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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.

The Week:

if you wanted to improve your Canadian accent, you would do better to just use your Californian accent. In some important ways it is closer to the real Canadian accent and vice versa than other American accents are.

Canada actually has many regional differences in accents. The most extraordinary ones are of the people native to Newfoundland but mine and Jim Dalrymple’s home province of Nova Scotia has some very distinctive accents too.

I like David Pogue. And I like what he’s done with Yahoo Tech. The new look is very clean and easy to navigate. As you’d expect from Pogue, it’s also very friendly.

I love this.

[Via Coudal]

I’m not one of those crazy Batman people, but this cool.

I don’t have these new versions, but I swear by the older models of these products. Apogee makes quality.

Some of this stuff is just great.

Pro Tools updates have been coming fast and furious. I like it.

Gretsch makes some fine instruments.

The scruffy twenty-something, wandered by our Pax East booth, looking up at the banner for our game. Ten feet tall, rising above the Pax floor, three tall, skinny women look jauntily at the camera. Two wear form-fitting combat suits. Another wears a ’60s Checkerboard dress. […]

T-Mobile CEO John Legere has big balls. They should have let him stay.

It’s nice to see someone starting out put so much time into thinking about the right ways to monetize a Web site.

I’m thinking not enough rehearsal time.

Despite running Android, the devices come with a Windows 8-style tile interface called “Magazine UX,” which Samsung says is better optimized for large screens.

There is just no stopping these guys.

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.