This web site is really cool. You can listen to radio stations from around the world.

Adequate Man:

Life as we know may end, but the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and the army of little Ina Gartens who have seemingly unlimited cash to spend on its wares, will endure. They shall adorn their houses in the finest garlands and pass around only the choicest amuse bouches, and everything will be PERFECT even as the world burns a mile away. OH, IT’LL BE SO GRAND THAT YOU’LL WANNA PUKE.

I admit to loving Williams-Sonoma stores, primarily for the gadgets, but this rant about the catalog is hilarious and definitely NSFW.

Macrumors:

Apple has updated its website to indicate its all-new BeatsX wireless earphones will be available in February in the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, and several other countries, after originally saying they would launch in the Fall. Online pre-orders can still not be placed at this time.

BeatsX earphones feature Bluetooth and the same Apple W1 chip used by AirPods, which launched today, enabling users to pair them by simply powering them on and holding them near an iPhone. Unlike the truly wireless AirPods, the BeatsX have a Flex-Form cable that keeps the earpieces tethered to each other.

The rumor mill is going crazy with the reasons behind these issues but the bottom line is Apple is having a hard time with its earphone products and it’s getting a little embarrassing for them.

We make safe and useful apps for Mac, PC and Linux trusted by millions. Try Video Downloader, YouTube to MP3 tool & Instagram downloader, you’ll love it!

Apple today announced AirPods are available to order online now from Apple.com and will start delivering to customers and arriving at Apple Stores, Apple Authorized Resellers and select carriers next week.

This is great news. I’ve been using these since they were announced in September and you will love them.

HBO press release:

THE DEFIANT ONES, a four-part documentary event, will debut on HBO in 2017, it was announced today by Casey Bloys, president, HBO Programming. Director Allen Hughes (“Menace II Society”) has made an unquestionably bold film about the unlikely but ultimately unbreakable bond of trust and friendship between two street-smart men from different worlds who have shaped many of the most exciting and extreme moments in recent pop culture.

And:

Set amid many of the defining events of the past four decades, THE DEFIANT ONES tells the stories of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre — one the son of a Brooklyn longshoreman, the other straight out of Compton — and their improbable partnership and surprising leading roles in a series of transformative events in contemporary culture.

And:

Allen Hughes filmed Iovine and Dre over a three-year period in making THE DEFIANT ONES. In addition to extensive interviews with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, who speak frankly about their highs and lows, the show includes interviews with such music icons as Bono, David Geffen, Eminen, Nas, Ice Cube, Gwen Stefani, Jon Landau, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Bruce Springsteen and will.i.am. The series also features never-before-seen footage from a multitude of recording and writing sessions with Eazy-E, JJ Fad, Stevie Nicks, N.W.A., Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and U2, among others.

I will definitely watch this.

From a source close to Trump’s transition team:

Those items, said the source, are U.S.-focused job creation, and how these tech firms can work with government to improve efficiency.

Among those attending the meeting will be Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

According to Apple’s System Status page, the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store, and the Mac App Store are currently unavailable for some users, making it impossible to do things like purchase new apps and download app updates.

I’m affected by this. I’m also getting a message that says iTunes can’t process purchases right now.

More people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. Our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever, and the combination of excitement for the innovation of Surface coupled with the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro – especially among professionals – is leading more and more people to make the switch to Surface, like this. It seems like a new review recommending Surface over MacBook comes out daily. This makes our team so proud, because it means we’re doing good work.

Microsoft has come out with things like this in the past for products competing with Apple, including a mock funeral for the iPod years ago—the number of times they’ve done that makes it hard for me to believe them. However, if this is true, Apple has a problem.

Benjamin Mayo:

Apple is rolling out a fix for the iCloud Calendar spam issue that has plagued users over the past few weeks. On iCloud.com, the company has added a new Report Junk feature. This lets users remove spammy invites from their calendar and reports the sender to Apple for further investigation.

The feature is currently only available on Apple’s iCloud.com Calendar web app but it is likely to roll out to the iOS and Mac native Calendar in a future software update.

Great, great, great!

This is a fascinating article on WSJ. It profiles a new service called Music Aficionado that caters to getting the older crowd to pay for music.

Although older, wealthier fans raised in the age of record stores make up the demographic that is most comfortable with the idea of paying for music, they’ve been among the most reluctant groups to pay for monthly streaming subscriptions, which offer ad-free access to up to tens of millions of songs.

I’ve seen this myself. People with millions of dollars that are using free services or just using their own music, instead of paying for a service. I pay for Pandora, Apple Music, and Spotify, but I’m not sure any of them really talk to me as a long-time music buyer and listener. Pandora is probably the best, followed by Spotify, but it feels like Pandora’s new service may have an edge in this next year because their new service will be tailored around what you listen to and like instead of pushing the music the service wants you to listen to.

While older consumers can generally be slower to adopt new technology, there are other factors at play. Streaming companies have been primarily built by young techies and generally use what Mr. Penn calls a “DJ model” to cater to a younger audience, promoting pop-heavy playlists that serve primarily as soundtracks for activities such as partying, exercising and “chilling.” Record companies, meantime, haven’t rushed to convert their album buyers to subscribers, since physical music sales are still highly profitable and accounted for nearly 40% of the recorded music industry’s global revenue last year.

The over-50 “demo is largely being ignored in the digital world even though these folks are the most passionate about music because they lived all of it the first time around,” said Fred Goldring, a 58-year-old veteran music lawyer.

Agreed. This is why I think Pandora has a chance—they’ll show me what I want to see as a music listener.

When I open up Apple Music and see the newest Pop/Hip Hop in my “For You” section, one of two things is happening: Either Apple’s “Love” feature doesn’t actually work, or they are pushing these albums to all users regardless of their choices. Either way, it’s not good for the user.

“Just seeing how defenses are playing me, playing us,” James told cleveland.com. “Kind of watching and paying attention to the minutes I was in, so at the last three minutes of the first quarter when I come out, I can watch and see from when I was in. Then I go back in for the second, and I get it once again at the six minute mark of the second quarter. Just trying to stay above the curve and see how i can help.”

James is the only one using the iPad on the Cavs at this point, but he’s using it wisely. Studying how the other team is playing him on the court and seeing if he can come up with ways for the Cavs to counteract that.

James Thomson found himself an old Apple collectible that might be pretty valuable. Start here, then follow the thread.

Shigeru Miyamoto, in an interview with glixel:

Glixel: What’s it been like working with Apple? How did the partnership for Super Mario Run come about? They’re supporting it a lot more than they usually do with individual games.

Miyamoto: The timing was really fortunate for both of us. On the Nintendo side we’d been talking a lot about going into the mobile space but we hadn’t decided that we were going to make a Mario game for smartphones. As we were talking about what we were going to create we started asking ourselves about what a Mario game would need to be. So we were experimenting with some things and we came up with the base idea, and that’s what we eventually showed to Apple.

Part of the reason we took it to Apple was that in order for us to have the performance we wanted we needed some development support to ensure that the game would run the way we expected. Because Nintendo is always trying to do something unique we also wanted to try and do something different on the business side too. We really didn’t want to do something in the free to play space, but in order to make sure we had the opportunity to do what we wanted [offer a taste of the game for free, and charge $9.99 to unlock the whole thing], we had to talk to the people who are actually running the shop. Naturally the people on the App Store initially told us that the free-to-play approach is a good one, but I’ve always had this image that Apple and Nintendo have very similar philosophies. As we started working together, I found that to be true and they became very welcoming of trying something new.

If you are a gaming fan, take a few minutes to read the interview.

Shigeru Miyamoto is an incredibly influential part of modern gaming’s history. The Super Mario and Zelda franchises are his creations.

The game Super Mario Run carries that DNA, that gaming delight, over to the iPhone. And somehow it does that in a game that only requires a single finger to play.

I had no idea. I have to say, that really is one ugly Mac. That said, ugly is in the eye of the beholder.

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld:

Right now, my iMac’s uptime (the time since my last restart) is nearly four days. And Safari is using 6.81GB of RAM, by far the largest memory hog on my Mac. The app itself is using about 1GB, but each tab, each window also uses RAM. You can see this in Activity Monitor (located in /Applications/Utilities), by selecting the Memory tab.

And:

As you can see [in the image in Kirk’s original post], the most egregious RAM user is Google Docs, which requires more than 500MB RAM for a single, blank document. Open a few more Google docs, and you’ll see that number quickly balloon. (It’s not clear whether this is Google’s fault or Apple’s fault.)

A lot of this memory usage depends on how long the pages or tabs have been open. If I launch Safari on my 12-inch MacBook, and open the exact same tabs, it only uses 2.8GB RAM. Of course, if I leave them open for a long time, that RAM usage will increase.

I fired up Activity Monitor on my Mac and tapped the Memory tab. My Safari only used 321MB (Less than 1/3 of Kirk’s 1GB).

I then created a new Google Doc blank document which used 193MB (again, much less than Kirk’s result), and added more Google Doc documents, each of which weighed in at slightly less than the original.

I don’t doubt Kirk’s results, but I suspect that there’s more here than simply Safari being a memory hog. It’d be interesting to see a more controlled experiment, loading known pages in a controlled environment after a fresh restart.

The Next Web:

San Francisco Police Department has released footage of two recent Apple store robberies in the Bay Area, which took place on November 25 and November 29 (respectively) in the vicinity of Chestnut Street in San Francisco.

The first video captures three perpetrators daringly walk in, grab whatever they can and swiftly storm out – and all of that in the window of less than 15 seconds. Similarly, the second clip catches four men perform the same maneuver with almost identical pace.

In both cases, startled staff and customers merely watch the criminals make off with a bunch of gadgets in their hands.

It’d be interesting to know what Apple is doing about this problem, if anything. Does this fall into the category of nuisance, a small enough loss that Apple writes down the loss and moves on? Is there a stealth effort, after the fact, that tracks down the thieves via a Find My iPhone type mechanism?

Recode:

Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are among the small group of top tech leaders who will attend a summit with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday at Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to numerous sources with knowledge of the situation.

Those who will be attending (although most of the companies declined to comment to Recode) along with Page, Cook and Sandberg, include: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; and Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

“I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can,” said Catz in a statement. “If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of this meeting.

Being a session guitarist is a vastly different gig than being a member of a band in the studio. Session guitarists are a great breed of musicians that can be very helpful on a project if asked.

Longreads:

You walk into a local multiplex a few minutes after the lights have dimmed. You find your seat to the first trailer, some confection involving superheroes or zombies. As the light flickers over you, strings churn from the speakers, interrupted at certain intervals by a massive blast of indistinguishable brass, like an alphorn next to an amplifier.

The internet and the sound’s creator refer to it as BRAAAM. It may sound synthetic, but it’s usually produced with brass instruments and a prepared piano. Although it has its roots in a scoring style composer Hans Zimmer employed for much of the early ’00s, the BRAAAM heard in seemingly every trailer was first recorded for Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception, and has been adapted, copied, and even outright sampled ever since. Is BRAAAM something that happened to us, or is it something we, as moviegoers, desired?

Along with the “Wilhelm Scream“, probably one of the most recognizable, and therefore annoying, sounds in movies today.

Scientific American:

A dash of graphene can transform the stretchy goo known as Silly Putty into a pressure sensor able to monitor a human pulse or even track the dainty steps of a small spider.

The material, dubbed G-putty, could be developed into a device that continuously monitors blood pressure, its inventors hope. It also demonstrates a form of self-repair that may herald smarter graphene composites.

Example number eighty gazillion of how cool science is.

Popular Science:

Each year, Popular Science picks the 100 greatest new innovations in science and technology to feature in our Best Of What’s New issue. These are the breakthroughs that will shape the future—and some may even make great Christmas presents.

There are some really cool and really expensive potential gifts on this list.

manytricks:

If you ask either of us for our opinion on the best place to buy Mac software, here’s our opinionated answer: We strongly recommend buying direct over using the Mac App Store.

At a personal level, we both always try to buy direct, using the App Store only when there’s no direct alternative.

Why do we think you should buy direct? Because we feel the advantages of buying from the Mac App Store are greatly outweighed by the disadvantages of buying from the Mac App Store.

Here’s a comparison of the two methods of buying, with what we view as some of the pros and cons of each.

The Mac App Store works for those who want more of a hands off approach but I’ve always preferred to buy direct from the developer. This piece does a good job of laying out the pros and cons of each method.

While the exact reason for the delay remains unclear, a person familiar with the development of AirPods told The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s troubles appear to be related to its “efforts to chart a new path for wireless headphones,” in addition to resolving what happens when users lose one of the earpieces or the battery dies.

I’ve been using the AirPods since they were introduced at the event and I love them. I’ve had a couple of very minor issues over the last couple of months, but nothing significant. These things are going to sell really well.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Friday that a software update for Galaxy Note 7 smartphones will be released mid-December in the United States preventing them from charging and functioning as mobile phones, rendering them useless.

Good, they are dangerous to the general public.

However, Verizon Communications Inc said it would not take part in the update because of the added risk this could pose to Galaxy Note7 users that do not have another device to switch to.

Are you kidding me? These things have caught on fire mid-flight!