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Gadling:

In honor of its upcoming 100-year anniversary, the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa is offering an amnesty for anyone who has pilfered something from the hotel over the last century. The historic, castle-like hotel in the Canadian capital has already received more than 60 items from people all over North America.“The amnesty part means there are no questions asked,” said Deneen Perrin, the hotel’s director of public relations. “It doesn’t matter whether your grandmother took a silver spoon and put it in her purse or if someone’s parents maybe worked in the hotel and took something, we’ll take it back.”

Shows how nice Canadians are.

The (unofficial) SXSW Torrents:

This torrent includes all the tracks that could be previewed on the SXSW website for SXSW 2012 as of March 6, 2012. This year’s collection includes 1,219 files totaling 7.52GB. Torrents for 2005-2011 are also available.

Would you like a buttload of free (and legal) music, from (mostly) undiscovered bands? These torrent files are your ticket.

Posterous has been acquired by Twitter, according to founder and CEO Sachin Agarwal.

AT&T is continuing to expand its 4G LTE service network with 11 new markets online by early summer.

All told, STAR went through almost a thousand rumor stories over the past six months.

The only problem I have with this is including Mac Rumors and AppleInsider.I know that sounds strange, but you expect to see rumors on those sites. They report and aggregate rumor stories for us, which is they’re whole model.

What I’m more interested in is the sites that publish rumors that don’t say they are rumor sites.

Still, fascinating findings.

Location check-in service (and Foursquare competitor) Gowalla has shut down, three months after its acquisition by Facebook.

This is just classic from Matt Thomas.

It’s possible, notes a researcher, that beards are meant not to attract women, but to “fend off other males.” Perhaps that makes sense: Males described the bearded men as older and tougher.

Women love the beard.

Time:

Do you ever have those days when you just can’t decide between an iced tea and a beer, and you think, If only I could combine them?No? Seriously, you don’t? Well, that’s not going to stop Molson Coors from launching Coors Light Iced T. The beer giant announced Tuesday it will roll out the new product in Canada next month, followed by a likely debut in the U.S. The iced-tea-flavored brew will contain 4% alcohol and no caffeine

Do. Not. Want. But I bet it still tastes better than Heinken.

Consumer Reports is looking at the Fisker Karma – an expensive electric car – and the thing broke down during the test.

Many thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Say “hello” to Piezo!

Whether you want to record a Skype conversation, save a streaming radio program, or just record a quick voice memo, Piezo can do it. It runs on Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 and it can capture audio from any application (yup, even sandboxed App Store apps).

Download Piezo free, then buy it in the App Store or directly through our store.

Anthony Kay:

680 News is a local AM station in Toronto that does all news all the time. They started a Twitter feed back in 2008 that alternately informs and annoys. Then there are times you wonder if the person tweeting is actually lucid.

A blogger at a Chicago Tribune-owned site claims the newspaper’s reporters are stealing story ideas for the print publication.

Wonder why Apple isn’t using Google Maps in iPhoto for iOS? Geoff Duncan thinks it’s because Google is insisting that new services which rely on the data let it display ads.

TECHi:

Space may or may not be the final frontier, but the television and movie series Star Trek and its subsequent incantations have sparked the imagination of sci-fi fans across the ages. From Kirk and Spock to Picard and Data, then back to a new Kirk and Spock, Star Trek has become one of the most influential fictional concepts of the modern era.From nerds to geeks to hipsters and beyond, the dreams of millions have been guided by the ideas of particle transporters, warp engines, and photon torpedoes. It is an icon of pop culture and road map towards a better distant future.

Time to get your geek on!

A look at new 1080p video from the iTunes Store suggests that Apple is doing some interesting things with compression and with the hardware on the new Apple TV and iPad.

Young Audri Clemmons built a Rube Goldberg machine, and it is awesome.

Scott Bourne corrects some incorrect assumptions about the new Lytro Field Camera.

Most of the tech press sucks, and MG Siegler calls it like he sees it.

Acer’s MacBook Air competitor may be priced lower, but it’s making the company absolutely no money.

The Guardian:

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years.While sifting through the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth work, cultural curator Erika Eichenseer found 500 fairytales, many of which do not appear in other European fairytale collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch.

I’ve always been a fan of reading the fairy tales we think we know in their “original form”. I hope these will be published soon.

The U.S. government says it has the right to seize computer domains that end in .com.

Mat Honan offers an unvarnished look at tomorrow’s Apple event through the eye of an experienced tech journalist.

Verizon has announced a home broadband service based on its 4G LTE technology.

Venture capitalist Seth Levine is getting sick of overhype in the startup community, and wants people to get back to building actual businesses.

Wired’s Gadget Lab:

Too big to be a wieldy smartphone, too small to be a generously sized tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Note hasn’t received a warm critical reception. Wired’s review ended with a 4 out of 10 verdict, Gizmodo gave it 2.5 out of 5 stars. Analysts have also been Galaxy Note skeptics.So critics and analysts have not been kind to the Galaxy Note — making recent news of strong Samsung sales figures all the more curious. Samsung is on pace to sell 10 million more before the year’s end.So why is a handset that’s being critically panned selling so well?

As an iPhone user, most of us couldn’t imagine using a slab like the Samsung Galaxy Note but it looks like it has found its niche.