An eatery in Trenton, NJ, previously known as Weedman’s Joint — that sells food only in a weed-themed setting — is rebranding as “Weedbukx”. I give it 30 days before Starbucks AND Exxon file a trademark suit against them.

I can’t imagine it’ll take that long.

iMore:

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives votes on an already-passed joint resolution from the Senate. This bill would repeal the FCC’s 2016 privacy rules on how ISPs can and can’t use your private data.

In plain English: If you connect to the internet using a service like Charter, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, or others, those companies are currently bound against doing certain things with your data. By passing this bill, Congress (and the President) would remove that barrier.

Regardless of the “I don’t have anything to hide” argument, this is something everyone should be concerned with.

Fortune:

Costco is a retailing colossus. Its worldwide sales trail only those of Walmart, which has 11,528 stores to Costco’s 715, and Amazon, which just climbed into second place. Costco is the world’s largest seller of choice and prime beef, organic foods, rotisserie chicken, and wine (!), and it moves more nuts than Planters. Its private label, Kirkland Signature, which sells everything from packaged goods and beverages to apparel, generates more revenues than the Coca-Cola Co.

But Costco, big as it is, prides itself on not being your typical multibillion-dollar company. That is where the culture comes in.

Costco became a phenomenon by doing things its own way. But with Amazon ever more powerful, millennial shoppers burgeoning, and a new generation of leaders awaiting its turn, can the company preserve its edge?

I’m not a big box store fan but this story about Costco was fascinating.

Macworld:

The BeatsX headphones fix my biggest annoyance with the AirPods, which is their reliance on Siri. BeatsX has a microphone so you can use Siri to queue up music or make a phone call, but since the two earbuds are connected with a wire, there’s room for a three-button remote, which lets you adjust the volume and control playback without getting Siri involved.

That’s a really big deal. The BeatsX also offers superior comfort, longer battery life, and more convenient charging, but just the existence of the inline remote makes these the winner over the $159 AirPods. BeatsX even costs $9 less and comes in colors. It’s barely a contest, unless you’re totally hooked on the AirPods’ wire-free style.

Everyone rightfully raves about the AirPods but they are not necessarily the best for everyone. Read this review for info about the new BeatsX.

Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] suspended its pilot program for driverless cars on Saturday after a vehicle equipped with the nascent technology crashed on an Arizona roadway, the ride-hailing company and local police said.

That doesn’t sound good, but…

The accident occurred when the driver of a second vehicle “failed to yield” to the Uber vehicle while making a turn, said Josie Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the Tempe Police Department.

I’m not sure that any car, driverless or not, could have avoided a crash in this situation.

Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) said on Monday it plans to sell refurbished versions of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphones that were pulled from markets due to fire-prone batteries.

How could you possibly trust this device?

Click through to the ad, then either click (or tap) to step through the pages or, if you are on a larger display, click the magnifying glass for a larger version.

I found the whole thing fascinating. Guns without orange tips, a full size 10-speed bike for $69.99, a Nintendo set that came with a robot, so much chewy goodness.

I normally avoid these slide show advertising buckets, but this is Jason Snell and, per usual, he does a nice job. In this case, he walks through a set of 25 examples of Workflow in action. If you’ve never used the app, make your way through the examples to get a sense of what Workflow can do.

Interested in learning about Clips? Read this CNET article, or just watch the video embedded below.

The Guardian:

The US-UK ban on selected electronic devices from the passenger cabins of flights from some countries in north Africa and the Middle East was partly prompted by a previously undisclosed plot involving explosives hidden in a fake iPad, according to a security source.

When it was sneakers and underwear, they did not ban sneakers and underwear. This seems arbitrary at best.

theverge:

Drake’s latest project More Life was streamed 300 million times worldwide in its first week on Apple Music, Republic Records tells The Verge, surpassing the 250 million streams the label said Views, an Apple Music exclusive, did in its first week last year. The biggest first week for any album on a single service is Ed Sheeran’s Divide, which was streamed 375 million times on Spotify. The label also says early calculations for More Life have it at around 600 million streams worldwide, which would be a record for an album.

Drake has been tied at the hip with Apple Music since it launched in 2015, releasing a series of exclusive songs and albums through the service and on OVO Sound Radio, with his co-manager Oliver El-Khatib serving as the usual host. And More Life debuted on the most recent episode. “What we saw on Drake’s radio show were TV numbers,” says Jimmy Iovine. The episode set the record for the most listened to Beats 1 show to date.

Those are incredible numbers.

Engadget: >Japanese toilets have long been a mainstay in Asian households, but the concept is still something of a curiosity in much of the Western world. Toto, Japan’s biggest toilet maker, has attempted to market its high-tech commodes to American audiences for decades with little success. The company is trying to change all this with a brand new “experiential” showroom that launched this week in San Francisco. It’s called Concept 190, and it’s equipped with four sensor-laden bathrooms where visitors are invited to pee, poo and have a toilet experience unlike anything they’ve had before.

I experienced Toto toilets in Tokyo. Mind-blowing tech for something so “simple”. Maintaining a clean and efficient toilet system such as this one is essential for every home, and items like septic tank bacteria play a crucial role in achieving this. These products are specifically designed to enhance the health of your septic system by introducing beneficial bacteria that break down organic waste, grease, and other materials. By doing so, they prevent clogs, reduce odors, and minimize the risk of costly repairs or backups. Septic tank bacteria are especially beneficial for households relying on septic systems, as they ensure the tank operates at peak efficiency, reducing the need for frequent pumping. Additionally, these bacteria help maintain a balanced ecosystem within the septic tank, promoting the natural decomposition process and prolonging the system’s lifespan. Regular use of septic tank bacteria is an environmentally friendly approach, as it reduces the reliance on harsh chemicals that can harm plumbing and disrupt the delicate balance of the septic system.

Macworld:

If you aren’t using two-factor authentication to protect your Apple ID and iCloud account, you really should do it today. Hackers who claim to have millions of stolen iCloud credentials are demanding Apple pay a ransom or they’ll release them—and ZDNet obtained a sample set of credentials and determined they’re real.

But guess what? Using two-factor authentication should protect you completely. It’s easy to set up, so take a minute and do it now.

Do it. Do it now. Yes, it’s inconvenient and a PITA. But one day, you’ll thank me.

Apple today released a revised version of iTunes 12.6, which appears to eliminate a hidden option that may have accidentally been built into the software release.

Shortly after the original release of iTunes 12.6 on Tuesday, a reddit user discovered a “Show on Profile Page” toggle on a Playlist edit page.

Apple is quite clearly looking at social networking in iTunes once again. It makes me cringe to think that they are still trying to be social with music. I suppose it’s another place they can push artists that they pay millions of dollars to have exclusive rights to their music.

My thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop with SD Clone 3 this week.

If you do any projects that use SD cards (like the Raspberry Pi), check out SD Clone. SD Clone makes an exact copy of your SD card right on your Mac and makes it easy to restore back to either a single SD card or multiple SD cards at once. You’ve spent a lot of time getting a Raspberry Pi project exactly right and want to make an image of your SD card to protect all that work. SD Clone makes creating an image simple. If you want to make multiple of copies of that SD card to start shipping your project, SD Clone restores up to 8 SD cards at once, making it super fast to do something that was slow and painful before. SD Clone can also check any SD card to make sure it is not failing or isn’t a counterfeit. Learn about these features and more here.

Get 50% off all editions of SD Clone 3 this week with coupon code SDCLONELOOP

David Chartier, writing about an experience at AltConf in 2015, when the Apple Watch was brand new:

It was a good keynote, but my favorite part happened in the Metreon theater. About 50 minutes in, a cacophony of Apple Watches all beeped nearly at once—according to the Activity features, it was time for us to stand.

Beautiful. A real moment in time.

BBC:

A four-year-old boy saved his mother’s life by using her thumb to unlock her iPhone and then asking it to call 999.

Roman, who lives in Kenley, Croydon, south London, used the phone’s voice control – Siri – to call emergency services.

Police and paramedics were sent to the home and were able to give live-saving first aid to his mother.

Great story.

Anita Balakrishnan, CNBC:

Apple said on Tuesday that Swift Playgrounds would be available in Simplified Chinese. Swift Playgrounds is an app, only available on iPads, that helps kids learn to code through games. Not only does Playgrounds help kids learn to code, but it teaches them Apple’s new coding language, Swift, released in 2014.

And:

Getting kids hooked has historically been part of Apple’s long game for the iPad — Steve Jobs once told Barack Obama that it was “absurd” that teachers still used chalkboards instead of iPads.

This is an important move that got little attention. This is Apple paying great attention to the details in opening up the iOS device market in China, paving the way via education. Smart.

This is like an external keyboard case with a slot for an iPhone (or an iPad), except with this model, there’s an external display that is driven by the iOS device’s processor.

Neat idea. A bit of a missing link between iOS and macOS.

Fascinating post by Ed Fries, who led the team that created the original Xbox for Microsoft, on hearing the legend of the very first arcade Easter egg and his quest to track it down.

Great, great read with lots of detail and pictures.

LifeHacker:

At a glance, Magnet ($7.99, but it’s on sale right now for $1.49) is like any window snapping tool. You can organise windows neatly side-by-side, in fullscreen, quarters, thirds or any combination of those you want. You can manage windows by dragging them, setting up keyboard shortcuts, or by using the menu bar. This alone is helpful for someone like me, who typically has dozens of windows open of varying sizes all stacked in a disorganised way that makes me spend more time in the app switcher than I’d like. If I do ever bother to manually resize a window, it’s usually just to make it large enough to peek out from another stack of apps.

What sets Magnet apart from other options is the sheer amount of polish.

I’ve been a Magnet user for years. I love it.

Fortune:

Apple is reassuring customers that its systems have not been breached while a hacker, or hackers, threaten to remotely wipe hundreds of millions iPhones of all their data, including photos, videos, and messages.

The hackers are using an alleged cache of stolen email accounts and passwords as leverage in an attempt to extort the world’s most valuable company. They claim to have access to as many as 559 million Apple email and iCloud accounts, Vice blog Motherboard reported on Tuesday.

Want to be on the safe side? Enable two-factor authentication.