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.

International Business Times:

A future iPhone could protect itself from falls by using the vibration motor to adjust its centre of gravity, meaning smashed screens may be a thing of the future-past.

A patent awarded to Apple by the US Patent and Trademark Office this week, describes a “protective mechanism for an electronic device” and calls on the iPhone’s processing power to recognise a fall, calculate the potential impact, and work at lightening speed to come up with a plan to save the fragile glass screen.

Once the phone’s speed of descent, time to impact and any degrees of spin have been calculated using the accelerometer and gyroscope already fitted to current iPhones, the system then calls on the vibration motor to fire, which shifts the handset’s centre of gravity, countering the spin and ensuring it lands screen-up.

Fantastic. Like a cat!

Issue 30 of The Loop Magazine posted yesterday on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. We have nine stories available in the latest release, including a couple on iTunes Festival London that took place in September; Nathan Barham looks at tools for education; Johannes Zhou tells us what memory athletes do; Darren Murph talks about what he learned from buying his mother an iPhone; Rob Annese looks at his experience being an iPhone convert; Brock Winstead looks at real estate and Zillow; Alex Davies delves into Google search and advertising; and finally Darren Murph takes us on vacation… for a tenth of the price it would normally cost in “Travel Hacking.”

The Loop Magazine costs $1.99 per month and you get about nine articles to read. There is a preview of each article in this month’s issue, so you can try before you buy.

Tekrevue:

So, what does this mean? At best, it means only very modest improvements for some models, certainly less than most would expect from a system as old as the 2012 Mac mini. At worst, it means a dramatic decrease in performance, with some 2012 configurations absolutely destroying their 2014 counterparts in multi-core workflows.

The good, bad and downright ugly of the latest Mac mini. Not a machine I have a lot of faith in recommending.

The Independent:

Turn off the spine-tingling music and forget everything you thought you knew about this solitary, “mindless killing machine”. Sharks have individual personalities. They socialise, choose best friends and create social networks of unusual complexity. They can be trained by humans to complete simple tasks, much more quickly than rabbits or cats, for instance, and retain the knowledge for much longer.

Sharks also teach each other new tricks: how to find food, identify predators and charm mates. Like sea turtles, some travel huge distances to return to their own birthplace, again and again, to give birth themselves. Most don’t need to swim continuously to survive. And rather than being near-blind and reliant on smell, which is the general perception, they in fact have advanced sight. They feel pain. And the boldest sharks face a greater risk of dying before adulthood.

Why does any of this matter? Well, we’re killing about 100 million sharks every year, 11,000 an hour.

Like many of us, I have been fascinated by sharks since first seeing the movie “Jaws” as a kid. But, far from giving me nightmares, it instilled a lifelong fascination with these amazing animals.

Animagraffs:

Speakers push and pull surrounding air molecules in waves that the human ear interprets as sound. You could even say that hearing is movement detection. So what makes a speaker travel back and forth at just the right rate and distance, and how does that make sound?

I thought I knew how speakers worked. After watching this cool web page, I realized I had no clue how speakers worked.

Washington Post:

Imagine for a second that your job is to gather intelligence on government officials in Washington, or financiers in London, or entrepreneurs in San Francisco. Imagine further that there existed a database that collected daily travel information on such people with GPS-quality precision– where they went, when they went there and who else went to those same places at the same times.

Now add that all this location data was not held by a battle-hardened company with tons of lawyers and security experts, such as Google. Instead, this data was held by a start-up that was growing with viral exuberance – and with so few privacy protections that it created a “God View” to display the movements of riders in real-time and at least once projected such information on a screen for entertainment at a company party.

And let’s not forget that individual employees could access historical data on the movements of particular people without their permission, as an Uber executive in New York City reportedly did when he pulled the travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter who was working on a story about the company.

Wouldn’t that strike you as a hacking opportunity of remarkable awesomeness?

Interesting speculative piece.

More tech deals for today. Go get ’em.

Sony Pictures was hacked last week, bringing its operations to a halt. From Deadline.com:

Things have come to a standstill at Sony today, after the computers in New York and around the world were infiltrated by a hacker. As a precaution, computers in Los Angeles were shut down while the corporation deals with the breach. It has basically brought the whole global corporation to an electronic standstill. I’d heard that this began with a skull appearing on screens, and then a strangely ominous message telling users they’d been hacked by something called #GOP. It gets more bizarre as the message claims this is just the beginning and then threatens to release documents by 11 PM this evening. There is no reason given why this is happening, and no specific demands. Mentioned are websites in places around the world, some of which don’t even function.

Now, Sony has discovered that at least five screeners (review copies of unreleased motion pictures) have been leaked on-line. From Variety:

“Fury” has been downloaded by over 888,000 unique IP addresses since showing up on peer-to-peer networks on Nov. 27, according to piracy-tracking firm Excipio. That’s high enough to be the second most-downloaded movie currently being pirated, and it’s not out of movie theaters yet.

Another big Sony movie, “Annie,” is also being pirated, this one three weeks ahead of its own wide release. Other Sony movies being downloaded include “Mr. Turner,” “Still Alice” and “To Write Love on Her Arms.”

There is some speculation that North Korea is behind this, in retaliation for Sony’s upcoming comedy, The Interview, in which James Franco and Seth Rogen run a tabloid news show and score an interview with Kim Jong-un which turns into an assassination attempt.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

In the market for an iPad mini, iMac, or MacBook? Ready to buy one today? Read on.

The Roosevelts:

2014 is coming to an end and if you didn’t get all the majestic locations checked off your travel bucket list this year we have 50 photos that inspired awe and wonderment in 2014.

Spectacular images showing the awesome beauty of our planet.