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Mark Cuban is frequently painted as provocative and adversarial. He’s a big personality, but he’s also smart and savvy. Cuban is also one of the more outspoken critics of net neutrality, laying out his arguments in an interview with the Washington Post.

Apple continues its string of iPhone commercials that feature voice work by Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake.

Pad and Quill, a Minneapolis based company, began as an idea on a napkin in 2010. Starting with 4 prototypes, a barter to paint our web designers deck and a Paypal account to track orders, Brian and Kari began shipping cases from their basement and since they have grown to a business selling tens of thousands of unique hand crafted products a year.

Initially riding the Apple iOS wave, Brian and Kari (Mr and Mrs PQ) sought to bring to market iPhone and iPad cases crafted from organic materials such as leather, Baltic birch wood and buckram linen book cloth. Over time, the celebration of the craftsman, the accentuation of natural beauty and the delight of their customers solidified as the core values of the company, driving the creation of an expanded line of iPhone cases, iPad cases, sleeves, and tech bags.

With each product being constructed by hand, by craftsmen and women skilled in the century old trades of woodworking, bookbinding, and leather craft every customer receives a product that was essentially made for them. While they’ve come a long way from passing packages to the mail guy through their basement window, both Brian and his wife Kari enjoy the day to day interactions with their customers and dreaming up new ideas for future hand crafted products.

Where the reporter makes the Stupid Statement of the Day: “Let’s see how the cameras compare!” Here’s a little hint – they don’t. They can’t. Not even remotely. Stop trying to force the comparison.

He does offer a couple of good tips on proper shooting though. So it’s not an entirely worthless video.

Washington Post:

Researchers coated subjects’ hands with Lactobacillus, a harmless bacteria that you don’t typically come across in a public bathroom. The idea was to mimic hands that hadn’t been washed properly. After drying hands, researchers went in and conducted 120 air-sampling tests. They found that Lactobacillus counts in the air were 4½ times higher near high-powered jet dryers than around warm-air dryers. And bacteria counts were 27 times higher near warm-air dryers than when subjects used paper towels.

Ok, that’s it. I’m simply not going to use public washrooms any more.

Handbrake:

HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.

Handbrake has been my go to video converting app for years.

Medium:

Cyberspace may be ancient history for Gibson, but how our future unrolls before us has once again captured his attention. After sticking fairly close to the present for his last half-dozen novels, The Peripheral is Gibson’s most wide open and far-ranging adventure in decades. Multiple futures, near and far, collide. Characters zip back and forth in time, conspiracy theories come true, and an apocalypse unfolds in slow motion, with all the inexorability of a slowly rising tide.

I’ve been a hug fan of Gibson’s since I first read Neuromancer as a kid. It’s is still the first and only book that blew my mind so much that, when I read in pretty much one sitting, I immediately turned back to page one and started reading it again.

New York Times:

Those who saw Odell Beckham Jr.’s acrobatic catch live on Sunday night at MetLife Stadium probably could not fully appreciate it in real time. Those who saw it on video — millions, once the awe spread on social media — were dazzled by his seemingly impossible body control. And those who saw still photographs of the catch might have wondered, how did the photographer capture that?

Jeffrey Furticella, a picture editor on the Sports desk at The New York Times, reached out to some of the photographers who shot the catch on Sunday night.

As a photographer, I always love to read the stories behind the images.

This world record jump is not only not what you’d expect, it’s also bat-poop crazy.

Following public outcry, Mattel pulled it’s computer engineer Barbie book. What followed next is a lot of fun.

Do you know the difference between continually and continuous? When to use I/me, who/whom? How about the difference between everyday and every day? A good cheat sheet to bookmark for later retrieval.

This is the season of food drives. The cold weather and holidays heighten the demand for donations of all sorts to local food banks. This fantastic piece digs into food bank donations, highlighting the most useful items and those that won’t survive the trip through drop off, storage, packing, and delivery.

Worth a read and, if you please, worth passing along to your friends and family.

The next big thing just blinked.

Apple on Sunday said it would mark World AIDS Day 2014 by donating a portion of sales at Apple’s retail and online stores around the world on two of the biggest shopping days of the year—Friday, November 28 (Black Friday) and Monday, December 1. […]

My sincere thanks to FoundSounds for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.FoundSounds is a unique new mobile app blurring the line between a social network and a collaborative art project. The premise is simple: if you find a sound you like, record it and share it with the world. Recordings are geotagged, and you can browse them by scrolling through a timeline or exploring a map. You can also construct sound collages that create intriguing sonic geographies. If enough sounds have been recorded in your area, consider taking a sound walk, which allows you to listen to recordings made near you. Walking past a concert venue would allow you to hear previous performances from that location, while passing by a new building would trigger the sounds of its construction. The vision of FoundSounds is to create a space where people can listen to sounds they might not normally hear. FoundSounds costs $0.99, the same as the price of a song on iTunes. FoundSounds is available on the iOS app store now.

The biggest change for some of you, however, will be that we have decided to remove the commenting function from the site. We thought about this decision long and hard, since we do value reader opinion. But we concluded that, as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.

I’ll admit, I’ve considered this too.

A draft motion seen by the Financial Times says that “unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services” should be considered as a potential solution to Google’s dominance. It has the backing of the parliament’s two main political blocs, the European People’s Party and the Socialists.

Wow.

Apparently, the new iPhones can do it right out of the box.

Dan Goodin for Ars Technica:

As already alluded, the threat stems from the use of the Android clipboard, which acts as a temporary cache for text that is being copied and pasted, either within the same app or from one app to another. Android has no official programming interface that secures the clipboard. By design, its contents are available to any app installed on the phone, from the highest privileged banking app to one with no privileges at all.

Android wins.

Like most things on the Web, Dropcaps have been done poorly over the years, but perhaps a new CSS property will help.

But for type lovers, WatchKit contained a nice little surprise: a folder containing 23 different variations of the Apple Watch system font, the first one Apple has designed in-house in almost 20 years. Even better, that typeface finally has a name: San Francisco.

I really like the typeface.

Boston Globe:

More than 6 feet of lake-effect snow was dumped in the Buffalo, N.Y., area over the last few days with reports of more on the way. Storms closed a 100-mile plus section of the New York State Thruway, and the US National Guard has been called in to help dig out.

Some amazing photos included in this story. Being from Canada, I’ve experienced these kinds of snow falls when I was a kid – it was a lot of fun then but as an adult, I’m glad I don’t live somewhere I’d have to deal with this on a regular basis.

Wired:

There’s no way to anticipate the emotional impact of leaving your home planet. You look down at Earth and realize: You’re not on it. It’s breathtaking. It’s surreal. It’s a “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto” kind of feeling. But I’ve spent a total of 55 days in space, over the course of five missions for NASA, and I’ve learned that being out there isn’t just a series of breathtaking moments. It’s a mix of the transcendently magical and the deeply prosaic. It can be crowded, noisy, and occasionally uncomfortable. Space travel—at least the way we do it today—isn’t glamorous. But you can’t beat the view!

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Hell, I still do.

Tina Roth Eisenberg finds some really interesting things.

From Intel’s site:

The Code For Good Campaign will help support Code.org, CodeClub, and GirlsWhoCode globally to educate, inspire, and equip the next generation of developers with the computing skills they need to pursue 21st century opportunities.

This kind of stuff is amazing and unacceptable.

I’ve seen a lot of people misunderstand what a prototype is. I should send this link to them.

Yesterday, John Gruber posted an article on which mobile devices Daring Fireball users were viewing his site with. I thought it was very interesting—interesting enough to take a look at what devices The Loop readers were using. Here’s what I found in Google Analytics: […]

Interesting article from Jacob Gube.

The report notes that Beats will continue to be a paid service and will likely be rebranded under the iTunes umbrella. The move could come alongside the launch of the Apple Watch, with users able to push Beats music from their iPhones to the wearable device.

This makes perfect sense to me.