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I guess in the U.S. this would be akin to trying to hire a hitman.

I don’t see the problem.

A wonderful pictorial by Doug Menuez with pictures of Jobs that I hadn’t seen before.

A friend of mine is selling this guitar and it’s a beauty. I wish I had the money to pick it up.

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.

Chris Hadfield:

When David Bowie wrote and recorded Space Oddity in 1969, I wonder if he ever imagined it being played in orbit? Even more so, would he have imagined (or worried about) the legal concerns of extra-planetary music?

When the original video was pulled, there was a lot of complaining and misunderstanding of the reasons. Hadfield does a great job of explaining the story.

Dan Frakes:

Here are some of my favorite iOS 8 features, in no particular order, with an emphasis on things that haven’t been exhaustively covered elsewhere. I hope you discover something new and useful.

Dan has some great tidbits here. My favourite is the SMS relay feature.

Macworld:

The latest release of AgileBits’ password manager is as good as ever—and a perfect companion for OS X Yosemite.

I can’t recommend 1Password enough. Indispensable to my computer use.

Quartz:

It didn’t take long for me to get used to Apple’s large new iPhone 6 Plus. After more than a month of everyday use, it has become even more of the pocket computer I’ve always wanted. A few thoughts.

The article hits a lot of the points I was curious about. Anyone else have similar or dissimilar stories about using their iPhone 6/6 Plus for the past month?

The Robservatory:

Dearly beloved…

On this, the occasion of its 14th birthday, we’re gathered here to mark the passing of Mac OS X Hints.

While it can be hard to tell exactly when a web site has died, the signs are fairly obvious. It’s been over 45 days since the last new hint appeared on the site. There is no way for new users to sign up for an account. There’s been one new comment posted in the last two days. A sidebar box proudly proclaims Latest Mountain Lion Hints. The site design, logo, and icons were last updated when I worked for Macworld, over four years ago. To paraphrase a Star Trek character, “it’s dead, Jim.”

While Rob, the originator of Mac OS X Hints, makes a clear case as to why the site is no longer as needed as it has been in the past, it’s dormancy is still a shame. It was a site many of us relied on in the early days of Mac OS X to try and figure out the ins and outs of the new operating system.

Outside:

As airlines pack more passengers than ever onto each plane, a single storm can reverberate through the system—leaving flyers stranded as agents scramble to find ever-rarer empty seats on later flights. But you aren’t entirely at the mercy of the airlines. Should your itinerary be delayed, cancelled, or overbooked, knowing your rights can be the difference between a $300 voucher and a long night at the airport.

As air travel gets more and more onerous, it’s important to know what you are supposed to receive when the airline makes a mistake. As always, be firm but polite with any airline agents you speak to.

NPR:

Tom Magliozzi, one of public radio’s most popular personalities, died on Monday of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 77 years old.

Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as “Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers” on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles.

I don’t know a thing about cars but listened to the show simply because Tom and Ray were so entertaining.

Pop Chart Lab:

Newly refreshed with a bevy of recent Apple products including the iPad Air 2, iMac with 5K Display, iPhone 6, and even next year’s Apple Watch, the world’s most comprehensive mapping of Apple products is back.

This classic gallery of proprietary gadgets displays every computer, handheld, peripheral, software, and operating system released by Apple from 1976 onward. Over 500 items in all, chronicling how Apple has invented—and reinvented—insanely great products.

We’ve mentioned this before but the update makes it even better. If you know “A True Apple Believer”, this would make a great Christmas gift!

Wired:

The Baltimore Wastewater Treatment Plant put out a call for “extreme spider” help in 2009, when a giant spiderweb covered almost 4 acres of their facility. Scientists eventually estimated over 107 million spiders were living in the structure, with densities of 35,176 spiders per m³ in spots.

In honour of Halloween, I’m going to leave this right here for you. Thanks to Brian Webster for the link.

Wall Street Journal:

Ive told an audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Thursday night that designing the smartwatch posed more challenges than the iPhone because of societal expectations around a wristwatch. The wrist, he said, is an ideal place for “lightweight interactions” and “casual glancing,” but not for heavy reading.

“Even though Apple Watch does so many things, there are cultural, historical implications and expectations,” Ive said. “That’s why it’s been such a difficult and humbling program.”

It’s obvious Apple has thought long and hard about that last sentence and maybe that’s why the Apple Watch will be more successful (although, that’s damning with faint praise) than other company’s offerings.

Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta 2014 – Timelapse Short Film from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Vimeo:

Every year the city of Albuquerque host the largest hot air balloon event in the world, the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

This festival is on my “Great Places to Shoot Photos” bucket list.

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?

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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.