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Co.Exist:

Radar trains local journalists in regions where Western reporters don’t go unless there’s a disaster, and has them file stories via text, with the hopes that the news might get some stories–and perspective–it usually ignores.

There are all kinds of stories to be told. Radar sounds like a way for (trained) citizen journalists to help get those stories told.

What is a film director? Is it just a person who yells “action” on a film set? Is he or she the one who controls the artistic, visual, and dramatic details of a film? Or does a director simply follow a script, a cookie-cutter set of rules and micromanage the gathered actors and technical crew? Are they just people that “shoot a schedule” to bring a film in on budget? The answer is, it depends on the director. […]

Clearly, the big comment of the story is the fact that Lenovo plans to surpass Apple and Samsung over time, but the story behind the acquisition is interesting too. I think the next 12 months or so will show how successful the new Motorola can be.

Obviously, this store is still in the planning stages, but I always look at what the company is doing with its stores. Simply beautiful.

Great tip from Chris Breen. I find myself needing to batch rename images from time to time, especially when I’m working on The Loop Magazine.

This is a great idea.

io9:

The 2014 Campbellian Anthology – a DRM-free ebook featuring the work of over 100 authors eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in science fiction and fantasy – is currently available for download. 860,000 words of fiction. For free (for now). Go grab it.

Available as a Mobi file for Amazon Kindle and Kindle Readers apps and as an Epub file for iPad, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, and most other e-reader devices and apps.

BuzzFeed:

I have no idea how I exist as an adult human who consumes food and didn’t know most of these, and yet here I am. No shame about not knowing these.

As a city kid, I’ve rarely seen fruits and vegetables in their natural state. Some of these are really fascinating. Bored Panda has a bunch more.

Boing Boing:

Long have I heard tell of the Cockney Rhyming Slang ATM of Hackney Road, but na’er had I chanced upon it…until today! As soon as I stuck my debit card in the machine in front of the Co-Op Grocers in Hackney Road and was asked to make a language-selection between “English” and “Cockney,” I knew I’d found it at last.

We have Chinese language ATM’s here in Vancouver but this is so much cooler.

Many thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

If you run Windows on your Mac with Boot Camp, check out Winclone and Boot Runner. Winclone is an easy and reliable way to make an image of your Boot Camp partition so that you can quickly restore, migrate, and mass deploy Windows in Boot Camp. Boot Runner provides a powerful way for both users and administrators to switch between OS X and Windows on dual boot Macs.

When you get a new Mac or have issues with your Windows installation in Boot Camp, reinstalling Windows is time consuming and difficult. Winclone makes it easy to make a complete clone of the Boot Camp partition, and restore it back to the exact same state on your existing or new Mac. Winclone supports migration of Boot Camp partitions over the network, moving your Boot Camp partition to an external drive and making it bootable, and much more. It also works great for mass deployment so deploying Boot Camp is as easy as deploying a package to a group of Macs.

If you manage lots of dual boot Macs, Boot Runner provides a great way to manage the OS selection. People can decide which OS to use by selecting OS X or Windows prior to logging in. Network administrators can fully customize and manage the selection screen, and can even remotely select the OS through network policy. Boot Runner also includes a scheduling feature to make sure that the Mac is booted into Windows during your maintenance window. Check out the intro video to learn more.

Winclone and Boot Runner are available for purchase and download today at twocanoes.com and have full phone, email and forum support options.

What the hell is this guy talking about!

Very sad.

Worth a read if you don’t have access to Fox via traditional means, but do have net access. Not sure if and how this applies outside the US.

I love this app. You can hum a new song into the app, so you can remember it for later. You can also write lyrics in the same window, so your song is kept together.

Some very interesting points from Ben Evans about what the future may hold.

Constructed using woods that were seized by the Feds, then returned once there was a resolution and the investigation ended, this radical Government Series II Explorer makes the perfect memento of an infamous time in Gibson history. And it’s a fierce performer in its own right.

Wow, that’s quite a swipe at the government.

Slate:

This Sunday, the eyes of millions of Americans will turn to a fetid marsh in the industrial hinterlands of New York City for the country’s most important sporting event—and some would say the key to understanding its proud but violent culture.

Slate has been running this series for a while and it’s funny to read how American events might be reported through the eyes of others.

Wall Street Journal:

“The Lego Movie” gathers characters who don’t normally hang around together, coming from separately owned franchises and studios. These include Warner movie characters like Batman, Superman, Gandalf, Dumbledore and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle; but also Han Solo, Shaquille O’Neal, and Milhouse from “The Simpsons”.

I’m going to borrow a nine year old and go see this movie.

I love this.

[Via Brett Terpstra]

The magic of Tumblr is that it sits between Twitter (short form) and WordPress (long form) and fills a gap in the world of blogging that nobody else has managed to capture. There are elements of Facebook and Instagram in it as well. So it’s a lot like all of these apps but in the end it is like nothing else. It has a soul and pulse and a vibe that other social apps don’t have. At times, it is simply magic.

That’s a really good way to describe Tumblr.

John Gruber:

For one thing, they sweated the details. The greatest testimony to their genius is just how much of that original design is recognizable in today’s Mac OS X 10.9. A Mac user from 1984 could sit down in front of an iMac or MacBook today and recognize it as a successor to that original machine. That’s simply amazing.

John is so right. Apple sweated the details and they still do—that sets them apart from every other company.

Another great find by Tina Roth Eisenberg.

Google will keep the Nest group intact inside the company. The new division will still work on hardware devices, but not necessarily thermostats or smoke detectors. In fact, Google would like Fadell to work on gadgets that make more sense for the company. Will it be a phone or a tablet? It’s unclear for now.

We suspected that Google wanted Fadell. Makes perfect sense.

In this issue, Christopher Jennings takes a look at the history of Yellowstone National Park; Alex Saretzky talks about where designers should focus their time and skills; Bryan Irace discusses CocoaPods and Objective-C; Scot Olsen is a photographer taking beautiful pictures with his iPhone 4s; and Darren Murph looks at T-Mobile’s free international data.

Co.Create:

New York-based artist Jon Burgerman has responded to both the violent ads in subway movie posters and the rising scores of public shootings by playing the victim.

In a new series of interventions, called “Headshots,” Burgerman documents himself donning fake blood and other props to portray the potential target of whoever in the poster is pointing a gun (or bow and arrow.)

Hilariously subversive.

Flag allows anyone (within the US to start) to print and mail a pack of 20 photos each month for free. You can keep the prints yourself, or send them to the people you love. If you want more than 20 a month you can buy as many as you need.

To make photo printing fun – for the first time by our reckoning – we’ve designed a photo finishing system ready for the 21st century. Museum quality (Giclée) printers, German 220 gram photo paper from sustainable sources, laser cutters, and robots with carbon fiber arms will allow Flag to deliver prints, for free, that are better than any you can pay for today. We want to turn your memories into mementos you can be proud of.

Our secret to making photo printing free? An advertisement on the back of each print. It will always be tasteful, and we are steadfast in our commitment to never sell or share your personal information with advertisers.

This is something I would use. I’m okay with an ad on the back of the photos. Samuel Agboola really came up with something interesting here.

You can sign-up for the MacTech BootCamp III, MacTech Conferences and Microsoft Office for Mac Accreditation programs right now. There is a special savings on the page for readers of The Loop.

TechCrunch has confirmed reports that Lenovo is buying Motorola Mobility from Google. This is the division within Google that the company purchased in 2011 for $12.5 billion. Motorola Mobility will go to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.

First Google Reader, now this. Seriously, Google got what they wanted out of Motorola—the patents.

Fast Company:

The era of the pre-game Super Bowl strategy kicked off in earnest in 2011, when Volkswagen pre-released its excellent spot “The Force” before Super Sunday. The monster success of that spot spurred others to follow suit and this year the trend continued unabated, with teasers and entire bespoke ads created to stoke buzz before game day.

Here, all the spots (and accompanying content) released so far.

Some fun ads here but I gotta say, the Lawrence Fishburne ad for Kia was the most disappointing, the “Doberhuahua” the funniest and the Newcastle “The Teaser For The Trailer For Newcastle’s Mega Huge Football Game Ad” the most clever. Thanks to reader David Mark for the link.