Since this was from 1978, Steve was likely making an appearance to promote the Apple II. Sigh. Big wave of nostalgia.

There was a slight glitch in the stabilizing system, but looks to be minor and fixable.

LADEE’s reaction wheels were turned on to orient and stabilize the spacecraft, which was spinning too fast after it separated from the final rocket stage, Worden said. But the computer automatically shut the wheels down, apparently because of excess current. He speculated the wheels may have been running a little fast.

This launch is a critical step in enabling high-bandwidth communications with future long haul manned missions to Mars and beyond.

If you are on the US east coast and have clear skies tonight (Friday, Sept 6) around 1130p, keep an eye out for the launch.

This strikes me as a very interesting strategy. The way I read it, by installing the Chrome browser, you are enabling Chrome apps that you install to live outside the browser.

Chrome Apps amount to a Trojan horse for Google. By way of the Chrome browser, the company is essentially putting its own app ecosystem right on top of Windows and OS X. It’s a play that’s been months in the making. “There are still reasons why a developer would build a native app over a Chrome App today, but we’re working to tackle each one,” Rakowski says. Google began promoting a handful of Chrome Apps (then called Packaged Apps) in May. In July, its Chrome notification center was pushed out to Windows and Chrome OS users, allowing for alerts and pop-ups outside the browser window. And for months, Chrome’s developer channels have shipped with an app launcher that lives in the Windows taskbar — this launcher rolled out to the public today too.

The new apps look and behave much like the native apps you find on Windows and OS X. They’re built using web technologies, but also with Chrome-specific code that means they won’t be able to run on other web browsers — they’re truly Chrome apps. They can exist outside of your browser window as distinct apps, work offline, and sync across devices and operating systems. They can also access your computer’s GPU, storage, camera, ports, and Bluetooth connection. Chrome Apps are, for now, only available through Chrome on Windows or Chrome OS on a Chromebook. Mac users will have to wait another six weeks before their version of Chrome will be updated.

Will be interesting to see how this all works on top of Mac OS X.

I’d like to thank Marketcircle for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop. Send professional, detailed invoices and get paid sooner with Billings Pro for Mac, iPhone and soon iPad.

Easily capture all your billable time using the convenient time tracker on Mac and iPhone.

Organize your time, mileage, expenses and products using projects. Generate invoices for clients with multiple projects or generate invoices on a per project basis. You can also send recurring invoices, statements and estimates to your clients.

Automatically synchronize between all your Macs, iPhones and iPads as an individual user or as a team of users.

You can also get notified when Billings Pro for iPad is available.

With Intermission, you can jump back and replay something you missed, then resume live playback. Use it to pause any audio while you take a call, answer the door, or use the restroom. You can even pause streaming audio on services like Pandora, iTunes Radio, or Spotify to build a buffer, then skip right past the ads and songs you don’t want to hear!

Another great looking app from Rogue Amoeba.

An extended edition of an article originally published on MacStories.net, “Writing On The iPad: Text Automation with Editorial” contains an in-depth review and detailed guide to Editorial, a revolutionary Markdown text editor for iPad with unique automation features. After reading this book, you’ll have a new perspective on what is possible to accomplish on an iPad with Markdown and text automation.

A new book from Federico Viticci.

Back in 2010 the NSA published “Hardening Tips for Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’” (PDF), a terse, two-page pamphlet recommending a series of security precautions. The agency hasn’t updated that pamphlet for more recent versions of OS X—so I thought I’d do so in the agency’s stead.

Some security tips and explanations.

More iOS music goodness from IK Multimedia.

This product announcement really has me excited. The do-not-call registry caused the telemarketing industry to shift their gears and develop a new strategy, the robocall. When a human being calls you, you can ask them to take you off their list and, legally, they have to comply or face stiff penalties. Their response? Robocalls. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of telemarketing calls I’ve received have been recordings, with no way for me to relay my do-not-call request.

Enter Nomorobo, a free service that screens your calls in real time. If it determines that the call is a robocall, it intercepts the call with a warning message heard only by the caller, and your phone doesn’t even ring.

Of course, not every robocall is evil.

Doesn’t block school closings, appointment reminders, weather advisories and other legal robocalls.

Nomorobo launches on September 30th. My hopes are high that this will work.

A federal jury yesterday rendered a verdict that makes Google (Motorola) a convicted patent troll. It has been found to have breached the duty of good faith and fair dealing flowing from Motorola’s FRAND licensing pledges to standard-setting organizations. None of the companies typically described as trolls have actually been convicted of similarly unlawful conduct.

Ouch.

Neil Young has long been working on an alternative to CDs and digitally encoded music formats. His Pono Music project is an attempt to significantly raise the bar on music fidelity.

The key difference between Pono and industry leaders such as iTunes or Spotify is Young’s focus on audio fidelity. An avowed enemy of the CD, Young now wants to “save listeners” from the MP3. “The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio,” Young wrote. “Hearing Pono for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theatre on a sun-filled day.”

Perhaps he is tilting at windmills, but he is persistent and getting a fair amount of attention, especially from professional musicians. Time will tell.

I bet these sound incredible.

Some nice looking guitars and basses here including a Rosewood Telecaster, a Geddy Lee 1972 Jazz Bass and a Gold Top Dusty Hill Precision Bass.

Ever hear of Marty Glickman? He was on the Olympic team that represented the US in Berlin in 1936, alongside Jesse Owens. The documentary, Glickman, tells the story of Marty’s youth as a runner, his trip to the Berlin games (great story, don’t want to spoil it here), and then his rise to become one of the most influential sportscasters in history. Just as most musicians are influenced by the Beatles, most sportscasters have been influenced by Marty Glickman.

Glickman is available on HBO, HBO on-demand, and HBO Go. Terrific documentary.

Mick Jagger’s letter to Andy Warhol, asking him to design the infamous Sticky Fingers album cover.

In my short sweet experience, the more complicated the format of the album, e.g. more complex than just pages or fold-out, the more fucked-up the reproduction and agonising the delays. But, having said that, I leave it in your capable hands to do what ever you want………..and please write back saying how much money you would like.

One of my favorite Stones’ albums. Great letter.

Sony announced a new series of lens cameras, designed specifically as smartphone attachments. Each QX lens has no screen and no body. The camera smarts are inside the lens housing, communicating with the smartphone via WiFi. There’s an attachment that connects the lens to your phone, though that is not strictly necessary. The QX app converts your smartphone screen into a realtime viewfinder. When you press the shutter release on the lens, a compressed version of the image is sent to your phone’s image library. The full-size images are stored in a memory card on the lens.

I really like this idea, though it is hard to imagine mounting the lens on my phone every time I want to take a picture. Something you might get used to, I suspect, and worth it if the images are significantly better than any I can capture with my phone’s built-in camera.

One aspect that I find most intriguing is the fact that the app can control the lens remotely, with the ability to release the shutter, start/stop movie recordings, and adjust common photographic settings like shooting mode, zoom, Auto Focus area and more. This means I can mount the lens on a tripod, move to a comfortable position, make all my adjustments, then take my shot, all remotely. In addition, this lets me take my shot without touching the lens, avoiding vibrations that might affect focus.

Meanwhile when you’re looking for photo clipping path services to take care of all your photo editing needs, here is a good company similar to Zenith Clipping, a clipping path service provider in Bangladesh that offers the best quality clipping paths. They are also a well-reputed top-ranked image editing company serving since 2010.

It seems unimaginative to me. I don’t know, I just expected more.

Stupid lawsuits.

An article I wrote for Fortune on how important the iTunes Festival is for the bands that participate.

If you’ve spent any time with a pair of headphones and Pink Floyd’s seminal work, Dark Side of the Moon, the phrases “cruisin for a bruisin” and “I certainly was in the right” will bring back some memories. Not to mention, “There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”

Someone at WFMU got hold of all the individual mix tracks from the album and posted them. Nice.

This is an interesting business model. RocketSpace rents space to tech startups, a common enough practice. But instead of offices, or even cubicles, RocketSpace uses long tables, shared within a single company, or between multiple companies. Tight quarters, noisy, with some nice perks.

What RocketSpace, the office rental company he started in San Francisco in a building on its last legs in late 2010, does provide is lots of high-speed Internet access, proximity to well-regarded young companies, amenities like free beer and occasional chats with the likes of Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft, Dick Costolo of Twitter and the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.

And RocketSpace is succeeding. By packing tenants into tight quarters, they achieve a 20% rent increase per-square-foot over traditional office space.

Companies that have passed through RocketSpace, either as local start-ups or initial satellite offices, include such tech darlings as Zappos, Uber, Spotify and Kabam, an online gaming company.

I suspect we’ll see this model quickly make its way into other tech markets.

This infographic shows households by type, 1970-2012. The most notable trend is the number of married couples with children, which dropped from 40.3% to 19.6%. Interesting.

A 21-year-old communications engineer and self-professed security enthusiast named Arul Kumar, from India, is about to get his second bounty from Facebook for pointing out a flaw in the system. This one was pretty interesting.

Basically, the hacker uses the support dashboard to request the removal of a photo from someone’s account. During the request process, the hacker has access to the photo owner’s Profile_id. Change the Profile_id to the hacker’s own id and the request is sent to the hacker instead of the owner. The hacker approves the request and the photo is deleted.

This movie is from Arul’s blog post. Facebook has fixed this hole, thanks to Arul’s detective work. Good job, Arul.

Delete any Photo from Facebook by Exploiting Support Dashboard from Arul Kumar.V on Vimeo.