The Jackson X Series Rhoads models continue the metal legacy pioneered by the immortal Randy Rhoads. Regal and proud, the RRX24 offers fantastic tone, ultra-fast playability and unbelievable value for 21st century guitarists.

Randy was so great.

> For some, it’s a staple of the American morning: a comforting routine, a good deal. Anything that costs more than $1 is needlessly expensive, a waste of money — the coffee from a deli, diner or doughnut cart is all you need to start the day. For others, the $1 cup is suspiciously cheap. Maybe it tastes bad, or its production does harm to the land and is unfair to laborers. If you have to pay more, then that is probably a reflection of a drink’s true cost.

I just want a plain cup of black coffee. No foam art, no flavored syrups, no complicated menu choices that require a second read just to understand what you’re ordering. There’s a certain honesty in black coffee that gets lost in the modern café experience. It’s hot water and ground beans, nothing more, and yet even that simple combination now sits inside layers of branding, pricing debates, and lifestyle meaning. Somewhere along the way, coffee stopped being just a drink and became a statement—about budget, taste, values, even identity. Coffee Catering Scottsdale offers different coffee drinks to suit everyone’s taste.

Worth weaving into this discussion is the practical side of getting set up, which turned out to be far simpler than I had braced myself for. When I finally sat down to compare options at https://admiralvending.co.uk/office-coffee-machines/ I found the whole process refreshingly transparent, with instant quotes rather than the drawn-out sales calls I had honestly come to dread. The support package meant installation, training and servicing were all handled without me lifting a finger, and that hands-off experience was ultimately what convinced me it was money well spent rather than another gadget destined to gather dust in a corner.

The $1 cup represents simplicity and accessibility, a reminder that not everything needs to be elevated or reimagined to be worthwhile. At the same time, the more expensive cup isn’t necessarily a scam; it can reflect better sourcing, fairer wages for farmers, and more careful preparation. In fact, the same range of experiences can be seen beyond everyday mornings—like a mobile espresso bar for events, where convenience meets quality by bringing freshly made coffee directly to gatherings without losing the craft behind it. But most mornings, those larger ideas don’t matter to the person standing in line half-awake, just wanting something warm to hold while the day begins. They aren’t thinking about global supply chains or artisanal roasting methods. They’re thinking about caffeine, routine, and getting out the door on time.

Still, it’s strange how something so basic can carry so much meaning. A cup of coffee becomes a small negotiation between comfort and conscience, between speed and quality, between what we can afford and what we think we should be paying. And yet, after all that thinking, all those comparisons, all the arguments about value and taste, I still circle back to the same simple thought: I just want a plain cup of black coffee.

Although a launch date is still unclear, when it debuts the new Spotify Apple Watch companion app will finally give Spotify listeners a comparable experience on Apple Watch as Apple Music subscribers have had over the past few years.

This is huge for Spotify users.

To celebrate the Golden State Warriors’ NBA-best regular season record—and star Kevin Durant’s return to the team just in time for the 2017 NBA Playoffs—artist, teacher and sports fan Robert Generette III shares an exclusive illustration of Durant coming to life on iPad Pro.

Wow, this is so impressive.

CNET:

The company has unveiled a new web-based drawing tool called AutoDraw, which will turn your terrible Microsoft Paint skills into actual pictures.

Just scrawl something on your phone screen with your finger (or on your desktop with a mouse) and Google’s machine learning will detect what you’re trying to draw, and fix it up for you.

Ignoring the headline, AutoDraw can be very helpful for people like me who can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.

Business Insider:

Imagine going to work at 7:30 every night and spending the next 12 hours, including meals and breaks, inside a factory where your only job is to insert a single screw into the back of a smartphone, repeating the task over and over and over again.

During the day, you sleep in a shared dorm room, and in the evening, you wake up and start all over again.

That’s the routine that Dejian Zeng experienced when he spent six weeks working at an iPhone factory near Shanghai, China, last summer.

Factory work is never easy. It’s often mindless, tedious work.

John Warren Geils Jr., better known as J. Geils, the guitarist of the the J. Geils Band, was found dead in his home in Groton, Massachusetts Tuesday. He was 71. Rolling Stone has confirmed Geils’ death. According to Groton Police, “a preliminary investigation indicates that Geils died of natural causes.”

R.I.P.

Tower:

When Steve Jobs presented the first iPhone in 2007, it was of course the device that gained center stage. The software that powered it (running on the same foundation as Mac OS) was only mentioned briefly.

Only several years later would it occupy its rightful place – as a major brand by itself.

This is amazingly well done.

Apple updated TestFlight today and outlined the changes on its developer web site.

Welcome to Grid Garden, where you write CSS code to grow your carrot garden! Water only the areas that have carrots by using the grid-column-start property.

Have fun learning.

Drawing on your phone or computer can be slow and difficult—so we created AutoDraw, a new web-based tool that pairs machine learning with drawings created by talented artists to help you draw.

That’s pretty cool.

Apple has filed a complaint in a Swiss court over the use of the slogan “Tick Different” in a Swatch marketing campaign, arguing that the watchmaker is unfairly referencing the Californian company’s successful 1990s “Think Different” ad campaign for its own gain.

Seems pretty obvious to me.

CTV News:

The Bank of Canada has placed an Easter egg on its website promoting the new $10 bill.

If visitors to the website enter the right series of keys, it plays the national anthem and fills the screen with a shower of tiny animated banknotes.

The central bank unveiled the design for the new $10 bank note last week to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation.

I can’t tell – is this nerdy, cool, or Nerdy Cool?

CNET:

UK-based analyst Juniper Research released a new study today that showed the number of “contactless” Apple Pay users nearly doubled with the total number of Apple Pay users reaching 86 million by the end of 2017. Android Pay (Google) and Samsung Pay usage also had big increases in usage. However, according to the study, Apple was expected to dominate the contactless payment market over the next 4 years.

Take these studies with a grain of salt but (having never used the alternatives) I’ve found Apple Pay on my phone, even for internet transactions, frighteningly easy and compelling to use.

MarketWatch:

Qualcomm Inc. fired back at Apple Inc. in their legal battle, defending its business model and seeking damages from Apple over withheld payments for technology used in iPhones.

Qualcomm, whose chips and patents are widely used in smartphones, accused Apple of mischaracterizing the chip maker’s business and encouraging international regulators to attack it.

The other shoe has dropped.

Now you can send Starbucks Gifts with iMessage with Apple Pay. Be one of the first to send a $5 or more Starbucks Gift via iMessage and receive a $5 Starbucks Gift for yourself – while supplies last.

Do something nice for a Starbucks fan in your life.

CNET:

We geeks who spent hours of our adolescence playing Dungeons & Dragons always had to explain what we were doing to parents and grandparents who didn’t understand the appeal of pretending to be elves and wizards.

But the new YouTube series “D&D AARPG” on the Geek & Sundry channel takes it a step further and invites seniors to actually play D&D themselves for the first time.

In the first episode of “D&D AARPG,” which aired in February, the seniors choose their characters and get the hang of pretending to be druids, dwarves and elves. The second episode, posted on April 6, shows the seniors having even more fun during their quest. Dungeon/game master Amy Vorpahl does a great job impersonating witches, ogres and other characters to the seniors’ delight.

These are really fun videos to watch. They bring me back to my D&D playing days in high school and college.

In today’s hyper-connected landscape, users demand software that travels seamlessly with them across all their devices. We are seeing a massive industry-wide shift toward borderless digital environments; whether consumers are managing cloud-based productivity suites, streaming high-definition multimedia content, or exploring interactive Ethereum casinos, the modern expectation is absolute continuity regardless of the hardware. Algoriddim embraces this exact philosophy. djay Pro, our award-winning DJ application, is already available for macOS, iOS, and Android. Now it’s also on Windows 10, bridging a native desktop and touch experience across every platform and fulfilling our mission of making everyone a DJ. Anywhere. Any time. Any platform.

TechCrunch:

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: “I stand with airline pilots, flight attendants, and America’s flying public against the FCC’s ill-conceived 2013 plan to allow people to make cellphone calls on planes. I do not believe that moving forward with this plan is in the public interest. Taking it off the table permanently will be a victory for Americans across the country who, like me, value a moment of quiet at 30,000 feet.”

I am unreasonably happy over this decision.

Product Hunt:

I love using small and focused menubar apps and hope to discover some gems I didn’t know of.

I try to keep my menu bar items to a bare minimum but there are some great suggestions here.

economist:

For as long as there have been cars, there has been a need to store them when they are not moving—which, these days, is about 95% of the time. Washington, DC, had a parking garage in 1907, before Ford produced its first Model T.

Parking can seem like the most humdrum concern in the world. Even planners, who thrill to things like zoning and floor-area ratios, find it unglamorous. But parking influences the way cities look, and how people travel around them, more powerfully than almost anything else.

Parking isn’t one of those things you think about until you can’t find a space. But is surprising how it can affect the livability of an area.

Vox:

Astrologers regularly blame Mercury retrograde for a variety of everyday communication problems. But underneath those interpretations lies a much more interesting story about the limits of our Earth-bound perspective and the discovery of the solar system.

Really good explainer of the seemingly bizarre movement of Mars and Mercury in our night sky.

In 2012, Twitter fought the New York District Attorney so protect tweets sent by an Occupy Wall Street protester, and in 2014 it sued the U.S. government so that it could share these kinds of user information requests more publicly. Then in 2015, Twitter successfully protected the identity of two anonymous users who were being sued for defamation.

And the company also gets into legal fights where it doesn’t even have a stake. In early 2016, Twitter signed an amicus brief alongside Google in support of PubPeer, a website that allows people to comment anonymously on scholarly articles. PubPeer was being sued by a professor who received unflattering anonymous comments about his work.

Twitter does deserve kudos for this.

What were you doing when you were 12? Getting quite good at Guitar Hero? Clumsily finding your way around a real instrument? Maybe even attempting a jam session with some of your mates?

Let’s face it, you weren’t going on tour through South America with a Grammy award-winning, platinum-selling metal band, were you? Not unless you’re Tye Trujillo, who has just signed up to play for Korn while their bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu is unable to tour with them.

Robert Trujillo is one of my favorite bassists of all time and there’s no doubt that his son is very talented too. This is pretty amazing.

I can’t speak to what the other five types of users need, but I have a pretty good idea of what I’d want as an iOS developer who uses a Mac every day. Not that anyone in Cupertino is asking me, but if they did I’d say this is my dream Mac.

A very nice article on what’s needed from a developer’s point of view.

This is just awful. Why do people have to be like this?

Geek Wire:

The Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle is home to some of the most noteworthy machines ever created. But a new exhibit opening this week will showcase what one official at the Paul Allen-founded institution called “the most important computer in history.”

Lāth Carlson, executive director of Living Computers, added to that designation by saying the metal box with a keyboard is “also the most boring to look at.” But for fans of computing and Apple in particular, the Apple I that once sat in founder Steve Jobs’ office is exciting for a whole host of reasons.

This is definitely a museum I’ll check out next time I’m in Seattle.

Financial Review:

Apple’s obsessive secrecy, coupled with the extreme demands it makes of its manufacturers and the competition to join their ranks, means its suppliers dare not put a foot wrong. Apple’s patronage is a blessing when everything is going well but it can quickly become a curse. The consequences of a break-up can be devastating, as London-listed chip designer Imagination Technologies discovered this week.

It has been said of being a supplier to Walmart that, “it’s the best and worse thing that can happen to your company”. I’ve heard the same about Apple.