I agree with Graham on this. Far too often I come across mixes that are just packed with plug-ins, and that takes away from the sound you’re trying to achieve. The best way to get yourself out of the habit is to use one channel strip plug-in and shape the sound with it. After you’re comfortable doing that, you can add the odd plug-in to the mix to enhance the sound.

I loved reading this story by Kara Swisher profiling Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber. It takes guts and a lot of belief in your company to do what Kalanick did to get Uber off the ground.

This is an absolutely fascinating, and scary, story.

BFD Oblivion is an expansion for FXpansion’s BFD3, BFD Eco and BFD2 designed to provide ready-to-use heavy rock and metal drum sounds.

Sold! I like BFD.

io9:

A dropped penny won’t kill you, alcohol doesn’t keep you warm, and swallowed gum doesn’t take seven years to digest. These are just three of the more than fifty rumors debunked in this compendious collection of common myths and misconceptions.

We’ve all heard many of these. We might even believe some of them are not myths. But, according to these guys, they all are. I knew most of them weren’t true but got caught by the one about bananas.

A.V. Club:

H.R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist sculptor and painter who died earlier this year, is the subject of the new documentary Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World. While the film is not available in the U.S. yet, a trailer is now online. The reclusive Giger was best known for his Academy Award-winning design contributions to the Alien franchise. This new documentary shares the last years of the artist’s life, and reveals how deeply he resided within his own dark artistic visions.

I’ve never enjoyed being creeped out more than when I see Giger’s wonderfully macabre art. I’d love to see this movie.

Much respect Sesame Street.

“Dollar for dollar, the Sound Blaster ROAR produces the best sound of any portable Bluetooth speaker I’ve heard.”

– Tom’s Guide

The compact Sound Blaster Roar boasts of two 1.5-inch high-frequency drivers, a dedicated 2.5-inch subwoofer, and a pair of side-firing passive radiators. Now, all these drivers will only sound as good as the music you play through them, and the Roar supports aptX and AAC over Bluetooth for high-quality audio streaming.

All this, while adding other features like NFC support, a USB port for charging, an integrated MP3 player through its microSD card slot that also allows you to record calls taken with the built-in speakerphone.

The Red Dot Design Award-winning Roar has received consistent 5-star reviews on Amazon since its launch. Now available at $149.99 via Creative.com and Amazon.com.

A very thoughtful post from Om Malik. I found myself nodding my head on more than one occasion while reading it.

Ben Thompson, in his stratechery post:

This telling of the story of iTunes and the iPhone suggests that this focus on the user experience not only defends against disruption, but it also provides an offensive advantage as well: namely, Apple increases its user experience advantage through the leverage it gains from consumers loyal to the company. In the case of iTunes, Apple was able to create the most seamless music acquisition process possible: the labels had no choice but to go along. Similarly, when it comes to smartphones, Apple devices from day one have not been cluttered with carrier branding or apps or control over updates. If carriers didn’t like Apple’s insistence on creating the best possible user experience, well, consumers who valued said experience were more than happy to take their business elsewhere. In effect, Apple builds incredible user experiences, which gains them loyal customers who collectively have massive market power, which Apple can then effectively wield to get its way – a way that involves maximizing the user experience.

Fantastic piece.

At a recent payments conference, Mike Cook, head of Walmart’s payment business and a driving force behind MCX and CurrentC, took the opportunity (from the audience), to quiz Visa exec Jim McCarthy (on stage) about Apple Pay being afforded the lowest possible fee, the so-called “card present” fee.

Before you watch the video (part of this re/code article), a bit of background. As the name implies, card present means the credit card being charged is actually in the store, as opposed to the higher priced card-not-present fee that applies for typical in-app payments. The thinking goes, if the card is physically present, there’s less of a chance for fraud. EMV (mentioned in Jim’s first answer) is the chip part of the chip-on-card credit card solution.

There’s a lovely bit of human dynamic here. You get the sense that the people on the panel are used to Walmart’s Mike Cook grousing about Apple Pay, that this is all a bit of an inside joke at this point.

That dynamic aside, this is an excellent discussion of the primary issues faced by MCX. Why does Apple Pay qualify for the lower card-present rate when the QR-code solutions, like Level Up, do not? Obviously, the answer is security.

The Roosevelts:

Using 80GB worth of photos captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station between 2011 and 2014, timelapse filmmaker Guillaume Juin created this awe-inspiring video of the Earth entitled “Astronaut.” And thanks to the incredible cameras aboard the ISS, this footage rivals the best visual effects that Hollywood has to offer.

Mind blowing. Watch on the biggest screen you possibly can.

NPR:

America’s master clock is one of the most accurate clocks on the planet: an atomic clock that uses oscillations in the element cesium to count out 0.0000000000000001 second at a time. If the clock had been started 300 million years ago, before the age of dinosaurs began, it would still be keeping time — down to the second.

Try that with your fancy-schmancy Apple Watch.

TorrentFreak:

It may sound absurd, but taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night and sharing that online may be copyright infringement. The stance is confirmed by the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, who note the following on their website.

“Daytime views from the Eiffel Tower are rights-free. However, its various illuminations are subject to author’s rights as well as brand rights. Usage of these images is subject to prior request from the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel.”

A weird and little known quirk of copyright law. So, you can take and sell daytime shots of the Eiffel Tower to places like stock photography sites but not of the night time shots because the evening light show on the tower (which is quite lovely) is copyrighted.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I always thought the wall was taken down in response to purposeful social change. But read the linked story. It was all the result of a colossal chain of clumsy bureaucratic error.

One tiny anecdote from a much larger story:

When one of the regime’s most loyal subordinates, a Stasi officer named Harald Jäger who was working the Nov. 9 night shift at a crucial checkpoint in the Berlin Wall, repeatedly phoned his superiors with accurate reports of swelling crowds, they did not trust or believe him. They called him a delusional coward. Insulted, furious and frightened, he decided to let the crowds out, starting a chain reaction that swept across all of the checkpoints that night.

Fascinating.

I can’t imagine either side had this in mind when these negotiations started. This is just ugly.

Many thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed. Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.

I really like Unread on my iPhone. It’s all about gestures and swiping to navigate the app, which is a nice way to do an RSS reader. There’s an iPad version too—I bought both.

Here’s one story of a bent iPhone and Apple’s response:

Following Apple’s instructions, I used my bent iPhone to schedule an appointment at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar for the following morning. I went to the store for my appointment, explained the situation to the employee, who then confirmed that the device was indeed bent without any obvious signs of abuse. I was then given a replacement iPhone and sent on my merry way. The whole process took less than a half an hour. From the time that I discovered my iPhone was bent to having a new phone in my hand was about 12 hours. Apple replaced the damaged phone under warranty at no cost to me, even though I had originally purchased the device from AT&T and not Apple itself. I’d never paid for any extended warranty or AppleCare Plus.

Your mileage may vary.

Quartz:

Language barriers in globalization are hardly a new issue. So why the sudden drive for polyglotism? It’s simple: As mobile operators and web giants try to expand their markets by bringing more people online, we have reached a tipping point where the imbalance of content on the internet has become too stark to avoid.

“A lot of the content online is about very few places and those are the places you might imagine: Western Europe, Japan, Korea, North America,” says Mark Graham, an associate professor who looks at information geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute. “And a lot of the contribution to the internet comes from those very same places.”

The English domination of the web is completely divorced from the language’s presence in the human population. “Just over half (55.8%) of Web content is estimated to be in English despite the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population speak it as a first language, with only 21% estimated to have some level of understanding,” according to GSMA and Mozilla (pdf). “By contrast, some of the world’s most widely spoken languages, such as Arabic or Hindi, account for a relatively small proportion of the Web’s content (0.8% and less than 0.1% respectively).”

My two cents? I think the net of the future will not shift away from English but, rather, offer more local content and much more content in other languages. Just as Facebook, Google and others are evolving new strategies to reach new, untapped markets as their existing customer bases become saturated, the net will evolve as needed to reach everyone on the planet.

Some light Saturday reading. A short story by Holli Mintzer about a school project and a lovable green frog.

So Anji decided to pick the easiest-looking project off the list of options: Design an AI that mimics the behavior of a public domain character. There was a list of characters to choose from, mostly stuff she’d never heard of. She picked Kermit the Frog because, she figured, there was a ton of footage of Kermit, even if it was mostly fifty years old, and she could just feed old TV shows to a bot until it started acting enough like Kermit to get her a passing grade.

Only it wasn’t that easy. For one thing, the bot was too stupid to understand that it was meant to be Kermit. Anji used off-the-shelf open-source language- and image-parsing software, so the bot would understand what it what watching, but she had to write a program to key the bot to Kermit in particular. It took forever. It was actually a pretty good challenge, writing a program to convince the bot that it was Kermit the Frog, that the little fuzzy green thing in the old video was itself—that it had a self, for that matter. She ended up using concepts and bits of code from the other classes she was taking, pulling a few all-nighters at the library with books on AI design, and just plain making stuff up in a few places. Her code wasn’t anything like elegant, but Anji found herself liking the project a lot more than she’d expected to, even as it got harder.

She also found herself liking Kermit a lot more than she’d expected to. Anji had never really watched the Muppets before; her parents, like most parents she knew, had treated TV as only slightly less corrupting an influence than refined sugar and gendered toys. But The Muppet Show was really funny—strange, and kind of hokey, but charming all the same. She ended up watching way more of it than she needed just for the project.

Enjoy.

A lot of new changes for one of my favorite apps.

Gigaom:

Since GT Advanced Technologies declared bankruptcy in early October, the vast majority of documents detailing its deal with Apple to supply sapphire crystal have been under seal.

On Tuesday, Judge Henry Boroff issued an order unsealing an statement signed by GTAT CEO Daniel Squiller as well as its attached documents, which include details on the reasons GTAT filed for bankruptcy and its business relationship with Apple, its largest creditor. On Friday, the Squiller statement entered the public record.

There’s never been any doubt that Apple plays hard ball with its suppliers. I’ve spoken to many companies who have to deal with the company and the stories all have one thing in common – you don’t negotiate with Apple. They dictate the terms to you.

I needed a good laugh today and this did it. We all hate spammers, so I have no sympathy for this guy.

Superior Drummer and EZDrummer are two of the best products on the market for people that want production-level drums in their songs. And Toontrack loves Metal!

There are a number of drag and drop utilities available for the Mac. They all work by inserting themselves in the drag and drop command chain, intercepting a drag event and then presenting their interface to receive and process the drop.

FilePane is an interesting take on this approach. Start a drag, when the FilePane window appears, drop your item on the pane. You’ll then have the ability to choose from a set of context sensitive options. Drag an image, you can resize, mail, share, or zip the image or, perhaps, make the image your desktop picture.

Drag text or documents and you can do all sorts of things. Convert to PDF, print, create new folders and documents, save and edit text in Safari and other apps, share, airdrop, and lots more.

MacWorld gave it 4.5/5 stars. Just saying.

Here’s a link, in case you want to check it out for yourself.