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The Washington Post:

There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate.

Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources.

I’ve always hated most salads. I knew it was a waste of chewing. While I love a good Greek Salad, any salad that consists mainly of variations on lettuce is unpalatable to me. This article helps justify my non-eating of that useless rabbit food.

Petapixel:

Back in July, Cafe Art handed out 100 Fujifilm disposable cameras to homeless people in London, connected them to photography training with the Royal Photographic Society, and asked them to shoot photos with the theme “My London.”

80 of the cameras were returned, and over 2,500 photos were developed. 20 photos were then chosen by a selection panel consisting of representatives from Fujifilm, Amateur Photographer, The London Photo Festival, Christie’s and Homeless Link. Those photos were then presented to the public, which submitted over 2,400 votes earlier this month to select the images for an upcoming calendar.

Here are the 12 photos that made the cut.

There are some lovely photos included. My only quibble is the Cafe Art site doesn’t explain how the photos were edited and by whom.

New data published by Wristly on Tuesday shows that 55% of people currently subscribed to Apple Music will purchase the service once their trial expires. However, the conversion rate could get even better for Apple.

“A 55% conversion rate would already be a big win for Apple, but if we additionally consider that a portion of the “undecided” will also convert to a paid subscription, then the total conversion rate from trial to purchase could rise as high as 65%-70% — which would be an astounding result!,” wrote Bernard Desarnauts, co-founder of Wristly.

The report also notes that 17% of people surveyed are not interested in streaming services at all, and 11% are satisfied with a competing product, like Spotify. A total of 71% of the people survey started a free trial of Apple Music.

Apple said earlier this month that Apple Music has 11 million trial members, which isn’t a bad number for a new service, but there is quite a bit of room for growth, given the amount of iOS devices out there.

I see what you did there!

Andy Ihnatko:

Before I begin what’s going to be a multi-part, in-depth Apple Watch review, I thought it’d be valuable to write down all of the fundamental observations that I believe to be true of all wearables, as of August 2015.

In his usual long-winded but wonderfully entertaining style, Andy Ihnatko makes some great points of what smartwatches need in order for them to be successful.

Everyone posts “A week with [insert device here],” but Lee Peterson spent a week without the Apple Watch and missed it. I’ve become dependent on my watch now and wouldn’t want to go a week or a day without it.

Apple:

Apple has determined that, in a small percentage of iPhone 6 Plus devices, the iSight camera has a component that may fail causing your photos to look blurry. The affected units fall into a limited serial number range and were sold primarily between September 2014 and January 2015.

If your iPhone 6 Plus is producing blurry photos and falls into the eligible serial number range, Apple will replace your device’s iSight camera, free of charge.

If you have an iPhone 6 Plus, it doesn’t hurt to enter you serial number to check to make sure your iPhone isn’t on the list of affected phones. If it isn’t and you’re still taking blurry photos, you might want to take a photography class.

Apple Inc’s China business experienced “strong growth” in July and August, Chief Executive Tim Cook told CNBC on Monday, seeking to assuage investor concerns over the company’s prospects in a market considered critical for its growth.

IPhone activations in China had accelerated over the past few weeks and the App Store in China had its best performance of the year over the past two weeks, Cook told CNBC in an emailed response to questions about Apple’s business in China.

Considering everything that’s been happening in the stock market, it was important that Cook did this. Apple has consistently bucked the trend in selling its products and this appears to be no different.

BBC:

Some words refer to things Americans don’t seem to have: toque for a kind of fitted knitted hat; poutine, Nanaimo bars, and butter tarts for three of Canada’s great culinary gifts to the world if the world would but accept them; Caesar for a bloody Mary made with clamato juice (tomato plus clam).

These Canadianisms stand as evidence of the difference between Canadian and American culture. It is very important for Canadians to maintain that difference, even if people from Vancouver sound more like people from San Francisco than people from San Francisco sound like people from San Antonio.

Until I moved to the US, I had no idea that Butter Tarts were Canadian. If you get a chance, try them. They are delicious.

The Next Web:

The next version of iOS comes with a major new feature called ‘content blockers’ which will allow users to install apps that block trackers, advertisements and other unwanted content for the first time.

Much has been written about the impending threat of ad blocking on iOS — it’s the first time blocking mobile advertisements en masse will be possible and publishers may face an existential threat to their revenue streams.

I spent the weekend with my new found family in Ontario and surfing my usual web sites on iOS was a torturous process. Most of the time, I was on 3G or – gasp! – Edge and some popular web pages would take several minutes to load enough to be readable. It’s going to be interesting how this whole ad blocking things shakes out but, if the examples included in the story are any indication, it’s going to be great for users in some ways.

This is a bit of a wild ride. A colleague of ours died about a week ago, and this hit me right in the middle of processing all that.

Don’t read this if you are not in a solid place. But it did help me connect some dots.

Thanks to MiStand+ for sponsoring The Loop this week. MiStand+ your tablet, any angle. Innovative, multi-axis adjustable stand for use with any tablet.

Kill it. Just kill it. Put it out of our misery.

The CSS clip-path property is one of the most underused and yet most interesting properties in CSS. It can be used in conjunction with CSS Shapes to create interesting layouts, and can be taken to the extreme to create some incredibly impressive layouts and animations like the Species in Pieces project.

TidBITS:

The folks over at Tech Insider have produced a video that will help you see what your signal strength is numerically, for troubleshooting purposes. But for some reason, they didn’t also write up the instructions for those who prefer reading. So if you fall in that camp, here’s how to see your iPhone’s precise signal strength.

Great little tip to help troubleshoot signal strength issues.

Wired:

“All I’ve ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture.” It sounds almost modest, the way he says it. Don’t be fooled. Some music executives want to help talented artists reach their natural audience, no matter how small. Iovine is not among them. He’s after the kind of massive flash points that unite populations around the world and change not just what they listen to but how they dress and move and behave and think and live. “He finds one great idea, gets rid of everything else, and chases it to the end of the earth until it’s everywhere,” says Luke Wood, president of Beats Electronics.

By his count, Iovine has pulled this off four times over the past couple of decades by introducing the world to Snoop Dogg, Tupac, and Chronic-era Dr. Dre, shepherding the careers of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, giving Eminem his start, and creating Beats, the hardware company that turned headphones into a fashion accessory and today accounts for 34 percent of US stereo headphone sales.

Fascinating piece on the two men. Regardless of what you think of Iovine’s performance at the Apple Music launch or of Dr. Dre’s music, these two are extremely powerful behind the scenes players in the music business. Whether it can be saved by them alone is another matter.

Apple:

Apple Music Festival is a full-volume celebration of music. It’s live from London and broadcast to every corner of the globe. This year, we return to London’s Roundhouse for 10 incredible nights.

This is always an incredible show and this year, Apple will tie in various aspects of the Apple Music service to make it an even bigger and better event with a list of headliners that includes Pharrell Williams, One Direction, Florence + The Machine and Disclosure.

Duncan Davidson:

It sneaks in like an invited guest to the party, not even noticed it at first. And then, slowly but surely, it grows inside of you and sows its seeds of destruction. Even when it’s something that you’ve dealt with a dozen times, it still manages to work its way in and shift the baseline of your entire reality without you noticing until the very lenses that you look at the world has been corrupted into a dim grey place.

By the time you can honestly sort out that you might be in deep, the very perception of that observation is distorted. And that affects your reaction to it, often tempering that reaction with an almost uncontrollable apathy. You know you want help, but the simple act of asking seems too much to bear.

Rob Richman and I talked about our depression and ways we coped with it. Sadly, it got the better of him. RIP, Rob.

Washington Post:

The world is expected to add another billion people within the next 15 years, bringing the total global population from 7.3 billion in mid-2015 to 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to new estimates from the UN.

Currently, 60 percent of the global population lives in Asia, 16 percent in Africa, 10 percent in Europe, 9 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and only 5 percent in North America and Oceania. China and India are the largest countries in the world, together making up almost 40 percent of the world population.

But those numbers won’t stay that way for long.

None of us will be around to see it but the trends are obviously happening now and will still impact the world in 25-50 years. Whether the impact will be positive or not remains to be seen.

Okay, now you’ve gone too far South Korea.

MiStand+ your tablet, any angle. Innovative, multi-axis adjustable stand for use with any tablet.

A bit of devastating news.

iMore:

The company has just posted three new TV commercials for Apple Music, each one focusing on using the service to discover new artists.

This was one of the promises Apple made when they first announced Apple Music. But I don’t know that these ads are compelling enough to make someone who is not a subscriber become one.

CNET:

Sam Galloway, the University of Auckland student who shot the film, said in the description of his YouTube video that he was on a spear-fishing trip in waters off the coast of Little Barrier Island when he and a friend came across the killer whales.

Some of the younger ones were actually quite friendly.

“The larger ones weren’t very interested in us,” Galloway wrote, “but the calves came in for a close look.”

I’m lucky enough to live on the West coast of Canada where Orca spotting is very common this time of year. They are magnificent animals regardless of whether you see them from a boat or the water like these lucky guys did.

Billboard:

The station is a fusion of old-school and futurism that reminds some of college radio, some of the BBC and some of the halcyon early days of FM. At its helm stands Zane Lowe, 41, the effusive, hyper-verbal, New Zealand-born former tastemaker-in-chief for the BBC’s Radio 1, who, as Beats 1’s “special creative and lead anchor,” is charged with programming the station, which so far has been exciting, chaotic, attention-grabbing and unpredictable… apparently just the way his bosses (low-key, retiring people with surnames like Iovine, Reznor and Cue) want it — and so far, so do listeners.

I don’t think it goes as far as reminding me of college radio (after all, my college radio was a freaky mess) but it certainly has opened my ears to artists I hadn’t considered listening to. For all of the problems I and many others have with Apple Music overall, Beats 1 remains a daily listen for me.

Benedict Evans:

None of these are killer apps or ‘use cases’. All of them could be done with your phone. They’re just better with a watch.

This really sums up how I feel about the watch’s UI.

Six additional stainless steel links for wrists that exceed 205mm.

I can say from experience that it’s very easy to add or remove links to the Link Bracelet.

Apple has introduced a new feature for iCloud on the web that allows you to restore deleted items. Not only can you recover files that you’ve deleted, but also restore contacts, calendars, and reminders. This new feature also shows you how long it will be until those items are permanently deleted if you choose not to restore them.

Great feature.

For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots.

As the article notes, it appears to be harmless traffic, but it still shouldn’t happen.

LA Times:

The world’s most popular streaming service revealed on Friday that the world’s most powerful man, President Obama, and his administration have launched an official channel on Spotify, and will be contributing playlists to the service. The president released the contents of his first two playlists on Friday through his @potus Twitter account.

I’ve been listening to these playlists all day. I’d like to think POTUS himself picked these songs but, regardless, there’s some great tunes on them.