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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.

An email went out to Buffer customers at about 4pm ET today informing customers that Buffer, the popular Twitter scheduling service, was hacked:

I wanted to get in touch to apologize for the awful experience we’ve caused many of you on your weekend. Buffer was hacked around 1 hour ago, and many of you may have experienced spam posts sent from you via Buffer. I can only understand how angry and disappointed you must be right now.

Not everyone who has signed up for Buffer has been affected, but you may want to check on your accounts. We’re working hard to fix this problem right now and we’re expecting to have everything back to normal shortly.

This banner was added to the Buffer home page:

Sorry – Buffer was hacked and some scam posts were sent. We’re working hard to investigate. Stay updated via Twitter (@buffer).

Follow the headline link for the latest from Buffer.

Wired:

Fearful of relegating TV to remaining “dumb,” consumer electronics manufacturers look to the success of Apple’s iPhone/iPad/iTunes, Google/Android, or Amazon ecosystems as examples of what could happen with smart TV.

But do consumer electronics companies really think they can monetize the new feature of accessing the web with smart TVs? Even with an industry standard for smart TVs, it’s not likely that those companies could start charging Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, and others for access to their screens. And conversely, by not controlling the device, these service providers operate at the whim of the smart TV.

I’m one of those people that think, Gene Munster’s “predictions” notwithstanding, that Apple has no intention of releasing an actual television set but instead will develop the present Apple TV into a fuller featured set-top box.

Bored Panda:

To celebrate this wonderful and colorful season, we’ve got a beautiful collection of photos of autumn landscapes that highlight the last explosion of rich, vivid color before the coming winter.

I feel sorry for those in tropical places that never get to experience Fall. That is, until the snows/rains come and then I’m just envious of them.

Great geek costume, has the added value of making your child easy to see from a distance.

Here ya go…

The Artery:

The Boston and St. Louis symphony orchestras are home to some of the country’s most talented musicians, but neither is above some good old-fashioned smack talk ahead of the World Series.

Trash talking band geeks prove that band geeks can’t trash talk.

Vitali Klitschko and his brother Wladimir are world championship boxers and, together, one of the greatest sports stories ever told. If you are at all a sports fan, watch the documentary Klitschko. You’ll see what I mean.

Both brothers made their professional debut on November 6, 1996 in Hamburg. Since then both have been heavyweight world champions in boxing. They have stated they will never fight each other.

There is a lot to admire about both brothers. Vitali made his fortune as a boxer, then went on to get his PhD and serve as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament. And now Vitali is running for president of his native Ukraine. Fascinating story.

Great review by Peter.

A special free issue, celebrating the Loop Magazine’s re-design. Including an exclusive piece by Matthew Modine: “What I learned from Stanley Kubrick”; “Who would buy an iPhone 5c?” asks Daniel Eran Dilger; “Based On A True Story” – Matt Dusenbury is talking about movies; Chris Domico is wondering “Where Is The Music Pendulum Now?”; and Jim Dalrymple’s “Thoughts on Apple’s iPad and Mac event”

Download the app and the issue free for iPhone and iPad.

I’m so proud to announce that The Loop Magazine 2.0 went live on the App Store this morning. We’ve been working on this app for quite a while and I’m confident that there isn’t a better magazine experience anywhere else in the world. […]

John Gruber talking about Microsoft’s Frank Shaw:

Betting against the iPad as a device on which people can work, for any meaning of “work”, is a bad bet in the long run. Shaw though, is doubling down on just that bet.

Shaw would do better by getting Microsoft to make a product that people actually want to buy.

Designed for iPhone and iPad.

I just downloaded this app—it looks great.