The Verge:

Gravity is a major contender at the Academy Awards this year, carrying a muscular 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, for a sci-fi epic that really raised the bar. While it has stiff competition from the likes of American Hustle in terms of acting and direction, the award for Best Visual Effects (which doesn’t typically hold the same cachet) ought to be a lock.

I don’t think it’s a great movie (even though I enjoyed it immensely) but I left the theatre wanting to buy the DVD just to see how the visual effects were accomplished.

Congrats to everyone at Mariner Software—24 years deserves recognition.

As Om Malik points out, Bitcoin wasn’t the first.

So Bad So Good:

On the final night of the Chinese New Year, the locals of Yanshui District in Tainan City, Taiwan put on a firework display that likes of which you’ve never seen before.

Several thousand bottle rockets are stacked together in a beehive formation and then simultaneously ignited all at once.

Everyone likes fireworks and bottle rockets but these folks are nuts.

NYCAviation:

Airline pilots will use one of three techniques when landing in a crosswind.

While the writer is a pilot who may think these kinds of landings are “not as scary as they seem”, I can tell him that, as a passenger, they can be terrifying. Still, it’s interesting to read about them and know pilots train for them.

Successful indie artist Zoë Keating shared the details of last years income online. Kirk McElhearn walks us through the numbers. Amazing how much she makes from sales via iTunes, etc. vs how little she makes from streaming.

If you own a Mac, this is well worth reading.

My residence was recently broken into (the alarm malfunctioned on entry and only went off as the thieves left) and two Mac laptops were taken. Luckily, I have good insurance and had an up to date Time Machine backup.

Over the past week, I’ve learned some additional things I could have done to prepare for this eventuality. My house had also been broken into ten years ago.

Here’s a summary of what you should do to prepare your Macs right now for the possibility of theft. It won’t eliminate theft but it will greatly reduce the damage from such events and make it more likely that your device will return to you.

One thing that I did not know was how easy Apple has made it to encrypt your external backup drive. Here’s a link to show you how to do that.

Good stuff.

There’s much to enjoy in this profile from Robersdale, Alabama’s Baldwin Register. I think what I liked the most was the sense of incredible pride that clearly came across, pride in their hometown hero. Don’t miss the slide show at the top with pics of Tim Cook in high school.

The FireEye blog announced an iOS proof of concept that was able to run in the background and record a user’s actions:

We have created a proof-of-concept “monitoring” app on non-jailbroken iOS 7.0.x devices. This “monitoring” app can record all the user touch/press events in the background, including, touches on the screen, home button press, volume button press and TouchID press, and then this app can send all user events to any remote server, as shown in Fig.1. Potential attackers can use such information to reconstruct every character the victim inputs.

Note that the demo exploits the latest 7.0.4 version of iOS system on a non-jailbroken iPhone 5s device successfully. We have verified that the same vulnerability also exists in iOS versions 7.0.5, 7.0.6 and 6.1.x. Based on the findings, potential attackers can either use phishing to mislead the victim to install a malicious/vulnerable app or exploit another remote vulnerability of some app, and then conduct background monitoring.

They are working with Apple, so I’d expect this to get patched reasonably quickly. Good to solve these things, though I don’t see much practical danger if you avoid obvious phishing attempts and only install apps from the App Store. [Via MacRumors]

Follow the headline link for another walkthrough of the Samsung Galaxy S5. More importantly, watch the video below to see the fingerprint scanner setup and performance.

As has been widely reported, the scanner only works when you scan your finger straight down, towards the bottom of the phone, making it difficult, if not impossible to unlock the phone with one hand.

A bust of Steve Jobs by famed Serbian sculptor Dragan Radenovic was unveiled in Belgrade today, the result of a competition covering more than 10,000 submitted works that will see the statue placed at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

The statue unveiled today is a maquette, a sculpture substantially smaller than the final version for demonstration purposes, that features Jobs’ head at the top, with a pair of Cyrillic letters, the Latin letter A, and the binary digits one and zero. According to a report in the Serbian press [Google Translate], sketches of the proposed status were sent to Apple executives, who said they were very interested in the sculpture and liked “the imperfections of his work”.

This is pretty cool.

Gestrument is a powerful tool for the professional musician but also an intuitive app for the beginner. Gestrument lets you delve into the “musical DNA” of a genre, artist or song. With full control over all musical parameters you can play and compose music with just the swipe of your finger.

Visit www.gestrument.com to see Gestrument perform music by Meshuggah, Richard Devine, Claude Debussy or see keyboard wizard Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater demo his own preset.

Apart from our artist we have videos and presets showing how to play for instance Dubstep, Cool Jazz, String Quartet and Indian Raga – all with just the swipe of your finger.

Gestrument is developed by contemporary classical composer Jesper Nordin and software developer Jonatan Liljedahl – Kymatica (the developer behind AudioShare, Sector, AUFX, NordBeat, BitWiz and many more iOS music apps).

If you have any questions at all, read this article on Macworld. Dan Moren, Dan Miller and Serenity Caldwell did a great job answering common questions.

Fantastic article by Daniel Eran Dilger.

The Atlantic:

I want to tell you about the controversy the Bell System’s embrace of numeracy provoked—how resentful some people became when their familiar method of making phone calls was taken from them. I want to tell you about why the change was necessary, and how it still informs our conception of phone calls and text messages. I want to tell you about the future of the phone number.

Interesting article if only for the tidbit about why New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit got their respective area codes.

We shouldn’t really be surprised with any of this, but how are we supposed to move forward when things like this are in place?

Steve Kovach got some time with the S5.

Netflix has agreed to pay one of the largest broadband providers in the United States Comcast Corp for faster speeds, throwing open the possibility that more content companies will have to shell out for better service.

This seems to set a bad precedent. Maybe I don’t see the bigger picture, but I’m uneasy about this going forward.

ReSound LiNX offers a superior sound experience, setting new standards for hearing aid performance.

This Made for iPhone hearing aid provides direct sound streaming, personalized to your every need.

Mic Wright:

The reasons I make these comparisons between me – a writer-turned-CEO who is hoping to upgrade his pot to piss in – and Zuckerberg – one of the visionary founders of his generation – is to ask this question: why do so many pundits presume that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what he’s doing? This is a guy who persuaded a group of some of the Valley’s most respected investors to back him, a guy who managed to navigate law suits and scaling issues to build a company that is now one of the big four tech companies beside Google, Apple and Microsoft.

This is exactly what pisses me off when people talk about Apple. Analysts and pundits always think they know better than Tim Cook. If that’s true, why aren’t they running a billion dollar company? The answer is simple—they aren’t qualified.

An ebook for iPad and OS X, designed to help you learn CSS transitions and animations through interactive examples.

This is a kickstarter project by Vicki Murley, who spent more than 10 years at Apple working on the Safari web browser and as the Safari Technologies Evangelist.

This is crushing news.

Ramis, a longtime North Shore resident, was surrounded by family when he died at 12:53 a.m. from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, his wife Erica Mann Ramis said. He was 69.

Ramis’ serious health struggles began in May 2010 with an infection that led to complications related to the autoimmune disease, his wife said. Ramis had to relearn to walk but suffered a relapse of the vaculitis in late 2011, said Laurel Ward, vice president of development at Ramis’ Ocean Pictures production company.

I always looked up to Harold Ramis, thought he was under appreciated. Brilliant body of work, influenced a generation of writers.

Ramis leaves behind a formidable body of work, with writing credits on such enduring comedies as “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (which upon its 1978 release catapulted the film career of John Belushi, with whom Ramis acted at Second City), “Stripes” (1981) and “Ghostbusters” (in which Ramis also co-starred) plus such directing efforts as “Caddyshack” (1980), “National Lampoon’s Vacation” (1983), “Groundhog Day” and “Analyze This.”

Previously he was the first head writer (and a performer) on Second City’s groundbreaking television series “Second City Television (SCTV)” (1976-79). More recently he directed episodes of NBC’s “The Office.”

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Steve Jobs and everything he did in his life, so I wanted to put together an issue of The Loop Magazine dedicated to Steve and his accomplishments. What better day to publish it than on Steve’s birthday.

I gathered together people that worked with Steve and those that were influenced by his extraordinary life. Former Apple executive, Richard Kerris, tells of introducing Jobs to The Rolling Stones to show off iTunes before it was released to the public; Don Melton, former head of the Safari team at Apple, tells of a number of interactions with Jobs; Industry analyst, Tim Bajarin, recounts how he watched Steve grow into the showman we all saw on stage; Actor Matthew Modine played John Scully in the recently released “Jobs” movie and talks about that experience; Matt Gemmell believes we’ve all met Steve through his work; and Jonathan Zufi talks about why he set out to photograph as many Apple products as he could to publish “Iconic,” a design book about Apple.

You can download The Loop Magazine from the App Store on your iPhone or iPad.

Someone on Reddit dug this up. Seems so very right. Heh.

Apple and Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft, have a huge lead in the smart phone mindshare race. Some might argue that the lead is unassailable.

You may have heard of the operating system Tizen (you may even know how to pronounce it: tie-zen, not tee-zen or tiz-zen).

But the chances of it running your smartphone are slim, about the same as having had one of its predecessors or rivals: Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, Bada, Ubuntu, Sailfish or Firefox.

Hard to argue with that. So why do these companies persist? Are they tilting at windmills? Or, perhaps, are they pursuing the next wave?

Instead, attention is shifting to winning a share of a potentially bigger pie: the software that runs your car, camera, fridge, smartwatch or TV. The thinking here is that if web-based operating systems like Firefox or Tizen can gain a foothold in those internet-connected devices, they could then gain broader acceptance among users and app developers on mobile, too.

Interesting discussion of the internet of things and emerging markets.

This article starts in a chilling way:

A Canadian internet service provider has been ordered to hand over the names and addresses of about 2,000 customers who allegedly downloaded movies online.

We’ve heard this sort of thing before. The pursuit of copyright protection can take on the nature of a patent troll using scare tactics to grab money from the guilty and innocent alike. But this case took an unexpected turn, thanks to case management judge Kevin Aalto.

A Federal Court decision released Thursday compels Ontario-based TekSavvy to identify the customers allegedly linked to downloads of films by the U.S. production company Voltage Pictures, which is behind the likes of The Hurt Locker, Dallas Buyers Club and Don Jon.

As a result, those TekSavvy customers could eventually receive a letter from Voltage threatening legal action. Under the federal Copyright Act, statutory damages for non-commercial infringement range between $100 and $5,000.

But while the court sided with Voltage’s efforts to go after copyright violators, it sought to protect against the company acting, “inappropriately in the enforcement of its rights to the detriment of innocent internet users.”

“On the facts of this case, there is some evidence that Voltage has been engaged in litigation which may have an improper purpose. However, the evidence is not sufficiently compelling for this court at this juncture in the proceeding to make any definitive determination of the motive of Voltage,” wrote judge Kevin Aalto.

Aalto ordered that before Voltage can send a letter to the alleged downloaders, it must return to court to get the wording of its communications cleared by a case management judge.

Much more work for the court, but this seems much more likely to limit the damage to innocent folks caught in the web. The cost of infringement would be much more equivalent to a speeding ticket than the overly expensive defense of a lawsuit.