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Ars Technica:

Last week three men filed a class action lawsuit in Northern California District Court alleging that Apple’s 2011 MacBook Pro laptops were defective and that Apple did not take proper steps to compensate customers whose hardware broke.

The lawsuit specifically addresses 15” and 17” MacBook Pros from 2011, which the plaintiffs claim suffered from “random bouts of graphical distortion, system instability, and system failures.” The plaintiffs also assert that the problem is widespread, with an online survey conducted by the plaintiffs receiving over 3,000 responses from 2011 MacBook Pro owners in a single week.

As someone who has one of these affected machines and has already had one logic board failure attributed to it, I’m going to follow this closely.

Bon Appetit:

Think about your usual supermarket routine. Chances are, if your market is designed like the majority in the U.S., you start shopping at the right side of the store and work your way around the outer rim of the supermarket—with occasional forays into certain aisles, but generally sticking to a counterclockwise route till you get to the register.

Now you may wonder, Why do I always choose to go that way?

The answer is, you don’t.

These stories of how we are subtly (and sometimes, not subtly) manipulated in these situations are always fascinating to me. Similar psychology is going on in casinos, too.

Much respect to all the participants of the 2014 World Beard and Mustache Championships. But holy shit, that neck beard is scary as shit.

It’s fascinating to see that people in different parts of the world get things so wrong about their own country.

iMore:

Just as quickly as CurrentC popped into the limelight, questions arose around the companies intentions. Even though I don’t have an invite for CurrentC’s invite-only mobile payments and loyalty rewards system, I decided to take a look. I posted some initial findings on Twitter and a brief summary on iMore, but wanted to do a more in-depth technical post for anybody who was curious.

Hard to believe this is going to actually go anywhere even if it does get released as expected next year.

This is one of my all-time favorite songs. I had no idea this is what it was about though.

This app allows you to change the pitch of a song, get the chords, slow down a song and much more. I’ve been using it for a while and really like it.

New in this version:

• View your calendar and event list in Notification Center with Fantastical’s Today widget
• Quickly create events or reminders from selected text in extension-enabled apps with Fantastical’s app extension
• Interactive notifications let you quickly snooze an alert or complete a reminder
• Enhanced landscape view shows your event list when using iPhone 6 Plus

I love Fantastical—I have it on all of my devices.

This is a very interesting update from Rogue Amoeba if you’re using iOS 8.1 and Yosemite.

Vimeo:

Paris & NY, like many large cities, have a lot in common ; transport, infrastructure, national monuments. I wanted to explore not only these comparisons but also the differences, in order to expose the beauty and individuality of each. What you cannot deny is the vibrancy and explosion of character each city has and I thought split-screen with timelapse would be a good way to help convey this.

Turns out, it’s an ad for British Airways but it’s still a fun thing to watch especially when you consider the effort that had to go into pre- and post-production.

But does he cheat a little bit at the end with the “LOVE” sculpture? Isn’t that in Philadelphia?

On this week’s Amplified, Jim and Shawn talk about the new iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 and does Apple offer too many iPads for sale?

Sponsored by lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/thebeard and get a FREE 7-day trial where you can access all of their 2,400+ courses).

Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.

I broke my wrist. Makes typing a bit of a challenge. Slow going for the next week or so. Just saying.

This is Colossal:

Hikers exploring England’s Derbyshire Peak District earlier this week stumbled onto a rare phenomenon caused by extreme winds.

Really wild looking video but, if it’s that windy, maybe you should be careful about walking on the slippery rocks.

Ars Technica:

Sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn’t pan out according to the orderly delivery schedule the creators promised.

A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out.

I’ve been burned by a few Kickstarter-type campaigns. Rule of thumb is to assume the money you are handing over is a donation – if you get something in return, great but don’t hold out a lot of hope. Granted, the majority of Kickstarters complete successfully but there are still plenty that don’t. Caveat Emptor.

Mosaic Science:

Meet the donors, patients, doctors and scientists involved in the complex global network of rare – and very rare – blood. In 50 years, researchers have turned up only 40 or so other people on the planet with the same precious, life-saving blood in their veins.

Fascinating story of how rare blood develops and the issues involved in having such an incredibly rare blood type.

The Verge:

a significant number of merchants, including heavyweights like Walmart, Kmart, 7-Eleven, and Best Buy, are in outright competition with Apple Pay. The retailers, through a joint venture formed in 2012, are building their own mobile payment app, called CurrentC. It’s expected to launch next year. In the meantime, these retailers have no intention to support Apple Pay.

There may be a lot of good reasons to not support Apple Pay and there may be good alternatives available now and in the future but CurrentC – which needs access to your checking account – and QR codes is not either of those things.

PetaPixel:

Normally Camera+ would set you back $3 in the app store, but right now there’s a lesser-known promotional offering from Apple that lets you download a copy for free. You just need to know where to look.

While some of the folks behind the scenes at Camera+’s developer, TapTapTap, are unsavoury, the app itself is pretty cool and you can’t beat free. Well worth jumping through some hoops to get it.

Huffington Post:

Manganese black. Yellow ocher. Vermilion. Ultramarine. These pigments sound delicious. Their names are so sharp and elegant, it’s as if the terms emote more meaning than just color. We can smell logwood, taste cochineal, touch mummy brown. There is just something (quite scientifically) alluring about a perfectly saturated glob of paint or an electric mound of powdered hues, especially when its name is so tantalizing.

The uniqueness of the names undoubtedly prompts those amongst us, who obsess over the various pink, purples and blues, to wonder where the terms come from. We learn the origin stories of famous paintings in art history course after art history course, but it’s rare to read about the birth of Madder red or mauve. How did the colors in Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” or J.M.W. Turner’s “Modern Rome” come to be?

I never really thought about it but of course it’s true; these artists had to make their own paint and would of course create their own colors too.

Air New Zealand: As the official airline of Middle-earth, Air New Zealand has gone all out to celebrate the third and final film in The Hobbit Trilogy – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies It very well may … Continued

Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.

Uber is serious about this. They’ve teamed up with Vaccine Finder and will either bring a registered nurse to you or bring you to a clinic for a flu shot, all for free. This effort is today only and limited to Boston, New York and DC.

Thanks to my friend Sly for sending me this video and thanks to the American hockey fans who honoured all Canadians by singing our National Anthem and showing their respect on this awful day. Tears and chills.

I picked up my new iPads after the event in Cupertino ended last Thursday where Apple introduced the new products. I’ve been using the new iPads just as I have used the previous generation devices, so I could get a good idea how they function under my normal working conditions. […]

Digg:

A nicely crafted beer is a thing of beauty, but if you’re pouring it into just any old grimy pint glass, you’re not letting that brew reach its true potential. The right glass is key to getting every last boozy drop of pleasure.​

A lot of people don’t realize that the shape of the glass you drink your beer out of can affect the way it tastes. In general, beer glasses are designed to enhance the kinds of beers inside. Always drives me nuts when I go to a bar and ask for a specialized beer and it comes in the “wrong” glass.

BIAS Desktop is the world’s most accurate, thorough and versatile guitar-amp modeler and designer. Its advanced amp-modeling engine captures the warmth and feel of real tube amps in every aspect, component by component. To start, the plug-in includes 36 authentic models of the most sought-after vintage and modern amps in rock ‘n’ roll history.

This alone is worth it—BIAS is my favorite amp modeling software for iOS, but then they added this:

Amp Matching utilizes a collection of underlying technologies to analyze and compare your currently selected BIAS amp model and the sound of a target tube amplifier, the corresponding cabinet and the microphone in front of it. It then executes the tonal compensation and enhancement needed to make your amp model accurately match the target tube amplifier.

Holy shit!

“I’m sorry.”

The Washington Post ran a sensationalistic story this morning that claimed Apple would have user’s location, unique identifying codes and search terms when using Spotlight in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. […]

David Smith:

Since getting my iPhone 6 a few weeks ago I’ve been continuously trying to optimize the configuration of my home screen. The larger screen means that I now have an extra row of icons to fit onto the screen, but the physical size of device means that I can’t actually comfortably reach them.

Since you can’t arbitrarily place icons on your home screen this means the situation is actually worse. I now have to fill in the top row of icons with ‘stuff’ just so that I can easily reach my main icons without stretching.

I poked around at finding a better way and this was my solution. No weird hacks or jailbreak required.

An easy to do “hack” for those who have an issue with getting to the top row of icons on your iPhone 6 Plus.

Apple:

OS X Yosemite introduces a beautiful new design, useful new connections between your Mac and iOS devices, and amazing new features for the apps you use most.

Lots of things to dig in to and discover if you have a Mac compatible with the required features.