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Much respect beard.

I recorded a podcast last week with Charles Perry and Joe Cieplinski talking about The Loop Magazine and Newsstand.

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Great looking conference and a good price too.

Homes and Hues:

These seventeen bookcases and bookshelves can clear away the cluttery piles of books you may have laying around while adding some extra style to your home.

I’m a big fan of books and therefore, of bookshelves. Most of these designs are actually available (if expensive) and not just design concepts.

Failblog:

“Hey. Can we use your pool? There’s a moose in ours…”

Happens all the time in Canada.

For those of us who are fans of the movie, this old “behind the scenes” video is fascinating.

Fancy little dog-less sled that fellow has.

Man thanks to iExplorer for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loo. Access your iPhone’s data on your computer with iExplorer. Easy to use, fully loaded and well polished—this app is a great tool for anyone upgrading to a new computer or iPhone.

Text messages, playlists, songs, voicemail, voice memos, photos, notes, files and more—iExplorer makes it easy to transfer or backup an iPhone to a Mac or Windows computer. Download the app, connect an iPhone and click transfer. Your files are now on your computer.

Use coupon code LOOPSWAG and receive a free Macroplant branded USB thumb drive with any purchase of iExplorer placed before January 13th. Get the free trial version today.

This is exactly how Canadians talk.

I hate Google for doing this and for making users opt-out.

I kid you not.

Motorola Mobility accused Apple in 2010 of infringing on six of its patents covering technology such as reducing signal noise and programming the device’s touch screen so a user’s head does not accidentally activate it while talking on the phone. The ITC ruled in April 2013 that Apple did not violate any of the six. The appeals court addressed just one of the six patents.

Bucket list!

It’s a committee. And Disney. What could go wrong?

U.S. Mac sales spiked 28.5 percent year over year in the just-concluded fourth quarter of calendar 2013, according to the latest figures from Gartner, giving Apple a 13.7 percent share of its home market while the rest of the industry continues to struggle.

I guess it’s a good time to own a Mac… and iPhone… and iPad.

Once the service goes live over the next few days, a new setting will appear in Gmail called “Email via Google+.” If you don’t want everyone on Google+ to be able to send you an email, you’ll have to opt out by selecting “no one” or choosing another option to limit the feature to people in certain circles.

Stop it!

I was there that day—it was amazing.

Wall Street Journal:

TV is stuck in an innovation cul-de-sac. There are no new ideas in TV hardware that are worth paying for, so, thanks to competition and production efficiencies, good TVs keep getting cheaper. The cheaper they get, the more desperate TV makers become, filling their sets with more and more useless piffle.

From 3D to 4K to curved screens to Sony’s strange “wedge-shaped” sets (don’t ask), we are witnessing an industry out of ideas, a business desperately casting about in the dark for something—anything—that might persuade us to part with our money.

For most of us, the TV we already have in our living rooms is perfectly good for what we watch. There’s little compelling in the offerings at this year’s CES.

Expect to see a host of new wearables from Samsung this year, including some that were designed, in part, in San Francisco.

Allow me to translate: We expect Apple to release wearables sometime this year. As soon as they do we will copy them in an undisclosed location in San Francisco.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon will attend the session with in-house lawyers only, according to a Wednesday court filing. Their legal teams had met on January 6 to “discuss settlement opportunities,” the filing read.

Let me get this started: Stop stealing our shit you slimy bastards and we’ll stop winning lawsuits against you.

Someday I’m going to get these.

Nilai will be renamed, redesigned, and be completely open sourced. We’ll offer a fully hosted solution that people can use for both for free and for pay for but anyone that would like to they can download the application and run it themselves. We’re going to build it out in the open, which means that we’ll be publishing our roadmap, our internal discussions, our design mockups (both failures and successes), our business ideas, our marketing materials — anything and everything we can publish as early as we possibly can. In short, we’re going to rebuild Nilai into something new and do it in public.

Interesting. This comes from the folks who make the Barley CMS.

Totally agree with Gruber.

Jim and Dan talk about Canadian blizzards, Jim’s missing 2013 Mac Pro, the LaCie Fuel, Dropbox, DROPOUTJEEP, coding on an iPad, apps that Must Always Be Installed, Jim’s amazing new rig, and more.

Sponsored by Ting, Squarespace, and Freshbooks.

Yeah, I did it. Enjoy.

Some interesting thoughts from Om Malik on the Snapchat drama of late. I don’t know, I think they really screwed up, but maybe I’m in the minority.

The gathering featured some 200 manufacturers displaying an array of gadgets that is quaint by today’s standards, but must have been impressive at the time. As The New York Times described it, the conference’s audio section alone offered products ranging from “phonographic needles to the tiniest radios and TV sets, to giant high fidelity, stereophonic sound systems.”

It’s great looking back. I enjoyed this more than any CES coverage this year.

Mashable:

We’ve found 10 of the most interesting and interactive real-time visualizations on the web. Feast your eyes on these awe-inspiring pages for a fresh look on what’s happening on the planet right now.

I don’t know about “put the world in perspective” but the Tweetping and FBomb_co data is fascinating.