Click the link.

Live Streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.

Very excited.

Blank on Blank works with journalists to dig up dusty cassette interviews and collaborate with animators and video artists to bring them to life. Here’s a great example:

A configurable world clock, with statistics like births, deaths, each divided into various categories, and lots more.

Not too surprising, considering BBM has an installed base of 60 million users. But still, an interesting datapoint.

Good tutorial. Two takeaways:

1. Never defragment your SSD. You’ll only shorten its lifespan.
2. Defrag your non-SSD hard drive once a year or so. Be sure to back it up first.

Official Travel Guide to Norway:

Rjukan is situated deep in the narrow Vestfjord Valley in Telemark. Due to the high mountains surrounding the valley, among them The Gaustadtoppen Mountain at 1,883 metres above sea level, there is no sunlight six months of the year (from September to March).

This winter, the darkness will finally come to an end.

I live in Vancouver, BC and it can be bad enough here in the winter with all the dreary rain we get but can you imagine six months of no sun?

Grantland:

The Stanley Cup is the most beautiful of sports trophies. It shimmers. It’s big. When ancient peoples returned from the hunt, they held their prize aloft. When players today win a championship, in a timeless gesture of triumph, they throw their hands above their heads. And in sports, nothing fits better between a player’s hands than the Stanley Cup. It is perfect.

It didn’t begin that way.

Ken Dryden was not only a great goaltender (in the Hall of Fame for my beloved Montreal Canadiens) but he is also a great writer. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of his amazing book, “The Game” (Widely acknowledged as the best hockey book ever written and lauded by Sports Illustrated as one of the “Top 10 Sports Books of All Time”), he’s written another chapter. If you’d like to see why Canadians love hockey so much, pay particular attention to the small town aspect of the chapter.

The New York Times:

Men in lifting belts wheel hand trucks stacked high with food from across the globe: 80 pounds of ground beef, 700 pounds of top butt, 175 shoulder tenders, 1 case of New York strips, all from the Midwest; 5 pounds of chicken livers, 6 cases of chicken bones, 120 chicken breast cutlets; 30 pounds of bacon; 300 littleneck clams, 110 pounds of mussels from Prince Edward Island, another 20 pounds from New Zealand, 50 trout, 25 pounds of U10 shrimp (fewer than 10 pieces per pound), 55 whole dorade, 3 cases of escargot, 360 Little Skookum oysters from Washington State, 3 whole tunas, 45 skates, 18 black sea bass, 2 bags of 100 to 120 whelks, 45 lobster culls.

That’s just the fish and meat order.

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at a restaurant?

Can Cher Wang, billionaire co-founder of HTC, keep them from following in the footsteps of other beleaguered smartphone manufacturers? She faces a tough putt.

My favorite part of the article:

It’s worth noting that the 55-year-old, Berkeley-educated Wang personally managed HTC’S relationship with Microsoft during the time when its phones primarily used the Windows Mobile operating system. “Once a year,” the Times noted in its profile, “she flies to Seattle and meets with Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive.”

The last mobile-phone chief with close ties to Microsoft was Nokia’s Stephen Elop, who recently presided over the sale of the Finnish firm’s handset business to Microsoft. With Wang taking the helm, will HTC find itself similarly drawn into Microsoft’s orbit?

Graham Nash tells the story of how, back in 1972, Neil Young played him his brand new album Harvest. Fantastic way to demo your music. More barn!

Back in November 2007, Google had zero share of the mobile market. They watched the original iPhone rollout and could see it was going to be a game changer. To protect their search turf, Google released the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

In that era, Google had nothing, so any adoption—any shred of market share—was welcome. Google decided to give Android away for free and use it as a trojan horse for Google services. The thinking went that if Google Search was one day locked out of the iPhone, people would stop using Google Search on the desktop. Android was the “moat” around the Google Search “castle”—it would exist to protect Google’s online properties in the mobile world.

Fast forward to today, and Android owns a significant market share. But a true open-source Android means other companies can release their own versions of Android (à la Amazon with the Kindle Fire) with Google getting none of that particular revenue stream.

The linked article digs into that problem, shows one example of Google’s move from an open source proponent to an ambitious protector of market share. Interesting read.

Hold onto your beard, JimD.

Manufactured by Krups, The Sub is, in Newson’s words, “a giant pressurised vessel” and “a male-oriented object made of anodized aluminium.” Consumers can purchase what they’re calling “Torps,” metal cylinders filled with brew, that they then load into The Sub like a torpedo into a firing tube. But instead of sinking an enemy U-Boat, The Sub then chills the beer down to two degrees Celsius, which is four degress colder, Heinken reckons, than your ‘fridge can get it.

Start of a big week for Apple. Love the Spirit in the Sky riff laid under the mix.

1997 Jeep Cherokee:

If you do not own a toolbox, have never changed your own oil, and are scared of firearms: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.

If you have been posting on Facebook all about how excited you are for pumpkin latte season: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.

If you get offended easy and often, whine to your co-workers, and bitch a lot: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.

If you own a Bieber album, white Oakleys, Affliction t-shirts, or those candy-assed stitched-pocket jeans: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.

This the greatest Craigslist ad ever and I’m not man enough to buy it from this guy. Thanks to my friend Jeff La Grua for the link.

Pretty cool pictures. A fireplace – on a jet!

The news industry is going through some tough times. Newspaper after newspaper is folding or being subsumed by a goliath. Independent news bureaus are shutting down, forcing the news to flow through the keyboards of untrained citizen journalists. People are getting their news from the net, and that news is not being vetted in any formal way.

Amidst all this chaos comes opportunity. Jeff Bezos stepped in and bought the Washington Post. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was also approached by the Washington Post. Though he declined the purchase, Omidyar is committing a good portion of his fortune to reinventing journalism from the ground up.

His first step was to build a partnership with Glenn Greenwald, from The Guardian.

When they finally were able to talk, Omidyar learned that Greenwald, his collaborator Laura Poitras, and The Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill had been planning to form their own journalism venture. Their ideas and Omidyar’s ideas tracked so well with each other that on October 5 they decided to “join forces” (his term.) This is the news that leaked yesterday. But there is more.

Omidyar believes that if independent, ferocious, investigative journalism isn’t brought to the attention of general audiences it can never have the effect that actually creates a check on power. Therefore the new entity — they have a name but they’re not releasing it, so I will just call it NewCo — will have to serve the interest of all kinds of news consumers. It cannot be a niche product. It will have to cover sports, business, entertainment, technology: everything that users demand.

At the core of Newco will be a different plan for how to build a large news organization. It resembles what I called in an earlier post “the personal franchise model” in news. You start with individual journalists who have their own reputations, deep subject matter expertise, clear points of view, an independent and outsider spirit, a dedicated online following, and their own way of working. The idea is to attract these people to NewCo, or find young journalists capable of working in this way, and then support them well.

I have high hopes for these folks. This is important work.

It has long been a patent troll strategy to carpet bomb little companies with lawsuits. The cost of defending against the suit is much larger than the money at stake, so the little companies invariably cave. A key to this strategy is the fact that there is little cost to the patent troll if they lose a case. Currently, if the patent troll does lose a case, they just walk away, they have no obligation to pay the winner’s attorneys fees, which can be substantial.

This may be about to change.

The Supreme Court announced this month that it would hear two appeals of decisions by the federal appeals court that oversees all patent cases. In each case, the company that was sued for patent infringement won on the merits but did not prevail in having its legal fees paid by the losing party.

The court will decide whether to make it much easier for victors in patent suits to force their opponents to pay their legal fees. If it does so — and patent watchers generally assume that the court would not have agreed to hear the appeals if at least some justices were not sympathetic to the companies being sued — that could make it much more expensive to file a frivolous suit, and perhaps scare patent holders away from filing meritorious suits. Losing such a suit could conceivably bankrupt a small company if it was forced to pay the other side’s legal bills, which can run into the millions of dollars.

This could have huge implications. At the very least, it would force a patent troll to think twice before filing an industry-wide suit. If they lose, they risk everything.

This article covers a lot and does it well. If you like to share photos and are not already an expert at the process, take a read.

Adobe:

Elephants are increasingly endangered as people expand into their habitats, and poaching has drastically exacerbated the plight of the African elephant in particular. In 2012 the National Geographic cover story “Blood Ivory” revealed a complex, international web of trade that has contributed to the deaths of at least 25,000 elephants each year. Fewer than 700,000 now remain in the wild.

With every tweet that includes the hashtag #ProtecttheElephants Adobe will donate $1 to the National Geographic Society to help save these elephants.

Please tweet. If for no other reason than to cost Adobe a buck.

Thanks to Techi.com for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. If you love technology but you’re tired of browsing through hundreds of RSS feeds each morning, check out Techi.com.

It’s a technology blog that features only the top tech stories from around the web each day and is updated 24/7. You get a short summary of each story if you don’t want to read the whole thing and you also get access to exclusive articles.

Check it out and subscribe to their daily newsletter.

The First Cut:

Already, their thoughts are drifting up a flight of stairs to the sprawling dissection lab, where in two days they will meet and become intimate with something many have scarcely encountered: Death.

Today they begin the defining course of their medical education.

A required rite of passage on the way to a doctor’s white coat, gross anatomy offers first-year students a hands-on tour of an actual human body.

Talk about hands on training.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

Religious fervor is on my mind as I walk in the bright morning sunlight from the parking lot to my Apple Store. I pass the line of people waiting for the new iPhone, and most have been camping on that filthy walkway all week. Don’t they have jobs? Or classes? Or significant others? These hardcores wouldn’t deign to pick one up next week. They need it today. They’re in it to win it.

What’s it like to be involved in an Apple Product Launch from the POV of a store employee.

I get all the Apple bashing, I really do. Blogs need eyeballs, pundits gotta predict stuff, doom and gloom sells papers. But that Apple bashing is tiring to read and saps the credibility of those who write it.

The linked article is Mike Wehner’s take on the question, “Is Apple thriving?” Short answer, yes.

I love lists. Love stepping through them, one at a time, especially with friends, arguing and discussing what’s been left out, what doesn’t belong, and what is in the wrong place.

As is usually the case, this list is not mine. In fact, I definitely don’t agree with a number of these choices. That is what makes this so much fun for me. C’mon, Jaws at #17? That’s insane. I think Jaws should be right up there in the top 3 at least.

One thing I love about lists like this is the new movies I encountered here. My Netflix queue has some terrific new entries. What’s your choice for the most suspenseful film ever made?

You’ve likely seen some of these, but most of these were new to me. Carve out a few minutes to dig through this page. Incredible collection of powerful, moving images.

Kirk McElhearn argues that quitting an app might not speed up your iOS device, but it might make a difference to your battery life.

There is definitely room for improvement in the information Apple presents on background apps. As is, all you get is binary information, a scrolling list of apps that are running, in some form or another. At the very least, some kind of indicator that tells you that the background app is partaking in some battery sucking activity would be useful.