The New York Times writer Catherine Rampell hit a new low of utter stupidity today claiming that Apple wants to purposely “bust your iPhone.” I’m not even going to link to the pathetic excuse for an article—instead, read Brian Barrett’s takedown on Gizmodo. At least he put some thought into what he wrote.

Great article by Kirk McElhearn, although I don’t agree with his conclusion:

On the other hand, Apple is clearly saying that overly loud music doesn’t have a place on iTunes Radio.

I don’t mind Apple using Sound Check for iTunes Radio and I don’t see it as a statement by Apple about loud music. It’s just a way to normalize the volume of many different songs to give the user a more enjoyable listening experience.

I do wish music producers would lower the volume on their music—give it some room to breathe.

Currently, all wireless broadcasting uses two frequencies, one for transmit, and one for receive.

The underlying technology, known as full-duplex radio, tackles a problem known as “self-interference.” As radios send and receive signals, the ones they send are billions of times stronger than the ones they receive. Any attempt to receive data on any given frequency is thwarted by the fact that the radio’s receiver is also picking up its own outgoing signal.

For this reason, most radios—including the ones in your smartphone, the base stations serving them, and Wi-Fi routers—send information out on one frequency and receive on another, or use the same frequency but rapidly toggle back and forth. Because of this inefficiency, radios use more wireless spectrum than is necessary.

The technique behind the startup is similar to that used in sound canceling headphones.

To solve this, Kumu built an extremely fast circuit that can predict, moment by moment, how much interference a radio’s transmitter is about to create, and then generates a compensatory signal to cancel it out. The circuit generates a new signal with each packet of data sent, making it possible to work even in mobile devices, where the process of canceling signals is more complex because the objects they bounce off are constantly changing.

Not sure if this technology is a game changer all by itself. This is useful when there’s a lot of back and forth, but not so much when receiving or sending large chunks of data. But I suspect it represents the overall direction of WiFi and cellular evolution.

I hate companies that do stuff like this.

Given how much analyst spin saturates all the reporting, good to have this baseline for comparison.

First, there’s the timing.

The opening of Apple’s first store in Rio de Janeiro will come just in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which promises millions of tourists. Apple opened its first store in China in 2008 just ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

More to the point, opening an Apple Store in one of the economic centers of South America is a real challenge.

Several South American countries, including the two largest economies—Argentina and Brazil—heavily tax electronics that aren’t at least partially manufactured locally. The hope is that such taxes will coerce companies to set up local factories, but so far few have obliged. Apple has perhaps been the most stubborn of the lot; it makes no components of its products in the region. The result is that its devices suffer an enormous mark-up, between 60% and 70%. iPhones sell for as much as $3,500 in Argentina, and iPad prices are scarcely any more reasonable; South America is the worst place to buy an iPad.

Worth keeping an eye on the economics of this move.

Nice looking posters for a nice looking machine.

Doxie Go is the tiny, rechargeable mobile paper scanner that scans anywhere with no computer required. Scan paper, receipts, and cards, then sync to Doxie’s elegant Mac software.

Doxie makes it easy to go paperless, create searchable PDFs, and send scans to your favorite Mac and cloud apps – Dropbox, Evernote, and more.

It’s time to finally go paperless. Get your new Doxie Go direct from Doxie or Amazon.com.

Om Malik on the importance of keeping the local newspaper around. John Henry bought the Boston Globe. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Will the risk associated with billionaires owning a prominent local voice be balanced by the value of keeping those voices around?

Thoughtful piece from MIT Technology Review on the troubling growing pains of the world’s sixth most widely visited website.

The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

A return rate greater than 30%. If this is true, that is a telling statistic.

Samsung has found that more than 30% of Galaxy Gear purchases are returned in Best Buy locations, and they have asked that Samsung employees on site help try to figure out why this is.

Read some of the reviews. Might be a clue there.

This was demo footage created to show off the EditDroid editing system. Watch it while you can. I suspect this footage won’t be up there very long.

Jim and Dan talk about the Apple event including the iPad Air, iPad retina mini, new MacBook Pro’s, Mavericks, and more.

Sponsored by Mailchimp, Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME1013 for 25% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME10 for 10% off).

I’d like to thank IK Multimedia for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week with the iRig BlueBoard.

iRig BlueBoard is the first wireless MIDI pedalboard for iOS and Mac that allows you to control your music apps and more from the floor. Now control parameters of your MIDI-compatible apps like AmpliTube wirelessly from the floor. Switch between presets, change patches, turn effects on and off and control effects like volume wah pedals all from the stage floor without worrying about tripping over wires. Setup is as simple as turning the iRig BlueBoard on and telling it what you want to control. iRig BlueBoard features four backlit soft-touch pads housed in a sturdy, stage-worthy chassis, two TRS expansion jacks for connecting additional MIDI controllers like expression pedals, and is powered by four standard AAA batteries.

IK Multimedia’s iRig BlueBoard allows guitarists, vocalists and keyboard players wireless control of Core-MIDI-compatible music-making apps running on an iPhone (4s or later), iPad 4, iPod touch (5th gen) or Mac (models from June 2012). The pedalboard has four backlit pads up top, which can each be assigned controls to switch between presets and banks, tweak parameters or change patches on the fly. Expression, volume or wah pedals can also be connected to the two 0.25-in jacks on the side of the device for control of onscreen dials and knobs.

Sad.

New to Lou Reed? Here’s a link to his Wikipedia page and, below, an embed of Rock and Roll Heart, the Lou Reed episode of the American Masters series.

Sounds like a good number of features will require this patch from the get-go. Which means a real test of Sony’s servers on day one. And, I suspect, on Christmas Day.

Everything you ever wanted to know about working with ringtones in iOS 7. Good stuff.

The new MacBook Pro could easily be mistaken for its predecessor. That said, there are definitely some significant differences.

Like the Airs, the Retina MacBook Pro has given up its wired Ethernet port, but it comes with a few others to help earn it that “Pro” label. In addition to two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, and a combination headphone/input jack, it includes a full-size HDMI port and two Thunderbolt ports that power users can count on to get their wired Ethernet and FireWire ports back if they really need them.

These are the first Macs shipping with Thunderbolt 2 ports. Great if you plan on buying a 4K display.

Those two ports have been upgraded to Thunderbolt 2 courtesy of Intel’s DSL5520 controller, and this is the first shipping Mac that uses the new version of the high-speed interface. The controller includes four Thunderbolt channels, which can provide data bandwidth of up to 20Gbps to each port (or 10Gbps per channel).

The original Thunderbolt used four 10Gbps channels too, but they were separated differently—the controllers provided two sets of 10Gbps channels, and the new ones provide one set of 20Gbps channels. Thunderbolt 2 additionally adds support for the DisplayPort 1.2 spec, which is necessary to support 4K output, though according to Apple’s spec sheet each Thunderbolt port can only support a single 2560×1600 display at once (for a total of three displays, including the laptop’s). The Retina MacBook Pro provides 4K video output through HDMI—that port supports 3840×2160 displays at 30Hz and 4096×2160 displays at 24Hz.

The biggest issue is the Retina display. Most of the mainstream apps support retina graphics, but outside that core, there are many that do not. Most web sites fit that latter category as well.

The biggest problem at this point is actually the Web itself. Having Chrome, Firefox, and Safari Retina-optimized means that text looks smooth and sharp regardless of the browser you’re using, but most sites still use lower-resolution images that look soft and vaguely blurry on a Retina screen. This situation should continue to improve now that high-density displays are proliferating in Windows laptops and Web standards are catching up, but for now browsing is still the least consistent thing about using a Retina Mac.

Lots more good stuff in this review.

If you are considering the highest-end Retina MacBook Pro, you might want to take a read of this review from The Verge.

io9:

In the span of just a few minutes, short films can offer up spine-tingling chills, nightmarish monsters, and plenty of grim humor. Here are a few of our favorite horror shorts that we’ve featured in the past year, ready to deliver a quick hit of Halloween horror.

Proof that horror doesn’t have to take long to scare the bejesus out of you.

An email went out to Buffer customers at about 4pm ET today informing customers that Buffer, the popular Twitter scheduling service, was hacked:

I wanted to get in touch to apologize for the awful experience we’ve caused many of you on your weekend. Buffer was hacked around 1 hour ago, and many of you may have experienced spam posts sent from you via Buffer. I can only understand how angry and disappointed you must be right now.

Not everyone who has signed up for Buffer has been affected, but you may want to check on your accounts. We’re working hard to fix this problem right now and we’re expecting to have everything back to normal shortly.

This banner was added to the Buffer home page:

Sorry – Buffer was hacked and some scam posts were sent. We’re working hard to investigate. Stay updated via Twitter (@buffer).

Follow the headline link for the latest from Buffer.

Wired:

Fearful of relegating TV to remaining “dumb,” consumer electronics manufacturers look to the success of Apple’s iPhone/iPad/iTunes, Google/Android, or Amazon ecosystems as examples of what could happen with smart TV.

But do consumer electronics companies really think they can monetize the new feature of accessing the web with smart TVs? Even with an industry standard for smart TVs, it’s not likely that those companies could start charging Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, and others for access to their screens. And conversely, by not controlling the device, these service providers operate at the whim of the smart TV.

I’m one of those people that think, Gene Munster’s “predictions” notwithstanding, that Apple has no intention of releasing an actual television set but instead will develop the present Apple TV into a fuller featured set-top box.

Bored Panda:

To celebrate this wonderful and colorful season, we’ve got a beautiful collection of photos of autumn landscapes that highlight the last explosion of rich, vivid color before the coming winter.

I feel sorry for those in tropical places that never get to experience Fall. That is, until the snows/rains come and then I’m just envious of them.

Here ya go…

A survey article on the state-of-the-market in bringing TV to digital and digital to TV.