One of my favorite apps gets updated with some bug fixes.

For all of the money in the video games business, it’s just incredible that none of these analysts, developers, executives, or stakeholders has bothered to own up to what the truth about these games failing actually could be. Nobody wants to state the obvious and take responsibility for all of these millions of dollars in development and promotion squandered. So many excuses, but nobody talking straight.

It could be that your game just fucking sucked.

Preach.

USAToday:

PepsiCo on Monday announced it is rolling out “a new way to do mornings” with Kickstart, a fruit-flavored Mountain Dew beverage.

“Our consumers told us they are looking for an alternative to traditional morning beverages – one that tastes great, includes real fruit juice and has just the right amount of kick to help them start their days,” said Greg Lyons, Mountain Dew’s vice president of marketing.

Kickstart has far less caffeine than energy drinks — 92 milligrams for a 16-ounce can. By comparison, a 16-ounce cup of Starbucks coffee has 330 milligrams of caffeine.

Does anyone really want a “morning beverage” that tastes like “Mountain Dew and fruit juice” that has even less caffeine than their coffee?

Gadling:

Chinese New Year is the one time of year when everyone returns to their home villages to see family members and it’s been called the largest annual human migration in the world.

Some Chinese who can’t get train or plane tickets find creative ways to get home for the holiday. China Daily reports that one adventurous soul took a scenic route home, using “48 buses, a ferry, a free ride and his own feet to carry him 660km to his home town.”

You think traveling around the US is hard at Thanksgiving? It’s a cakewalk compared to the insanity in China this time of year.

Test your browser. I got two different scores in Safari, although they were close. Chrome scored about nine points higher.

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From the Nike Support Twitter account.

@mkoyerp Right now, we’re focused on iOS and web. We’re not working on an Android App.

— Nike Support (@NikeSupport) February 10, 2013

Rene Ritchie lines up the most popular Twitter apps and compares them.

Why do I think this will backfire.

Nicely done.

He added that the first class participating in the iMedEd Initiative scored an average of 23 percent higher on their national exams – taken at the end of the second year of medical school – than previous UC Irvine medical school classes, despite having similar incoming GPAs and MCAT scores.

That’s impressive.

Apple is providing a live stream of the event which takes place February 12 at 7:15 am PT / 10:15 am ET.

[Via TNW]

A handy tip from Michael Gorbach, an engineer that works on Kaleidoscope 2.

Two mobile operators in Europe have told customers with an iPhone 4S to avoid updating the device to iOS 6.1, because of reports that the upgrade brings connectivity problems with it.

Vodafone UK claims Apple is working on a fix related to 3G connectivity. iOS 6.1 has been out for almost two weeks, so this comes a bit late. But if you’re in either vendor’s service area and you’re using a 4S, it may be a good idea to put off updating for now.

As much as iCloud is the right idea still not realized, Dropbox is the wrong thing done brilliantly well. And at the end of the day, that still amounts to the wrong thing.

Interesting article by Rene Ritchie.

Note that you have to opt-in and change the settings yourself. I’ve been enjoying ADN.

Laughing Squid:

In the Brazilian town of Santo Antônio da Platina, spiders known as Anelosimus eximius were shot by Erick Reis as they showered the sky. Marta Fischer, a local biologist, is quoted at G1 as saying (translated), “…They are usually in trees during the day and in the late afternoon and early evening construct a sort of sheet webs, each makes his and then they come together. The goal is to capture insects.” She also says this phenomenon is normal.

Normal? NORMAL!? There’s nothing “normal” about thousands of spiders just hanging around in the evening sky!

io9:

Like so many couples, the husband and wife in Timothy Reckart’s Oscar-nominated animated short Head Over Heels have drifted apart, not just emotionally, but gravitationally as well. They roam their flying house, one living on the ceiling, one living on the floor, each barely acknowledging the other’s existence. Then, one day, the husband tries to reconnect with his ceiling-dwelling wife, setting in motion a chain of events that radically alter their existence.

Have some tissues handy. Your eyes are going to leak.

Esquire:

Beer is made by way of science. So it makes sense that a beer’s vessel should be constructed through science, too. And it makes perfect sense that the top craft pale-ale seller in the nation Sierra Nevada, and cultish extreme-beer fiends Dogfish Head — two companies that have gone to great lengths to make science improve their brews — collaborated with German glassmakers Spiegelau to engineer a glass specifically for the drinking of IPAs.

Serious beer drinkers know the shape and style of glass you drink your beer from can affect the taste of the beer itself.

I saw a number of these at NAMM in LA a few weeks ago. Everyone loved them and they looked really cool.

Paul Thurrott suggests that at least one Microsoft Store and other retailers are sold out of the Surface Pro 128GB model. He also said that Microsoft’s online store is sold out of that model.

This is great news for Microsoft, but I’ll wait until I hear exactly how many were sold before I congratulate the company too much.

I’d like to thank Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week with BBEdit, an app that I’ve been using since 1994.

BBEdit 10.5 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better. Now with Retina support and many other improvements — download the demo and see for yourself!

Michael Dell:

I am confident we are making the right decisions to position Dell, our customers and employees for long-term success. There is much more we can accomplish together.

I can’t wait to see what he does.

DudeFoods:

What if I were to make a grilled cheese sandwich that used this cheese in place of bread? A grilled cheese sandwich that was 100% cheese!

I like cheese more than any mouse but even I think this “sandwich” is a heart attack starter kit.