Nice post from Guy English. I agree with this bit: “That said, being opinionated isn’t the goal. Being useful is.”

Rob Richman reminds us that sometimes you should be thankful to be alive.

From the linked email:

Achieve big things.

iPad is the perfect way to be more productive than ever. Its powerful apps are designed to take full advantage of the things only iPad can do. So you’ll have everything you need to do what matters most.

The ad features links to buy an iPad Air and a retina iPad mini, as well as sections that highlight Apple’s productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), Microsoft’s Office iPad apps, and the Your Verse campaign.

From the NEC press release:

A consortium of six global companies announced that they have signed commercial agreements to build and operate a new Trans-Pacific cable system to be called “FASTER” with NEC Corporation as the system supplier. The FASTER cable network will connect the United States to two landing locations in Japan. The total amount of investment for the FASTER system is estimated to be approximately USD $300 million.

In order to address the intense traffic demands for broadband, mobile, applications, content and enterprise data exchange on the Trans-Pacific route, FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs).

This new cable system will be landed at Chikura and Shima in Japan and will feature seamless connectivity to many neighboring cable systems to extend the capacity beyond Japan to other Asian locations. Connections in the United States will extend the system to major hubs on the US West Coast covering the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle areas.

Google is joined by China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel.

WSJ:

Price isn’t the only issue keeping “Maleficent” and “Captain America” off of Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.48% ‘s virtual shelves.

Walt Disney Co.’s dispute with the giant online retailer also encompasses promotion and product placement on the Amazon website, as well as questions over who makes up the difference when Amazon loses money to match the prices of competitors, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

Here’s what’s at the core of the disagreement:

A particular concern of Amazon, those people noted, is that Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best Buy Co. and other brick-and-mortar retailers sometimes charge less than the wholesale price for a new disc to lure people into stores so that they will purchase other, more profitable items. Amazon often tries to match those prices, but doesn’t reap the benefits of drawing customers into a physical showroom.

As a result, the online retailer has asked studios to help make up for losses in those situations, the people said.

If you’ve never listened to WTF with Marc Maron, this interview with Robin Williams is an excellent place to start. Maron is an incredibly empathic and insightful interviewer and always brings out the hidden. This interview is normally part of the subscription package, but Marc brought it out to share.

In it, Robin talks about depression and his battles with drugs and alcohol. Marc re-cut the open to talk about his feelings about Williams’ death.

Mashable:

Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams died on Monday at the age of 63. As a performer, Williams had the rare ability to make audiences laugh and cry.In remembrance of Williams and his long legacy, we’ve compiled some of his finest moments from television, stand-up and film.

I was reminded by my friend Sly that I heckled Robin Williams during the taping of his HBO Special, “Live on Broadway”. He goes off on that Canada rant because some idiot in the audience (me) yelled out, “Yay Canada!” I met Williams years later on the show floor of Macworld Expo and we chatted for almost 30 minutes. I asked him about the heckling and he (jokingly) called me “an a-hole”. “You don’t heckle on Broadway!” he said.

David Barnard responds to Jean-Louis Gassée’s post about the need for human curation in the App Store.

Some interesting discussion in the comments (you’ll need to view the original Loop post on your Mac or iPad to see the comments). The running discussion is whether making the App Store easy to search is Apple’s job, or if it is the responsibility of the developer to create content that is compelling enough to make it easy to find, perhaps by word of mouth.

Personally, I don’t think of it in terms of whose job it is. I think of the App Store as a product, an Apple product. And Apple products are built to be easy to use and with great attention to detail. When Apple designed the App Store, it was relatively easy to self-curate, easy to navigate. This approach no longer works.

From David Barnard:

I absolutely agree with @gassee that the App Store is a jungle, but Apple is curating it, & took big steps in iOS 8

I don’t know how big the human curation effort is, but it sounds like Apple is working the problem. I know that if they do come up with a solution that makes it much easier for me to find apps that solve a specific problem, I’ll be handing Apple (and Apple developers) more of my cash.

And that’s a win-win.

Wow. Crushing loss.

This is how you can help. 100% of your donations go directly to the Make-A-Wish foundation. The Cancer Journal Project is completely self funded. We don’t keep a dime of your donation.

Help if you can.

Riding at night? This kickstarter gives you everything you need to make your helmet light up so you can be seen, raise your profile to make it just a little less likely someone will blindly pull into your lane. [Hat tip to Bill Fuglaar]

In this week’s Monday Note, Jean-Louis Gassée once again pressed his case for Apple to craft a humanly curated App Store experience, rather than one based purely on algorithms. This is not a new argument (Gassée has written about curation here and here), but the need for curation has become more and more obvious.

The App Store may be a gold mine, but it’s buried in an impenetrable jungle.

As always, the Monday Note is a terrific read and Gassée is the voice of a lifetime of experience. But this third quest for human curation might turn out to be the charm. The timing couldn’t be better. A big motivation behind Apple’s recent acquisition of Beats was to bring human curation to Apple’s music ecosystem. As the universe of available content becomes more complex, more splintered, the value of human curation increases at the same pace.

My favorite part of Gassée’s spiel:

Why do I care? Good question, I’m now 70 and could just sit in zazen and enjoy the show. And there’s a lot of show to enjoy: The tech industry is more exciting now than when I was a rookie at HP France in 1968. But in today’s app stores, the excitement fades — and I’m not just talking about Apple, Android’s Google Play is every bit as frustrating. I see poorly exploited gold mines where quantity obscures quality and the lack of human curation ruins the Joy of Apps. There are caves full of riches but, most of of the time, I can’t find a path to the mother lode.

The man can write.

The Verge:

Microsoft is bringing the Mac vs. PC battle back with full force today.

While the company targeted the MacBook Air at the launch of the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft’s latest ads place both devices head-to-head. It’s a style that’s similar to how Microsoft has targeted the iPad and even Siri recently, and one that mimics Apple’s classic ads from the ‘00s. There’s three 30-second spots in total, and each focuses on the touchscreen and pen benefits of the Surface Pro 3 over Apple’s MacBook Air.

As always – don’t read the comments section.

The Conversation:

Researchers have developed a method to produce ammonia simply from air and water. Not only is it more energy efficient than the century-old Haber-Bosch process currently in use all over the world, but it is also greener.

Ammonia – made up of three parts hydrogen and one part nitrogen (or NH3) – has had a momentous impact on society. Without the mass production of this chemical, it is estimated that as many as a third of us won’t be alive. This is because its main use is to make fertilisers, which have helped improve crop yields and sustain a large population.

I had no idea that ammonia production “consumes nearly 2% of the world’s energy supply” but as the article points out, even this process is no where near as efficient as Mother Nature.

New York Times:

Steven P. Jobs established Apple University as a way to inculcate employees into Apple’s business culture and educate them about its history, particularly as the company grew and the tech business changed. Courses are not required, only recommended, but getting new employees to enroll is rarely a problem.

Although many companies have such internal programs, sometimes referred to as indoctrination, Apple’s version is a topic of speculation and fascination in the tech world.

As usual, take whatever Brian Chen says with a truckload of salt (he gets several details wrong, as usual) but it’s still an interesting look at a little known aspect of Apple.

Salon:

You don’t know night. Not real night, the way it was experienced pre-electricity; what we lost when we developed the ability to light up the night sky.

That sounds obvious to someone living near Times Square or in Vegas, but those are only extremes in a phenomenon that touches nearly all of us: Two-thirds of the world’s population, and 99 percent of people living in the continental U.S. and Western Europe, no longer experience what we might call true night — one free from the glow of artificial lights.

I’ve been a City Kid my entire life. I still remember the night I was walking outside on my dad’s farm and couldn’t figure out why, with no light around, it was so bright outside – I could see my shadow. I looked up and literally gasped at the sight of the Milky Way – which I had never seen before.

National Geographic:

National Geographic Traveler magazine received more than 18,000 entries from around the globe. With thousands of pictures to review, judges found themselves wandering through stunning ice caves, mysterious desert views, and intriguing scenes from cultures throughout the world. Which photos were selected as the best of the best?

As always, some absolutely incredible shots in this collection.

Here’s one for your bucket list.

Located on the Great Australian Bight in Southern Australia, is the vast, featureless Nullarbor Plain – the world’s largest single piece of limestone, covering an area of 270,000 square km and extending some 1,000 km from the east to the west. The area is so flat that the Trans Australian Railway runs across its surface for about 483 kilometers in a completely straight line. On the surface of the plain there are areas of slight depressions where sparse rainfall has slowly dissolved away some of the limestone. There are also places where underground caves or sinkholes have collapsed to form dents in the surface. But mostly, the plain is horizontally flat and devoid of trees, as its Latin name suggests. The Nullarbor Plain ends abruptly at the spectacular Bunda Cliffs, comprising a 200-kilometer-long precipice curving around the Great Australian Bight.

Follow the link to see the pictures. Words just cannot do this justice.

This is simply genius.

Pando Daily:

Using the highly scientific process of…hunting for fancy words in tweeted headlines…Beak allows users to calculate the grade level of their tweets.

Not scientific at all but fun to use for comparison’s sake. I tweet at a level of 7th Grade. Which sounds high to me.

New York Times:

You can sell old iPhones — a lot of Android phones, too — to a number of online companies. Gazelle.com, cashforiphones.com, usell.com and icracked.com are just a few of them. Amazon and eBay are also vibrant marketplaces for used iPhones. I don’t know which one offers the best price or which are the most reputable. I don’t have enough used iPhones to do comparison testing.

But looking at the prices offered for the used iPhone 5s may offer some insight into what phone to buy next if you intend to sell it after a few years of use.

I’ve used Gazelle for several iPhone sales. Not the best price but definitely the easiest and less hassle.

TUAW:

In the wake of China’s 6.5 magnitude quake that hit the country over the weekend, Apple is doing its best to help out. As reported by CRIENGLISH, Apple is donating 10 million yuan, or roughly US$1.6 million, to the relief efforts.

You have to feel for the people affected. I’ve been in three very minor earthquakes and they were terrifying. I can’t even imagine what a 6.5 magnitude quake would feel like.

I’ve always been a fan of Jackson, especially the Dinky models. They just feel really good in my hands.

Thanks to The Blueprint for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. This week The Blueprint is featuring the IN1 is a multi-tool utility case for your iPhone 5/5s. Like a built-in swiss army knife for your phone. Choose from 8 colors. Get yours for $44.95, ships in 24 – 48 hrs.

This was more interesting than I thought it would be.

Grubstreet:

Pity the New Yorker who wants to eat an excellent burger for dinner while sitting at a proper table. The city is awash in outstanding burgers, but the simple task of ordering one at prime time feels like it’s become increasingly difficult.

The problem: More top New York chefs limit their burgers by selling them in very small quantities, or only at lunch, or only for the first 30 minutes their restaurant is open, or maybe just to the people sitting at the bar but not in the dining room, or possibly only on Mondays.

What a weird story and, I’m sorry, but “At Porter House, you can get the burger for $19 at lunch, or $26 at night at the bar” means I would never pay that much for a burger, no matter how good New Yorkers said it was.

AgileBits:

We are announcing that, for Mac and iOS users, our updates coming this fall for Apple’s OS X Yosemite and iOS 8—yes, including our awesome new Safari and in-app extension—will be free for current owners.

We’ve put 1Password for desktops on sale for 30 percent off, and 1Password for iPhone and iPad on sale for a whopping 40 percent off (1Password 4 for Android remains free-to-try through August 18!).

Get 1Password for Mac for just $34.99 and 1Password for iOS for just $9.99.

I personally highly recommend 1Password.