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Much respect to 70-year-old farmer Pedro Martin Ureta for making such a great forest.

I’ve live blogged a lot of things, but I don’t know how he did this.

We’re incredibly grateful for all of your support and hope you’ll join us on the next phase of our journey as part of Google.

Shawn Blanc’s list of three criteria on whether you should continue using a product or not. I like his list.

Sponsoring The Loop this week is SonicPics.

SonicPics is a fun and engaging digital storytelling app for iOS. Turn your photographs into narrated movies to share with your family and friends!

Check out SonicPics today on the app store.

I’ve always been fascinated glassblowers and love watching them work.

Wow, that’s impressive.

HP’s CEO Meg Whitman says the company is working on a new smartphone.

iLounge whines, Peter responds.

TIME:

On Wednesday, 18 workers were arrested for stealing the miniatures from LSG Sky Chefs, the company that provides food and beverages for American Airlines, CNN reports. The majority of those accused were LSG employees, but three were airport security guards. The arrests culminate a nine-month investigation known as “Operation Last Call” carried out by the Port Authority’s Office of Inspector General.Here’s how the whole scheme went down. At the end of every American Airlines flight, workers are supposed to return any unused bottles to a storage facility. Instead, workers began stashing the bottles to sell them to local liquor stores and bodegas.

I love those little tiny bottles of booze.

After Apple’s event finished I got a few minutes with the new iPhone 5, so I thought I’d give you a few pictures and some first impressions. […]

I know it’s a blue shirt and a lanyard, but does everything have to look like Apple did it?

GoDaddy and sites hosted with the popular service went offline on Monday; a hacker associated with ‘Anonymous’ claims credit.

New York Times:

(Here) comes an actor, comedian and writer, seeking to make his way across the country in the next two weeks with only a dream and, oh, yes, instead of a dollar, a trailer filled with 3,000 pounds of a new bacon.The actor, Josh Sankey, will embark this week on a promotion for the Oscar Mayer division of Kraft Foods that is being called the Great American Bacon Barter.

This is just yet another lame attempt by Corporate America to leverage social media (and use the mainstream media as a promotional tool) and turn something viral. It rarely works and often blows up in their faces.

On the other hand – Bacon. So there’s that.

Sponsoring The Loop this week is SonicPics.

SonicPics is a fun and engaging digital storytelling app for iOS. Turn your photographs into narrated movies to share with your family and friends!

Check out SonicPics today on the app store.

There’s always something around to help get that bottle open.

Wall Street Journal:

On Aug. 31, the Federal Aviation Administration requested public comment on its longstanding policy of prohibiting the use of personal electronics during takeoffs and landings. The restrictions date back to 1991 and were motivated in part by anecdotal reports from pilots and flight crews that electronic devices affected an airliner’s navigation equipment or disrupted communication between the cockpit and the ground. Over the years, however, Boeing has been unable to duplicate these problems, and the FAA can only say that the devices’ radio signals “may” interfere with flight operations.

Gadgets may not but the near constant whining of people who can’t use their iPads and Kindles and can’t entertain themselves for a few minutes might drive some of us insane. Our parents seemed to get along just fine on airplanes without needing to be constantly distracted by electronic gizmos.

Okay, skinny jeans had to go.

Steve Simonsen:

This morning I received an urgent telephone call from my good friend Pam Gaffin. She was terribly excited about an event that was happening before her eyes. Pam told me it was a migration of soldier crabs also called hermit crabs and there were millions and millions of them she likened it to the migrations of Serengeti.

At what point do you watch this video and think, “That’s really….CREEPY!!”

PayPal’s president is promising to make major changes to the way the company works after the latest publicized incident of the company freezing a customer out of his own funds.

Ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is suing porn makers for trademark violation, after they produced “Boston Cream Thighs” and “Peanut Butter D-Cup.”

More Shit Apple Fanatics Say!

I’d like to thank Weather 2x for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

A distinctively different kind of weather app for iPad and iPhone with stunning Retina-quality visuals and a refreshingly fun and touch centric UI.

Weather 2x is the perfect balance of aesthetics, intuitive functionality and the right amount of detail.

Check out the latest version with great new features including iCloud sync, Twitter & E-mail sharing, local weather detection, and images of Jim’s igloo for when it reaches those sub-zero temperatures.

I’ve been using Weather 2x since it first came out and love it.

Businessweek did an article today focusing on Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. Besides being a friend, John has helped me with advice and encouragement when I was redesigning The Loop. There is no doubt he has had a big impact on blogging.

So Nokia admitted to faking the video and now they fake the images too. Was anything about yesterday’s event real?

Wired:

Amazon packed a boatload of new products, services and information into its Santa Monica media event Thursday morning. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced a trifecta of new Kindle Fire Tablets, new software services to improve the tablet experience, and updated Kindle e-reader models.

If you are a fan of Amazon and/or their Kindle devices, there’s a lot to like about these announcements. Amazon has a niche – customers who want access to the Amazon ecosystem – and are serving it well.

It may not be a two horse race but the other horses are three legged.

Associated Press:

The nation will have a chance to say goodbye to Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, in a memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral on Sept. 13.The 10 a.m. service will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the websites of the cathedral and space agency.

I’d amend that first sentence to “The world will have a chance to say goodbye…” Armstrong represents and represented more than just America. He represented the best in all of us.