Revenues from online shopping on “Cyber Monday” surged 15.4 percent higher than last year, setting a new all time peak in U.S. ecommerce, with online mobile sales overwhelmingly driven by customers wielding Apple devices.

This doesn’t really surprise me that much. People seem to be very comfortable using their iOS devices for many things, including purchasing items from a variety of stores. This is something I see that sets Apple apart from its competitors—people have confidence in its products, which leads to confidence in doing other tasks, like shopping.

Petapixel:

This September, Airbus took to the skies to capture photos of five of its massive test and development A350–900s. The photo shoot was meant to celebrate the certification of the company’s latest twin-engine, wide-body jetliner.

It was also probably one of the most expensive photo shoots we’ve ever come across.

At a cool $300 million for each of the five A350–900s, the cost of the subjects alone totals $1.5 billion dollars.

Any five element photo shoot is complicated. An airborne photo shoot is a thousand times more complicated. Doing it with five massive, quarter of a million-pound aircraft is utterly remarkable. Great video.

Eddy Cue:

“We feel we have to fight for the truth,” says Cue. “Luckily, Tim feels exactly like I do,” he continues, referring to Apple CEO Tim Cook, “which is: You have to fight for your principles no matter what. Because it’s just not right.”

Preach it, brother. I agree.

Colossal:

Ontario-based photographer Stephen Orlando is fascinated with human movement and uses programmable LED light sticks attached to kayak paddles, people, racquets, and other objects to translate that movement into photographic light paintings.

As I photographer myself, from an artistic point of view, these photos are fascinating. But the technical aspect of capturing the images in this way are equally interesting.

Twitter:

In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we’re enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to “block”.

This issue is a giant hairball for Twitter but one that has been long overdue for them to address. I’m looking forward to seeing this rolled out. I’m not looking forward to seeing how it will inevitably be abused.

I really like Amazon and Bezos for that matter. I hate the way the company continues to say how good it is without providing any kind of numbers to back it up. As much as I like them, the criticism is well founded.

Tech Republic:

Jonathan Zufi decided to take some of his thousands of photos of Apple products and collect them into a giant, self-published coffee table book. The result was Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple, a 350-page tome filled with gorgeous pictures of products from Apple’s 30-year history.

I don’t think it’s the ultimate gift (a working Apple I would be), but I have this book and it is gorgeous. It would certainly make a great gift for any Apple fan.

Medium:

Every day tens of thousands of high-speed optical recognition cameras silently snap digital photos of plates, capturing in milliseconds an image of each tag and sometimes the driver as well. They are difficult to see if you’re not looking for them, but the sleek devices can be found clamped to patrol cars and the vehicles of debt chasers as well as mounted along streets and highways and in parking garages and shopping centers. A single reader, once activated, works furiously without assistance, capturing thousands of plate scans per shift.

But there are bugs.

We are being spied on in ways we don’t imagine, for reasons we can’t fathom and by “authorities” with little to no oversight.

The documents reveal that the agency worked behind the scenes for years, beginning after the release of the disco-inflected “Push Comes To Shove” single in 1981…

HAHAHAHA

“The last thing we wanted was to have another ‘Panama’ on our hands,” he added.

LOL!

“That being said, none of us could possibly have foreseen that For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge would indirectly result from our actions,” he added, solemnly shaking his head.

This is just classic. I love The Onion.

This is quite an article from former Google+ UX designer, Chris Messina.

[Via BGR]

All this time and I never knew that there was a MacPaint-like program hidden inside Preview. It’s no Pixelmator, but it’ll do in a pinch, and it’s free.

[h/t Minimal Mac]

LA Times:

Former L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said Tuesday that he didn’t know anything about the federal probe and that he had not been contacted by law enforcement.

Deasy’s own role in the iPad project drew attention after disclosures of close ties he had with executives at Apple and Pearson. Deasy, who resigned under pressure in October, has denied any wrongdoing, and board members also have said they don’t believe he was guilty of any illegal actions.

The morning after the FBI seized the documents, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said he was shelving the contract.

Cortines said his decision was not based on the surprise visit by FBI agents to district headquarters.

What a mess.

Before Lemieux, before Gretzky, there was Jean Béliveau. A sad day for hockey, a sad day for Canada.

The New York Times:

The technology, which has a microchip in the card and requires consumers to enter a PIN at checkout, has been required in Europe and some countries elsewhere for about a decade. Now, Americans retailers and banks are preparing for the wide release of the technology, in a wholesale security upgrade that will cost billions of dollars. The change will start next year and is expected to take several years to complete.

It can’t happen fast enough. Most of the rest of the world is already protected by this tech.

The Globe and Mail:

The first Shaw Fire log – Canada’s answer to what had been a sensation in New York since the 1960s – dates back to 1986; a way to broadcast content on a round-the-clock channel in Edmonton so employees could take Christmas off. Every year, Shaw’s vice-president of community programming invited his employees to his house for a party, and they taped a new fire log, which ran on a continuous loop over the holiday. It caught on elsewhere.

I’d be embarrassed to tell you how often this video plays on my TV during the holidays. Thanks to Lesley for the story link.

Use your iPad or iPhone to highlight and draw freehand on a PDF, sign a contract, make corrections, fill out an application, make comments on a presentation and much more.

A great app from a great company.

I really like Line 6 gear and software. This is one of my go-to apps for iOS.

If the XL1 was equipped with an 18 gallon fuel tank, and you did all highway driving, you could fill it up with an oil change and when the next change was due you could change the oil and keep driving without filling up for and additional 2,400 miles. But it comes with a much smaller fuel tank, because if it could go that long on a single tank chances are the fuel would foul before it got used. The tank is only 2.6 gallons to prevent fuel age related problems from happening. So fill ups are cheap.

Update: Many people have pointed to Snopes debunking this.

The band’s latest album is out and on iTunes for purchase and download. I pre-ordered it and I’m enjoying most of the songs so far.

Marco nailed this one.

Om Malik:

“Pico” is a prefix in the metric system denoting one-trillionth. It is also a small corner of the ever-growing web where I keep a record of my conversations with interesting people. Some are famous, some are young. Some are unknown, and some are wise and old. These conversations are not about technology. Instead, they are about transformation through technology as observed by those who are living through it.

Typically, these are the types of stories I enjoy reading the most.

The Essential Watermarking App for Professionals, Business and Personal Use. A new breed of iOS 8 app that works as a standalone app or photo editing extension. As an extension it can be used directly/quickly from within Apple’s Photos and other apps.

There’s versions for iPad, iPhone, Mac and other platforms too.

Algoriddim, creators of the world’s best selling DJ app with over 15 million downloads on iOS, has partnered with the AppStore and (RED) to bring you an exclusive (PRODUCT)RED version of djay. Available for a limited time only, djay 2 for iPhone and iPad contains a free (djay)RED skin as well as an exclusive (djay)RED sample pack available via In-App Purchase. From now through December 7, 100% of the proceeds when buying djay 2 or any of the (djay)RED In-App Purchases go to (RED)’s fight against AIDS.

Stand with Algoriddim, App Store, and (RED) to fight for an AIDS FREE GENERATION.

Get djay 2 on the App Store today: Mix Tracks. Save Lives.

Make your days more productive with this bundle of awesome Mac apps! Name your own price for Paperless, Data Backup 3 and Pixa, and if you pay more than the average price you’ll receive all the apps in the bundle plus an e-learning course that’ll teach you to master them all.

Looking at the page, the average price is pretty low for these 10 apps.

EE Times:

When he was diagnosed, Hawking had not even finished his doctorate in physics. He was given two years to live. However, with the help of technology from the self-proclaimed “rocket scientist” Walt Waltosz, who personally wrote the software that allowed him to get his life back, Hawking was able not only to speak to others but also to write the book A Brief History of Time, which broke all sales records by staying on the British Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks (more than four-and-a-half years). He is still using the same software to serve as director of research at the University of Cambridge Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.

Amazing to me that Hawking still uses, at its heart, the same basic software to communicate after all these years. Considering the resources at his disposal, Hawking and Waltosz really hit upon an ideal solution all those years ago.

Reuters:

Opening statements are scheduled to begin on Tuesday in an Oakland, California, federal court in the long-running class action, brought by a group of individuals and businesses who purchased iPods between 2006 and 2009. They say a 2006 iTunes update dictated that iTunes music could only be played on iPods, unfairly blocking competing device makers.

Plaintiffs are seeking about $350 million in damages, which would be automatically tripled under antitrust laws. Apple says the software update contained genuine product improvements, and thus should not be found anticompetitive.

I thought that you could always generate and export an MP3 version of any song in your iTunes library, then bring that MP3 over to any player your heart desires. I’ve owned iPods since day one, and I never had an issue bringing my music to other players.

At the heart of this case is RealPlayer and RealAudio, a dominant music streaming player and service back in the day. I sure hope Apple asks the question, how hard was it to pull music from RealAudio and play it on an iPod. I lived in both of these worlds and definitely found the path from iTunes to the outside world much simpler than the other way around.

UPDATE: According to the comments, there was a period when you could only generate an MP3 by burning a CD, then re-ripping the CD into your music library. That does ring a bell. Still, there was a path, albeit one that requires manual labor, the cost of a CD-R, and likely some signal loss.

Tom’s hardware puts a number of solid-state-drives through their paces, lays it all out for you.