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Maria Popova writing about how Hitchcock affected one child.

NASA:

On the nights of Aug. 11th through 13th, the best meteor shower of the year will fill pre-dawn skies with hundreds of shooting stars. And that’s just for starters. The brightest planets in the solar system are lining up right in the middle of the display. The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the nights around August 12th as Earth passes through a stream of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle.“We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “The Perseids always put on a good show.”

NASA even has a free app you can use to count meteors and upload the data to researchers.

LogMyRun now supports kilometers for distance and Celsius for temperature in addition to miles and Fahrenheit. You can convert the distance or temperature units for your entire log in Settings. You can also log individual runs in either kilometers or miles when adding a new run or editing an existing run.

Cheers people!

Michael Mulvey brought up another great point to Marcelo Somers “Linkblog Cancer” post that I linked to yesterday:

If I don’t have a unique perspective to the link in question, I usually won’t link to it. I don’t want to be the noise in the conversation.

That’s a great point. I believe readers are looking for a writers perspective. There are lots of places to get the news, but each writer has their own perspective.

Many thanks to Harvest for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. We’re more than halfway through 2012. You can’t buy that time back, but you can start tracking it wisely. Use Harvest to log your billable hours, and see … Continued

According to macProVideo.com’s Founder and CEO, Martin Sitter, “Until now, macProVideo.com has been the place ‘Where Mac Users Learn.’ With the acquisition of AskVideo.com, we have purchased a great brand with over 8 years of experience in online training. AskVideo will become our primary portal for bringing our trademarked NonLinear Educating System™ to the larger world of Windows PC users.”

Huge news in the video training market. I’ve been a user of MacProVideo for years. Good luck to Martin and the gang.

NPD’s research also revealed that the lion’s share of smartphone-market growth is concentrated in the top two brands. In fact Samsung’s and Apple’s combined smartphone unit sales rose 43 percent between Q2 2011 and Q2 2012, as unit sales for other brands fell 16 percent.According to NPD, the top five smartphone brands, and their market shares, in Q2 were as follows:* Apple: 31 percent * Samsung: 24 percent * HTC: 15 percent * Motorola: 12 percent * LG: 6 percent

Sebastian Anthony for ExtremeTech:

In Curiosity’s case, the CPU is a PowerPC 750 (PowerPC G3 in Mac nomenclature) clocked at around 200MHz — which might seem slow, but it’s still hundreds of times faster than, say, the Apollo Guidance Computer used in the first Moon landings.

Enjoy. […]

Jim Dalrymple and Dan Benjamin talk about Apple’s motivations for suing Samsung, Mat Honan’s hacked life and Amazon and Apple’s security flaws (and remedies), the new Apple iPad advertisement, exotic wood, and more.Sponsored by Flixel, Squarespace (use coupon DANSENTME8 for 10% off), and Hover (use coupon DANSENTME for 10% off).

It’s been a long time since I’ve read such complete and utter shit.

Samsung’s Vice President of Electronics has released a video defending his company. C’mon, the Galaxy phone bears no similarity whatsoever to the iPhone. Absolutely none at all!

Just go watch the video. I actually laughed out loud. Great job Conan and team.

Be sure to scroll down and watch the video of Sarah’s run. Such a beautiful animal.

NPR:

His father told him he’d never amount to anything but a ditch digger, a remark he still carries with him years later.“I was sort of studying sex, drugs and rock and roll in high school,” says Steltzner. It wasn’t just the long hair. “I liked to wear this strange Air Force jump suit. And my first car was a ’69 Cadillac hearse. I put a bed in the back.”

Great story.

A no-nonsense look at managing email from Matt Gemmell.

Classic.

Federal prosecutors on Monday announced a deal to drop a criminal case against Gibson Guitar Corp. after the instrument maker acknowledged its importations of exotic wood violated environmental laws.

We’re more than halfway through 2012. You can’t buy that time back, but you can start tracking it wisely. Use Harvest to log your billable hours, and see where your business spends its time. Start a timer effortlessly from your desktop, web browser, or iPhone. Get insight into your projects with powerful, visual time reports. Turn your hours into a professional invoice in seconds. Try Harvest absolutely free for 30 days, and get back on track towards a productive finish to the year.

Great shots of Mission Control when Mars Curiosity Rover landed.

Reuters:

The full moon rises through the Olympic Rings hanging beneath Tower Bridge during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

As a photographer, you dream about getting perfect shots like these.

Wired:

The moment is almost here. In just a couple days, NASA’s new Mars rover, Curiosity, will begin its descent to the Martian surface and hopefully start beaming back amazing images and data.Unfortunately, there’s no way to watch the probe actually plunge into the Martian atmosphere and undertake the carefully orchestrated sequence of landing events known as the “Seven Minutes of Terror.” Even the radio waves that indicate the rover’s position have to obey the laws of physics and recognize the 14-minute communications delay between Earth and Mars.But there are still plenty of ways to catch the action online and feel like you’re getting a front-row seat for NASA’s next big mission.

If you can, spare some time on Sunday to watch this event – and it’s on less of a tape delay than NBC’s Olympic coverage.

Harry McCracken wishes the venerable TRS-80 microcomputer a happy 35th anniversary.

“The longer hair provides a higher UPF at the smaller SZA, but the difference between the protection provided by the longer hair compared with the shorter hair reduces with increasing SZA. Protection from UVR is provided by the facial hair; however, it is not very high, particularly at the higher SZA.”

In other words, you bastards are going to die a miserable death, while I live forever.

This week, Dan and Jim talk about the rumored iPhone announcement on September 12th, Apple’s new Mac ads, bad Mountain Lion headlines, guitars, and more!Sponsored by Smile, MailChimp, and Shopify.

Talk about a bad day. In the mother of all computer glitches, market-making firm Knight Capital Group (KCG) lost $440 million in 30 minutes on Aug. 1 when its trading software went, to use the technical term, kablooey.

Wow, now that’s a software glitch.