.

We will never share your personal information obtained by tracking, either individually or in aggregate, with advertisers or any one else for one very good reason: we don’t have any.

I understand people are upset with being tracked and having ads all over the sites they want to visit, but that’s not what The Deck or The Loop is about. When you block the sites that do make you angry, remember to white-list the ones that treat you with respect.

Coudal also recently spoke with Fast Company about ad blocking.

Jeffrey Zeldman:

Advertisers don’t want to be ignored, and they are drunk on our data, which is what Google and other large networks are really selling. The ads are almost a by-product; what companies really want to know is what antiperspirant a woman of 25–34 is most likely to purchase after watching House of Cards. Which gets us into issues of privacy and spying and government intrusion and don’t ask.

And in this environment of sites so cluttered with misleading ads they are almost unnavigable, Apple looks heroic, riding to the consumer’s rescue by providing all the content from newspapers without the ads, and by blocking ugly advertising on websites. But if they succeed, will media companies and independent sites survive?

This issue is far from over. We have no idea how this is going to shake out, who will adapt and survive and who will fold. I do believe it is an issue ad publishers have largely brought on themselves. But it’s a shame there is and will continue to be a lot of collateral damage in this so-called Apple vs Google War.

Many people look at the “s” model of the iPhone as a less significant release than the years Apple does a full design change, but that’s just not the case. This year’s iPhone 6s and 6s Plus is full of new features and is probably the strongest “s” model iPhone Apple has ever released. I’ve been using the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus for about a week and a half, having received the devices from Apple two days after the September 9 keynote. […]

Huffington Post:

it really bums me out that The Man In the Machine makes little attempt to portray someone who was, by most accounts, a complex, iconic, but all-too-flawed man who, over the course of his career, could be both inventor and thief, monk and businessman, brat and sage, tyrant and beloved leader, and managed to use those conflicting traits to both change the world and create the most valuable, influential, and admired company on the planet.

Instead, The Man In the Machine is focused largely on the thesis that Jobs was always and only a jerk, that people who enjoy Apple products and admire Jobs are idiots and cult members, and that the computer revolution that was born of Jobs’ vision must inevitably contain the same ugly darkness Gibney feels is Jobs’ defining trait, despite any evidence to the contrary.

This review of the documentary tracks with how I felt about it. Not only was it simply inaccurate in places, it seemed to have its premise in place long before the facts were in evidence. It had Joe Nocera, a journalist who famously wrote “Apple hit pieces” for the New York Times, exclaim he didn’t understand the allure of the iPhone. “It’s just a phone!” That’s like not understanding the sex appeal of a Ferrari because it’s “just” a car. Overall, even though I had high hopes for the movie because of the director’s previous work,I was very disappointed in this documaentary.

Apple Inc. is accelerating efforts to build an electric car, designating it internally as a “committed project” and setting a target ship date for 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.

The go-ahead came after the company spent more than a year investigating the feasibility of an Apple-branded car, including meetings with two groups of government officials in California. Leaders of the project, code-named Titan , have been given permission to triple the 600-person team, the people familiar with the matter said.

This would be such a huge deal. Apple’s designers would undoubtedly come up with something great, and it fits with the company’s commitment to make the world a better place.

I picked up my Apple Watch with watchOS 2 from Apple in the days following the September 9 keynote presentation in San Francisco. I hadn’t installed any of the watch betas, so I was really looking forward to giving the … Continued

After a slight delay last week, Apple has released watchOS 2 to the public. You can download the update by going to the Watch app on your iPhone.

The new York Times:

We’ve chosen some of our best works or collections of works that have appeared since we began offering digital subscriptions in 2011.

While certainly not exhaustive, the list demonstrates the breadth, creativity and impact of The Times.

One of the things the NYT does really well is these long-form, investigative articles. “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer” was a heartbreaking look into the life of a hockey player I was a big fan of during his playing days.

Apple Inc is stepping up aid to the thousands of migrants that are streaming into Europe from war-torn countries, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook told employees in an internal message on Friday.

Thanks to Low for sponsoring The Loop this week. Low is live video texting you can do from anywhere without being overheard. More fun than plain texting. Less awkward than video chat.

Members of Google’s Project Zero vulnerability research team have challenged a key talking point surrounding the security of Google’s Android mobile operating system. To wit, a key exploit mitigation known as address space layout randomization does much less than the company’s overworked public relations people say in blocking attacks targeting critical weaknesses in Android’s stagefright media library.

A solid read from Kirk McElhearn. Sure hope content blockers don’t impact him negatively.

As usual, Federico does a bang up job in this review.

Today, I’m launching my own iOS 9 content blocker, called Peace, to bring peace, quiet, privacy, and — as a nice side benefit — ludicrous speed to iOS web browsing.

I always like the software Marco makes.

Gruber responding to a Nilay Patel tweet:

Perhaps I am being smug. But I see the fact that Daring Fireball’s revenue streams should remain unaffected by Safari content-blocking as affirmation that my choices over the last decade have been correct: that I should put my readers’ interests first, and only publish the sort of ads and sponsorships that I myself would want to be served, even if that means leaving (significant) amounts of money on the table along the way.

Fucking right.