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The Internet Archive:

The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software. Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable.

I never had a computer that could play any of these games but I recognize many of the names as classics of the genre.

Pacific Standard:

It’s no secret in the jewelry industry that retail demand for fine jewelry is slipping. As Forbes reports, the demand for gold jewelry has dropped 30 percent since last year, and continues to fall. Even diamond behemoth De Beers had to admit in their 2014 Insight Report that “retailers have faced pressures from a weak economic environment and strong competition from branded luxury goods and experiential categories, as well as the low-price models of e-commerce companies.”

Simply put: There are better things to spend money on, often at better prices, than jewelry.

Interesting premise. While I’m sure there are many contributing factors, I wonder how much the “rise of the machine” has contributed to this decline.

Jim and Shawn talk about Apple’s 2014, Amplitube and guitars!

Sponsored by Audible (Visit the link to get a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership), Squarespace (Use code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off), and Yosemite by Cocoa Conference (Visit the link to learn more about this conference for Apple enthusiasts, designers, and developers! Seating is limited so the sooner you get your tickets, the better).

Sounds great, but…

You have to hate it when the first words of something you expect to be good end in “but.”

Waterstones has admitted that sales of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader had “disappeared” after seeing higher demand for physical books.

The UK’s largest book retailing chain, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the Kindle in its stores, saw sales of physical books rise 5pc in December, at the expense of the popular e-reader.

Kindle sales had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”, Waterstones said.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to explain this shift in sales. While I think it’s good that people are buying physical books, I think it’s way too early to say that e-books are dead.

With seventeen of the most amazing people in the Apple community—some developers, but most not—Yosemite is a conference for the Apple community. Our speakers are some of the best and most-loved writers, designers, philosophers, and developers working in the Apple ecosystem.

I’ll be speaking at CocoaConf’s Yosemite Conference this year. I’m really excited about the line-up of speakers and meeting the attendees. I hope to see you there!

Fast Company:

Introduced with grand ambitions last summer, the Fire Phone is widely seen as a fiasco. Originally priced at $199 and intended as an iPhone competitor, it now sells for 99 cents, and Amazon has taken a $170 million write-down largely attributable to unsold Fire Phone inventory.

Yet Bezos finally answers the question with the kind of reasoning that investors, customers, and pundits have come to expect from him: Amazon is going to pour more resources into its phone. Defending the Fire Phone as a “bold bet,” Bezos argues that it’s “going to take many iterations” and “some number of years” to get it right.

I don’t think the Fire Phone will be around in two years.

Gruber summed up my feelings on the MacBook Air.

Whatever, the reasons, my mind keeps going back to the number — approximately $20 billion dollars of iPhones — roughly 34 percent of Apple’s total sales for the three months ending December 31, 2014. It explains everything about the company, its priorities and why it is starting to show signs of wear and tear across its other product lines.

Om brings up a good point—Apple’s focus is, and has been, on the iPhone for quite a while. Let’s not forget the record Mac sales over that period of time, though. Perhaps it’s the halo effect, but the Mac is doing better than ever.

Update: Om’s original article stated $20 billion, but it’s actually $43 billion.

Swiss watch makers like TAG Heuer, the biggest brand in luxury goods group LVMH’s watch portfolio, had until recently largely dismissed the threat of “smart” gadgets, but LVMH watch chief Jean-Claude Biver says he had changed his mind on the subject.

Not a big surprise.

Matt Richman’s thoughts on the news:

In order to have even a chance of being as feature-rich as Apple Watch, then, TAG’s smartwatch will have to pair with an Android phone. However, TAG wearers aren’t Android users. Rich people buy TAG watches, but rich people don’t buy Android phones.

I agree.

There are very few companies that continue to impress me, but Algoriddim has done it time and again. It’s not only the products, but the attitude in building those products to be great that wins me over. […]

An 86-year-old woman wrote this to her bank manager. Priceless.

Stephen Hackett has a look at a dozen RSS readers for OS X and while the winner is no surprise, it’s a great read.

Huffington Post:

From the great ancient capitals to the modern cities of Asia, the Americas, and beyond, here are the 50 cities you must see during your lifetime.

Out of the 50, I really only want to visit 23 of the listed cities. I’ve been to 11 so far.

Max Piantoni presents an exploration of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the rare Experience CD that accompanied the machine’s release. Including a lengthy and hard to find 1997 interview with Jony Ive.

Max did a nice job with this.

Vox:

We’re getting closer to the point where you can cancel your cable subscription and still continue to enjoy all your favorite cable TV shows. Today at the Consumer Electronic Show, the satellite TV company Dish announced the next step in that direction. Sling TV is a service that lets you watch cable TV channels over the internet.

Crucially, the Sling TV lineup includes ESPN, the nation’s most popular cable channel and a must-have for sports fans. And unlike some other streaming services, you can sign up for it without getting a conventional cable subscription.

Is this of interest to you cordcutters?

Reuters:

At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, mobile-marketing firm TapSense plans to release an Apple Watch ad-buying service. The service will provide a first glimpse of how businesses can serve up ads on the watch, even though the gadget will not be available until later this year.

At issue: the same qualities that render the watch exciting to Madison Avenue, such as the ability to detect customers approaching a store and to zap an ad directly to their wrists, also risk alienating those customers.

Before any one panics and screams about ads on the Apple Watch (oh, too late – they already are), keep in mind this is a “service” being offered to developers to include in their apps and there is no indication that Apple will allow such functionality. And, even if Apple does, I can promise you it will be an entirely opt-in process. Apple is not going to allow developers to push ads at you without your permission.

The history of the PBS NewsHour can be traced back to the Watergate hearings.

Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer covered the 1973 hearings for PBS. In 1975 MacNeil began anchoring The Robert MacNeil Report which soon evolved into the 30-minute MacNeil/Lehrer Report.

Om Malik:

How to find originality in a “networked society” is on my mind, because I have recently come across three individuals who have been original for such a long time. During a conversation for my new art project, Pi.co, Frank Clegg, a US-based bag maker put it best when he said, “If I make something different, then I don’t really have any competition. Either people like what I do, or they don’t like what I do.” Such a simple statement, but so hard to implement, because many find such comfort from hiding in the herd.

This is exactly how I see Apple. They make products that we don’t always know we need—people are going to like them or they won’t. Either way, it’s going to be different.

I’m easily entertained, but I love these.

Jacob Gube covers the six ways to declare colors in CSS.

One app that continued to impress and fascinate me in 2014 was Storehouse. Mark Kawano and his team have done a great job with the service and app.

I hope everyone had a great holiday. The new year is here and it’s time to get back to work. If you would like to get your product or service in front of the good looking, intelligent readers of The Loop, now is your chance to book. I’ve opened up the first two months of 2015 on the sponsorship page. If there’s a week that you would like to book later in the year, just get in touch.

The lifespan of electronics is shrinking and their number is increasing. Most electronics end up in the trash, doing terrible, toxic damage to the environment.

Fortunately, there are a number of efforts to make responsible recycling of your electronics much more possible, if not easier.

Marco Arment:

Apple has completely lost the functional high ground. “It just works” was never completely true, but I don’t think the list of qualifiers and asterisks has ever been longer. We now need to treat Apple’s OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ.

I hate agreeing with Arment but sometimes, he’s bang on. I believe in this case he is. From embarrassing software updates to apps that simply don’t work properly or well – Apple’s poor quality and functionality of the Mail.app being just one of many examples – the assessment that “We don’t need major OS releases every year” is something many of us hope Apple listens and pays attention to.

Bloomberg:

CES, the world’s largest trade show, is far from a hit-making machine. While the technology show is a leading indicator of trends and attracted 160,000 attendees last year, many products debuting at the event take years to get into consumers’ living rooms — if at all. The last time the event had a true stand-alone sensation was when Microsoft debuted the Xbox game console at CES in 2001.

I’ve been to several CES shows and they are a huge, hectic mess. Everyone in the tech media knows “the real show” is the behind the scenes deals made largely in private and in secret. But that isn’t sexy so the media hypes ridiculous products and their own presence at the show as if it actually means something to average consumers. It’s a shame to the show and a disservice to their readers when the media won’t be honest and objective in their assessment of what CES offers.

Thanks to my friend Greg for the link.

Dan Frommer:

From Apple’s financial followers to the culture pages, expect few technology topics to garner as much attention in 2015 as the Apple Watch, which is set to launch “early” in the year.

Why? Because it’s not just a new gadget. Several people, companies, and entire industries are counting on it to be a hit. Without hyperbole, the Apple Watch has the potential to create new billionaires and to change the way people live.

Here are a few reasons—from micro to macro—the Apple Watch is shaping up to be the launch of 2015.

I don’t know about “Year of the Apple Watch” but I do believe it will eventually be a hugely successful category for Apple, much like the “slow burn” of the iPod.

Businessweek:

Would you “scam” an airline’s ticketing policy if it saved $25? $70? $400?

A federal lawsuit is bringing public attention to “hidden city” ticketing, the technique of buying an airline ticket between two cities with a connection but ditching the rest of the trip. Say, for example, you want to fly from Boston to San Francisco but notice that a ticket from Boston to Seattle—with a connection in San Francisco—is cheaper. Once your flight lands in San Francisco, you prance out of the airport at your intended destination, pocketing the savings.

Airlines hate this maneuver—which has been around for decades—and argue that it violates the terms of the sale.

I’m normally not a fan of “scams” but the airlines have screwed us so often and in so many different ways, I’d have no problem using this method to save money.

Tunity: Tunity allows you to hear a muted TV’s audio directly to your mobile device. It acts just like a wireless headset – no need to purchase an expensive set. Scan the TV and let Tunity locate and match the … Continued

Boing Boing:

Marriott is fighting for its right to block personal or mobile Wi-Fi hotspots—and claims that it’s for our own good.

The hotel chain and some others have a petition before the FCC to amend or clarify the rules that cover interference for unlicensed spectrum bands. They hope to gain the right to use network-management tools to quash Wi-Fi networks on their premises that they don’t approve of. In its view, this is necessary to ensure customer security and to protect children.

If Marriott’s petition were to succeed, we’d likely see hotels that charge guests and convention centers that charge exhibitors flipping switches to shut down any Wi-Fi not operated by the venue. The American hotel industry’s trade group is a co-filer of the petition, and Hilton submitted a comment in support: this isn’t just Marriott talking.

I don’t travel often but when I do, I won’t be staying in a Marriott any more.