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Yes!

I Put a Spell on You:

While this piece of ridiculousness was ostensibly given to John for his birthday, I’m now delighted to reveal that this present was given for my own secret benefit as well. Before I explain, there are some facts you need to know.

As we get older, hopefully our pranks on friends get subtler and more mature. Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba just pulled a great prank on John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

Deadspin:

You should probably go ahead and not watch this if you’re squeamish. Yes, the tooth was part of a bridge, so the pain might have been minimal, but self-dentistry is never pleasant.

Now that’s a good old tough Canadian hockey player!

NPR:

As of Tuesday, Michael Erb was the No. 1 customer reviewer on Amazon. He has reviewed everything from doorbells to travel mugs to toothbrushes.

As Erb has risen up the ranks among Amazon reviewers, the stream of free stuff has grown because manufacturers have started sending stuff directly to him to review.

This feels really shady particularly because Amazon doesn’t identify “paid” reviewers.

The Nexus 5 and Kit Kat software are designed to make it easier to use Google’s search engine and other services to learn about a person’s habits and needs so it can display helpful information. Google Inc.’s virtual assistant, Google Now, also engages in richer dialogue with Nexus 5 users.

C R E E P Y

Alek’s Controllable Halloween Decorations:

Use the three halloween webcams for a live view of a buncha halloween decorations & lights and also CONTROL them – heck, you can even inflate or deflate the giant Frankenstein & Homer Simpson – D’OH!

All three webcams are online from 1800 to 2200 MDT (GMT-6) which is when you can turn stuff on & off and “entertain” the neighbors.

Ignore the spectacularly ugly web design and just think of all the tech this guy has installed.

Passengers will eventually be able to read e-books, play games, and watch videos on their devices during all phases of flight, with very limited exceptions. Electronic items, books and magazines, must be held or put in the seat back pocket during the actual takeoff and landing roll. Cell phones should be in airplane mode or with cellular service disabled – i.e., no signal bars displayed—and cannot be used for voice communications based on FCC regulations that prohibit any airborne calls using cell phones. If your air carrier provides Wi-Fi service during flight, you may use those services. You can also continue to use short-range Bluetooth accessories, like wireless keyboards.

Nice article from John Moltz. I think Microsoft’s biggest problem is its lack of vision—they don’t have a next big thing in their arsenal.

Glad to see CNN took crazy pants to task for her stupidity.

Developer Justin Williams gives us a pretty comprehensive list of hardware and software that he uses.

What goes around, comes around.

Adobe Systems Inc said on Tuesday that the scope of a cyber-security breach disclosed nearly a month ago was far bigger than initially reported, with attackers obtaining data on more than 38 million customer accounts.

Oopsie.

The police officer cited a California law stating that “[a] person shall not drive a motor vehicle if a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other similar means of visually displaying a television broadcast or video signal that produces entertainment or business applications, is operating and is located in the motor vehicle at a point forward of the back of the driver’s seat, or is operating and the monitor, screen, or display is visible to the driver while driving the motor vehicle.”

There is an exception that allows for GPS, so she may be able to fight the ticket.

Great song, great band.

Jim gets angry and talks with Dan about the Loop Magazine reboot, Apple’s Q4 results, hands-on with the new iPad Air, Tim Hortons, busting your iPhone, Stunt Copter, iPad keyboards, and more.

Fuck it, just say 20 hours and be done with it.

Fantastical is one of those apps that just works. Love it.

A number of Dell users have complained that their Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks “smell of cat urine”.

Dell engineers have ruled out biological contamination, and said the smell was not a health hazard.

There are some jokes in there somewhere.

I don’t like this as much as the Appetite Les Paul, but it’s still a nice looking guitar.

Peter Kirn has a nice roundup of what music companies are saying about compatibility of their software with OS X Mavericks. I’ve always kept my music machine one OS version behind just to make sure I’m compatible.

Very cool. You can see how it’s down at Webdesigner Depot.

Some great charts from Benedict Evans.

The New York Times writer Catherine Rampell hit a new low of utter stupidity today claiming that Apple wants to purposely “bust your iPhone.” I’m not even going to link to the pathetic excuse for an article—instead, read Brian Barrett’s takedown on Gizmodo. At least he put some thought into what he wrote.

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Doxie Go is the tiny, rechargeable mobile paper scanner that scans anywhere with no computer required. Scan paper, receipts, and cards, then sync to Doxie’s elegant Mac software.

Doxie makes it easy to go paperless, create searchable PDFs, and send scans to your favorite Mac and cloud apps – Dropbox, Evernote, and more.

It’s time to finally go paperless. Get your new Doxie Go direct from Doxie or Amazon.com.

Thoughtful piece from MIT Technology Review on the troubling growing pains of the world’s sixth most widely visited website.

The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

Jim and Dan talk about the Apple event including the iPad Air, iPad retina mini, new MacBook Pro’s, Mavericks, and more.

Sponsored by Mailchimp, Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME1013 for 25% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME10 for 10% off).

I’d like to thank IK Multimedia for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week with the iRig BlueBoard.

iRig BlueBoard is the first wireless MIDI pedalboard for iOS and Mac that allows you to control your music apps and more from the floor. Now control parameters of your MIDI-compatible apps like AmpliTube wirelessly from the floor. Switch between presets, change patches, turn effects on and off and control effects like volume wah pedals all from the stage floor without worrying about tripping over wires. Setup is as simple as turning the iRig BlueBoard on and telling it what you want to control. iRig BlueBoard features four backlit soft-touch pads housed in a sturdy, stage-worthy chassis, two TRS expansion jacks for connecting additional MIDI controllers like expression pedals, and is powered by four standard AAA batteries.

IK Multimedia’s iRig BlueBoard allows guitarists, vocalists and keyboard players wireless control of Core-MIDI-compatible music-making apps running on an iPhone (4s or later), iPad 4, iPod touch (5th gen) or Mac (models from June 2012). The pedalboard has four backlit pads up top, which can each be assigned controls to switch between presets and banks, tweak parameters or change patches on the fly. Expression, volume or wah pedals can also be connected to the two 0.25-in jacks on the side of the device for control of onscreen dials and knobs.

io9:

In the span of just a few minutes, short films can offer up spine-tingling chills, nightmarish monsters, and plenty of grim humor. Here are a few of our favorite horror shorts that we’ve featured in the past year, ready to deliver a quick hit of Halloween horror.

Proof that horror doesn’t have to take long to scare the bejesus out of you.