I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Shaun Inman’s great Fever feed reader. With all the talk about finding a replacement for Google Reader, Fever should be high on your list.

RocketNews24:

Sometimes the hustle and bustle of big city life in Tokyo makes you forget your manners. With most people commuting by train and working very long hours, sometimes there’s no time to do things at home. And sometimes, you’re just so tired and stressed that you don’t care that you are behaving badly.

As a result, back in 2008, the Tokyo Metro system launched a three-year-long campaign aimed at reminding subway passengers to mind their manners while riding the trains.

Some of these are hilarious.

A new weather service from the people behind the Dark Sky app. This is really nice.

Are you a fan of the Alien movies? Are you a fan of William Gibson, SciFi author? Then you’re in luck.

Gibson just tweeted a link to a site that has the script of his first ever screenplay – Alien 3. This version was never made but it’s an interesting look into what might have been.

Grab it before some tight-assed Hollywood type makes the script disappear.

Ellis Hamburger wrote a great piece about why we haven’t seen more app developers supporting iCloud.

Tabular is a brand new tablature editor that lets you read and write music for guitar, bass, drums and much more. It’s the best way to learn new songs, write your own songs and run through practice exercises for nearly any kind of stringed instrument or drum kit.

It’s a nice looking app. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks well done.

MacUpdate’s promotion is ending soon.

T-Mobile USA Inc. will begin selling the iPhone 5 on April 12, letting customers buy the Apple Inc. (AAPL) device via an installment plan that dispenses with the industry’s typical long-term contracts.

Qualifying buyers can get the phone for $99.99 down, plus monthly payments, T-Mobile said today at an event in New York. Service for the phone starts at $50 per month for unlimited calls and 500 megabytes of data.

Manton Reece takes a look at Netbot, Felix, and Riposte for App.net.

Yes, I laughed.

In December, the council unveiled its customary annual list of new Swedish words. Among the words that Swedes had begun using in 2012 was “ogooglebar” (‘ungoogleable’).

The California-based multinational soon got into a huff, asking the council to amend its definition. But the language experts refused to bow down to the demands, instead choosing a third option – removing the term all together.

Now Google is trying to control the words a country and its population can use? Really Google.

That’s right, my foul-mouthed podcast with John Welch and Darby Lines hit a milestone this week with our 200th episode. Special guest included author, programmer and speaker Dori Smith.

Topics include Shandroidfreude, more smartwatch unicorn chasing, and farewell (again) to Fake Steve Jobs.

MG Siegler:

I can’t help but get the feeling that the ramifications of Google killing off Reader are going to be far more wide-reaching than they may appear at first glance.

RSS is important to many sites and people in a variety of ways. MG looks at it from TechCrunch’s point of view and from his own site.

Definitely cool, but I wonder how they sound.

FedEx:

On March 25, 2013 the Toronto Zoo welcomes two giant pandas. This will be the first time since 1985 that pandas have visited the Toronto Zoo.They will spend five years in the Toronto Zoo before residing in the Calgary Zoo for an additional five years.

You really can ship anything via FedEx. And, unlike those of us forced to ride in coach on most airlines, the pandas will have In-flight catering that will include 220lbs of bamboo, 330lbs of bamboo shoots, 110lbs of apples and 33lbs of fresh water.

New York Times:

Last week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They were used to help develop our most important vaccines and cancer medications, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, cloning. Now they may finally help create laws to protect her family’s privacy — and yours.

I read the original book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (Amazon referral) and it tells a fascinating story of medicine and ethics.

BBC Radio 4:

Every Friday we bring you a new drama from Radio 4 or Radio 3. This week begins Neil Gaiman’s classic, “Neverwhere”, voiced by X-Men’s James McAvoy, Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer and soon to be Star Trek bad guy and present BBC Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch.

The first episode is available for download from the iTunes Store and other episodes are streamed from the BBC’s web site.

Ben Brooks explains how he kicked Google to the curb.

It makes my stomach queazy just looking at these pics.

Feral Interactive says its Mac conversion of XCOM: Enemy Unknown – Elite Edition will be out on April 25, 2013. It’ll be available for download from the Mac App Store and other services including Feral’s own online store.

XCOM was originally developed by Firaxis Games and published for the PC by 2K Games; an iPad version is in the works too (though Feral isn’t involved in that one). It’s a turn-based tactical role=playing strategy game that’s a “reimagining” of the classic 90’s game X-COM: UFO Defense.

As the Elite Edition, this release includes the Slingshot and Elite Soldier Pack add-on content, as well as the Second Wave update.

“We wanted to have the capability to start doing some smaller, more experimental games,” said Pardo. “At Blizzard, each team has gotten bigger and bigger, and our dev cycles have gotten longer and longer, and the industry moves much faster than that. Even though we still are going to keep doing large games because that’s what we’re great at, we still wanted to build some new capability and experiment with some games that might turn into the next big thing.”

Hearthstone is a collectible card game that will appear on Mac and PC, and then on iPad, and it’ll be free to play, with additional content available either by earning it in-game or purchasing it. It’s the first brand-new property for Blizzard in quite some time, and quite a departure.

Blizzard’s chief creative officer Rob Pardo talks about the small team that’s working on the game, and how its development made Blizzard look very differently at creating a new property.

Want great press for your startup, app or company? EZPR specializes in getting great stories written about what you’re working on. Call 646-569-9027 or email Ed Zitron to get started.

‘In theory the local police station would contact me and ask for Cameron to come in to be interviewed.

‘I could make it difficult of course and refuse to bring him in and they would have to come and arrest him.

‘Really I just want to embarrass Apple as much as possible. Morally, I just don’t understand where Apple gets off charging for a child’s game.’

So the father reported the kid to the cops. This isn’t Apple’s problem, it’s the father’s problem. Deal with it and stop blaming other people.

If you only read one gaming statistic this week, let it be this one: In a pre-conference survey, GDC 2013′s organizers found that 58 percent of gaming professionals attending either last year’s conference or this one plan to release their next game on smartphones or tablets. That’s a tad greater than commitments to the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s next console, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U and Wii, which combined garnered “next game” pledges from 56.5 percent of developers.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this week plays out.

First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. For example, if a chord is found in a song, what can we say about the probability for what the next chord will be that comes after it?

This is a three part series and is very interesting. I can’t imagine what must have gone into analyzing so many songs.

This was fascinating. Simon Thomas did a nice job with this article.

It’s great to see how businesses are using the iPad to make things better for its customers. I can’t see many iPads sticking around a restaurant in North America though.

What we can say, however, is that the sentiment and stock action related to Apple offer a perfect study in how conjecture and misunderstanding can trump actual knowledge when it comes to evaluating a company. When the company is as much the focus of worldwide attention and as uncommunicative about its own plans as Apple, the effect is even sharper.

Michael Hiltzick scores a bullseye here as he dissects the conflation of “myth-making” with actual news reporting on Apple and some fundamental misunderstandings of Apple’s clientele compared to Samsung’s and Google’s.