The magic of Tumblr is that it sits between Twitter (short form) and WordPress (long form) and fills a gap in the world of blogging that nobody else has managed to capture. There are elements of Facebook and Instagram in it as well. So it’s a lot like all of these apps but in the end it is like nothing else. It has a soul and pulse and a vibe that other social apps don’t have. At times, it is simply magic.

That’s a really good way to describe Tumblr.

John Gruber:

For one thing, they sweated the details. The greatest testimony to their genius is just how much of that original design is recognizable in today’s Mac OS X 10.9. A Mac user from 1984 could sit down in front of an iMac or MacBook today and recognize it as a successor to that original machine. That’s simply amazing.

John is so right. Apple sweated the details and they still do—that sets them apart from every other company.

Another great find by Tina Roth Eisenberg.

Google will keep the Nest group intact inside the company. The new division will still work on hardware devices, but not necessarily thermostats or smoke detectors. In fact, Google would like Fadell to work on gadgets that make more sense for the company. Will it be a phone or a tablet? It’s unclear for now.

We suspected that Google wanted Fadell. Makes perfect sense.

In this issue, Christopher Jennings takes a look at the history of Yellowstone National Park; Alex Saretzky talks about where designers should focus their time and skills; Bryan Irace discusses CocoaPods and Objective-C; Scot Olsen is a photographer taking beautiful pictures with his iPhone 4s; and Darren Murph looks at T-Mobile’s free international data.

This is breaking news from Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp.’s board is preparing to make Satya Nadella, the company’s enterprise and cloud chief, chief executive officer and is discussing replacing Bill Gates as chairman, according to people briefed on the process.

One person the board is considering to take the place of co-founder Gates as chairman is Microsoft’s lead independent director John Thompson, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is private. Gates may still play an active role at the Redmond, Washington-based company that he founded in 1975, depending on the wishes of the board and new CEO, said the people.

Nadella emerged as one of the stronger candidates to replace departing CEO Steve Ballmer weeks ago, people familiar with the search have said. The plans aren’t finished, said the people.

Thompson, who is heading the CEO search, wrote in a blog post last month that the board plans to complete a search for CEO in the “early part of 2014.” He said the board started with more than 100 candidates and has since narrowed the list. Ballmer said last August that he planned to retire within a year.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

Big news.

Co.Create:

New York-based artist Jon Burgerman has responded to both the violent ads in subway movie posters and the rising scores of public shootings by playing the victim.

In a new series of interventions, called “Headshots,” Burgerman documents himself donning fake blood and other props to portray the potential target of whoever in the poster is pointing a gun (or bow and arrow.)

Hilariously subversive.

Great post on TUAW featuring background on a series of ads that ran on Apple’s web site back when the iPod was still new and the iTunes Music Store first opened its doors.

My favorite is below. I don’t remember any of these and I bought an iPod on day one. Very cool!

Interested in reading the actual transcript of Apple’s recent earnings call? You’ll need to sign up for a free account via Seeking Alpha (you’ll have to jump through some minor hoops, but it’s not too bad) to read the whole thing, but I found it quite interesting, indeed eye-opening, to read Tim Cook’s actual words, as opposed to the translations of a journalist or analyst.

UPDATE: Turns out Macworld also runs transcripts of Tim’s part of the call and not behind a reg-wall. Here’s a link. Thanks to Serenity Caldwell for the heads up.

Be forewarned, the pictures in the linked paper are not for the squeamish. But they are fascinating if you have any interest in the structure of the brain. I could not tear my eyes away from Figure 1, “Ventral surface of H.M.’s brain”.

The linked paper details a postmortem exam of a patient’s brain. Back in 1953, a patient, known as HM, suffered from epilepsy. His doctor’s performed brain surgery. Inexplicably, after the operation, HM suffered from an inability to store short term memories. He could learn new skills, but could not remember how or when he learned them. This was an important case, but back in 1953 there just was not enough knowledge of how the brain operated to draw any conclusions.

Fortunately, technology was advanced enough to freeze and slice the brain, saving it for later use. Over time, technology improved and the ability to take pictures of, and eventually digitize and 3D render those slices, came into being.

The linked paper is the result of the most modern of these efforts. Fantastic.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata had a pre-scheduled strategy briefing to announce the companies planned direction. As expected, Iwata stuck to his guns, saying that Nintendo would continue on its path to make console and hand-held consoles and games. He did address the issue of porting hits like Zelda and Super Mario to mobile devices.

But Iwata was resolute that Nintendo would not take Mario mobile, just a day after Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd declared its mobile ambitions with a deal to buy Google Inc’s Motorola handset division for $2.9 billion.

He said mobile devices had a role as marketing tools to help potential customers “understand the wonder of Nintendo games,” although those games would still need to be played on Nintendo consoles.

The way I read this, that last bit seems to support the rumor (reported Tuesday) that Nintendo characters might appear on iOS and Android in some marketing form, perhaps as a mini-game or advertisement.

Iwata also teased a new personal health strategy.

The CEO was vague about the details of the new health business, hinting that the device or service could be used “beyond the living room” unlike the sports and fitness games available for its Wii and Wii U consoles.

“I’m sure you’re thinking of Wii Fit, but this is not like anything we have made before,” Iwata told a briefing of analysts and reporters.

“Looking after your health requires effort and many people quit quite soon after starting something. But we, as an entertainment company, can help people get over the difficulty of continuing their efforts in a fun way.”

Nintendo will continue down the path of more tightly binding the 3DS and Wii-U. Currently, the Wii-U has its own game pad. Not clear if that means merging the game pad and 3DS architectures.

He also said there would be a merging of handheld and home game console software architecture, suggesting that users would be able to download and play the same game across platforms in the future.

Iwata and his Board also announced that they would take a pay cut. I love this move. It signifies solidarity. I hate the idea of a CEO or President getting a big bonus while their companies languish.

Iwata announced on Wednesday that he would take a 50 percent pay cut for the next five months, while other board members would reduce their salaries by 20 percent, after admitting the company had failed to convince customers of the merits of its Wii U console.

Flag allows anyone (within the US to start) to print and mail a pack of 20 photos each month for free. You can keep the prints yourself, or send them to the people you love. If you want more than 20 a month you can buy as many as you need.

To make photo printing fun – for the first time by our reckoning – we’ve designed a photo finishing system ready for the 21st century. Museum quality (Giclée) printers, German 220 gram photo paper from sustainable sources, laser cutters, and robots with carbon fiber arms will allow Flag to deliver prints, for free, that are better than any you can pay for today. We want to turn your memories into mementos you can be proud of.

Our secret to making photo printing free? An advertisement on the back of each print. It will always be tasteful, and we are steadfast in our commitment to never sell or share your personal information with advertisers.

This is something I would use. I’m okay with an ad on the back of the photos. Samuel Agboola really came up with something interesting here.

You can sign-up for the MacTech BootCamp III, MacTech Conferences and Microsoft Office for Mac Accreditation programs right now. There is a special savings on the page for readers of The Loop.

TechCrunch has confirmed reports that Lenovo is buying Motorola Mobility from Google. This is the division within Google that the company purchased in 2011 for $12.5 billion. Motorola Mobility will go to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.

First Google Reader, now this. Seriously, Google got what they wanted out of Motorola—the patents.

Fast Company:

The era of the pre-game Super Bowl strategy kicked off in earnest in 2011, when Volkswagen pre-released its excellent spot “The Force” before Super Sunday. The monster success of that spot spurred others to follow suit and this year the trend continued unabated, with teasers and entire bespoke ads created to stoke buzz before game day.

Here, all the spots (and accompanying content) released so far.

Some fun ads here but I gotta say, the Lawrence Fishburne ad for Kia was the most disappointing, the “Doberhuahua” the funniest and the Newcastle “The Teaser For The Trailer For Newcastle’s Mega Huge Football Game Ad” the most clever. Thanks to reader David Mark for the link.

A well reasoned article from Brian Rinaldi.

Medium:

I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up.

The article includes several good suggestions on how to protect yourself online. But the biggest thing that needs to happen is companies who need our sensitive information need to be more vigilant about keeping that information safe.

extractCSS is an online tool which can extract ids, classes and inline styles from HTML document and output them as CSS stylesheet. All you have to do is to type or paste your HTML document and let extractCSS to do the rest for you!

ESPN:

If our children or our children’s children ever dig up a time capsule from the beginning of the new millennium, they will find that in February 2004, America collectively lost its damn mind.

For better or worse, America can be a remarkably puritanical society.

This is just incredible. When I first looked at the pictures, I thought he just did the outside of the plane, but no. He also has a YouTube Channel.

I’m a big fan of Stephen Fry. Love his acting, his writing, his intellect, the whole package.

Fry’s writeup on 30 years of Mac is so worth a read. But the best part is his telling of the missed connection between Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee. It’s about halfway through the post. Don’t want to spoil this. Just go read it.

Reading this review will take you a while. There’s a lot of detail, but that’s only a good thing.

While many people, mostly of the troll variety, will be running around the Web screaming “so expensive!” the new Mac Pro is anything but when considering what’s in the package. I joked on Twitter that Apple’s Mac Pro deal is this: “buy two discounted FirePro W9000 cards and get a workstation for free,” and that’s not an exaggeration. The AMD FirePro W9000 retails on Newegg for $3400, $600 under MSRP. Apple’s FirePro D700 is similar to this card, and the company ships two of them in the machine for $600 more than the D500 that comes stock with the 6-core configuration.

If you are at all considering the Mac Pro, go ahead and read the whole review.

This post is a bit more than a year old, but I just came across it this morning. Paul Graham uses a variety of threads to explore the concept of what makes a good startup.

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.

A thoughtful read that rings true for me.

I like the idea of Sony’s “mostly lens” camera system. The QX10 and QX100 are lenses that contain all the smarts and communicate with your smart phone via WiFi. 3.6x optical zoom, 5472 x 3648 image size, and Carl Zeiss f/1.8 lens. But the available mounting bracket is limited to 75mm, big enough for a smart phone but not big enough for a tablet.

This new SPA-TA1 tablet attachment will solve that problem, catering for devices between 85mm and 190mm in width. Six arms are available in various sizes (see below) weighing 31 grams. The Sony SPA-TA1 tablet attachment will launch on 4 April 2014 in Japan at a suggested retail price of 3,675 Yen (£21, €26, $36). We would hope to see a western launch of this useful attachment soon after.

Hmmm. Shooting with a lens mounted on my tablet sounds a little clumsy to me. Looking forward to seeing the reviews.

USA Today:

Johansson is the face of SodaStream’s newest commercial, which the company’s CEO says is too risqué for Fox. The television network isn’t banning the commercial because of any sexual innuendo or objectionable content. Rather, because of a parting shot to Coke and Pepsi.

Lame. Not the controversy. The commercial itself.