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As Michael Mulvey points out, it’s not just fragmentation, but Google’s lack of attention to design.

Blackberry has today filed a lawsuit against startup Typo Keyboards, which is backed by Ryan Seacrest. The company alleges that Typo copied BlackBerry’s patented ‘iconic’ keyboard design.

I actually agree with BlackBerry.

Our mission is to take the pain and tediousness out of the DMCA takedown submission process. We make this as easy as possible by creating tools that help you quickly create submissions, track existing submissions and organize the results.

Great idea.

Reservoir Dogs on Twitter:

Eight men dressed in BLACK SUITS, sit around a table at a breakfast cafe.

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, “Reservoir Dogs” is a great movie. This Twitter account recreates the movie in 140 character chunks. Interesting experiment in what Twitter can do.

Snapchat, the red-hot private messaging service, said on Thursday that it knew for months about a security loophole that allowed hackers this week to harvest millions of phone numbers and announced changes to its systems.

Assholes.

In this issue Wil Shipley talks about why developers ask you to rate their apps; Darren Murph wonders why American companies don’t give employees more time off; Jonathan Rhyne looks at some steps developers should take to legally protect themselves and their business; Matt Dusenbury tells of a sad story between a mother and daughter; and Doyle Armbrust talks about the new classical music scene.

I don’t even know why I posted this. Just for a chuckle I guess.

Deadspin:

Hello. My name is Chris Kluwe, and for eight years I was the punter for the Minnesota Vikings. In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team.

I honestly don’t know if my activism was the reason I got fired.

However, I’m pretty confident it was.

Kluwe became famous off the football field back in September of 2012 when his letter to a politician went viral. It’s a sad end to his NFL career.

Vocativ:

The truffle. It’s the hallmark of haute cuisine. Sorry, caviar, but you’re no match for the truffle’s earthy-flavored tastiness, beloved by chefs and epicures alike. The specialty comes in several varieties, including black and burgundy, but Italian white truffles are the most revered, and in turn, the most valuable. Alba, a hilly area in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy, is especially famous for its culinary gems, and it’s the place to look if you are hoping to find some.

I had never had real truffle (I thought it was a chocolate treat) until I went to Italy and was blown away by how even a little bit thinly shaved over a simple pasta dish could create such an explosion of flavour.

Incandescent light bulbs are on the way out. But not right this second. A US law, passed in 2007, has made it illegal to manufacture or import incandescent bulbs that do not meet the new efficiency standards.

CBC News:

In terms of astonishing weather facts, it doesn’t get much more impressive than being as cold as a distant planet for a day.

The Manitoba Museum is reporting Winnipeg’s temperatures on Tuesday were actually as cold as the surface of Mars.

According to the Curiosity Rover, Mars reached a maximum temperature of -29 C on Tuesday, a temperature Winnipeg only reached shortly before 3 p.m.

If asked the question, “Why will you never live in Winnipeg?”, I will simply point to this.

Jim travels to Austin, Texas to join Dan in person for this very special episode. Along with 5by5 Producer Haddie Cooke, they discuss the new Mac Pro, Bitcoin, iPad keyboards, the iA Writer patent controversy, Tim Cook’s thank you to Apple employees, and more.

Sponsored by HostGator (coupon DANSENTME), SquareSpace (coupon DANSENTME1213) and Shutterstock (coupon DANSENTME12).

Good writeup on 4 critical legal challenges, moving forward in 2014

Gizmodo:

Behold the first self-propelled ice sculpture ever—a truck made of ice that actually works! It’s a real truck, using 11,000 pounds of ice over a regular truck chassis complete with engine and electrical system. Check out the videos to see how they built it—and how it melted.

This commercial is in heavy rotation here in Canada.

Great list of iOS and Mac apps.

This has been around for a while, but is new to me. So deliciously awesome! Polydimethylsiloxane (or PDMS) is used in lots of products, from chicken nuggets and fries, to caulk, to shampoo. This use is my favorite.

Today I Found Out:

This tradition is mostly thanks to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadian Band. While their work is largely unknown to those born in the last few decades, the band has sold over 300 million records to date. Guy Lombardo himself has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he was once the “Dick Clark” of New Years before Clark and his “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” attempting to appeal to younger audiences, started supplanting “Mr. New Year’s Eve,” Guy Lombardo.

“Auld Lang Syne” is another one of those songs most of us don’t know the words to – like the Canadian National Anthem.

Death and Taxes:

A Reddit sleuth posted this list of movies and TV shows that will be purged from Netflix in January, 2014. If you have time off from work between now and January 1, it might not be a bad use of your time to binge-watch some blockbusters (“Braveheart,” “Top Gun,” “Platoon”), art house flicks (“Being John Malkovich”) and the entire series run of “The Kids in the Hall.”

I wonder if it’s less a “purge” as is being reported (it really doesn’t make any sense for Netflix to remove movies) or rather, Netflix’s contracts/agreements for those films are expiring.

Regardless, some of you may have some Netflix binge-watching to do New Year’s Day!

Ever since I was a kid, I was always fascinated with people celebrating New Years while I was still patiently waiting my turn. Here’s video from Sydney, Australia, counting down to 2014. New Year’s Eve in Sydney is definitely on my bucket list. Enjoy!

Pew Research Center shares some trends revealed by US public opinion surveys.

Focus is a beautiful and easy to use pomodoro timer. Built exclusively for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Focus is the best way to focus on a single task for a period of time.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.

The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically. You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.

Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.

After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.

Focus lets you enter and manage your task, work with customizable session length, see you completed tasks and incorporates the latest technologies. It helps you to focus on your tasks and stay productive all the time.

Focus is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with iOS 7 and also for OS X Mavericks.

This is so awesome!

Hidden among the racks of servers and disks in the CERN Computing Centre, you’ll find Hawaiian dancers, space aliens, gorillas… all LEGO® figurines! These characters were placed about the Centre for the arrival of Google’s Street View team for the world to discover.

Wow.

Robert W. Wilson, a retired New York hedge-fund founder who committed his life to giving the fortune he made from investing to charities, has died. He was 87.

Bored Panda:

When the weather forecast announced unexpected cold from -9°C to -12°C last week, photographer Angela Kelly decided to take an advantage of it in one truly creative way. Together with her 7-year-old son, Kelly combined the home-based remedies – dish soap, karo syrup, and water – and went out to blow bubbles and take pictures as they freeze and melt.

-9°C is 15+°F. Or as we Canadians call it, “The month of May”.

BuzzFeed:

Like many casual fans, we assumed we could immediately pick it up and dominate. We were very wrong.

Check the article out if for no other reason that the GIFs.

And the “tip” at the end? Not gonna happen!

Bored Panda:

Nina and Gramps have been married for 61 years, however, all they’ve got from their wedding day is a single photograph. On one of the most important days of their life, the couple got stood up by their photographer. In order to fix this, their caring granddaughter, an event designer Lauren Wells, organized a beautiful anniversary photo session, inspired by the famous Pixar animation movie “Up“.

61 years of marriage. Most of us haven’t even been on the planet that long, let alone married. Congratulations to them!

TIME:

King Wenceslas didn’t start Boxing Day, but the Church of England might have.

During Advent, Anglican parishes displayed a box into which churchgoers put their monetary donations. On the day after Christmas, the boxes were broken open and their contents distributed among the poor, thus giving rise to the term Boxing Day.

Maybe.

Even though TIME doesn’t answer its own headline question, the article still might be instructive to our American friends who have heard about “this weird Canadian Holiday”.

This is cool. What a lot of work though.

BuzzFeed:

My advice to TV shoppers has evolved: Consider the off-brands. Are you building the ultimate home entertainment system to show off to your friends? Then sure, shell out for the Samsung. But if you’re not…perhaps it’s time to take a look at one of those sub-$350, 40-plus-inch TVs.

Purists will scoff but he’s not wrong. And with “good enough” TVs coming down in price, it makes it less and less likely Apple will be interested in trying to sell their own high margin sets.

BBC News:

Erwin Perzy III knows a thing or two about making it snow – it’s the family business.

The 57-year-old Austrian is the grandson of the man widely acknowledged as the inventor of the snow globe. His grandfather, the first Erwin Perzy, came up with the idea by accident in 1900.

Mass production started in Vienna in 1905, and 108 years later, the company – Original Vienna Snow Globes – is still going strong.

There’s something a little bit magical about a well done, well made snow globe.