Jeff Sonderman for Poynter:

Being the first-of-a-kind is as dangerous as it is exciting in the technology world. With few or no prior examples to learn from, you’re left to try stuff and learn the hard way. With the benefit of hindsight, there seem to be at least two major lessons from The Daily’s failure.

Musicians of all kinds use Anytune to learn, transcribe and practice their favorite songs!

Check out Jim’s guitar stylings in a rare solo version of a theme that fans of The Loop should recognize. Something unexpected happened when tuning the track that hints at the source of Jim’s power… You’ll have to watch the video on this page to find out what it might be.

Music Practice Perfected.

Ben Brooks takes an interesting look at some of the most popular sites for tech news hounds and how much of their Web site is dedicated to the reader and how much is useless junk.

Gabe Weatherhead:

RSS is time-shifted news. It’s closer to a newspaper than a radio station. I visit a news feed when I have time to read. Like a newspaper, the value comes from being judicious in using my time. I can’t read everything but, I want to read every good thing.

I use RSS everyday and find it very useful — that’s why I offer an RSS feed for The Loop and a full text feed for members. Sometimes it does get out of hand though, so maybe these tips will help you.

Brett Terpstra offers some advice for new developers on how to release and market their app.

Scary when this happens.

Fascinating when you see all the things that go into making up a Web site design.

Peter Kafka for All Things D:

The Daily, News Corp.’s attempt to create a newspaper for the iPad era, is shutting down after less than two years.

The media giant, which also owns this Web site, said it will “cease standalone publication” of the app on Dec. 15.

The Daily launched amongst great fanfare in a New York City event at the Guggenheim Museum featuring News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and Apple’s VP of interactive services Eddy Cue. The daily newspaper, delivered via iPad, was the first publication to feature Apple’s one-click subscription service.

While The Daily launched as an iPad exclusive, it later became available for Android tablets as well. Still, News Corp. couldn’t get the traction they needed to make the publication a success.

Murdoch says in a press release that The Daily couldn’t “find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term.”

Murdoch says that they’ve learned from the experience, though, and plan to use that knowledge in their other publications going forward.

Van Halen was a surprise guest on “Beat It,” the album’s third single. His blazing guitar solo lasted all of 20 seconds and took half an hour to record. He did it for free, as a favor to producer Quincy Jones, while the rest of his Van Halen bandmates were out of town.

Eddie is one of the greatest guitarists that has ever picked up the instrument.

Leo Kelion for the BBC:

In a world first, on 3 December 1992, an engineer sent the message “Merry Christmas” from a PC to a mobile device using Vodafone’s UK network.

But the origins of the idea date back further to Matti Makkonen. Over a pizza at a telecoms conference in 1984, the former Finnish civil servant put forward the idea of a mobile phone messaging service. This was to become the SMS (short message service) standard.

Dubbed the “father of SMS”- a title he dislikes because of the work others did to develop the technology – Matti Makkonen rarely gives interviews. However, he made an exception for the BBC’s tech team with an interview via SMS.

Big news for holiday shoppers and Apple’s financial quarter.

BuzzFeed:

Only available from 1951-1952, this science kit for CHILDREN included 4 types of uranium ore, a Geiger counter, a comic called “Dagwood Spits The Atom” and a coupon for ordering MORE radioactive materials. One of the four uranium ores included was Po-210 (Polonium) which, by mass, is 250,000 times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide. “Merry Christmas Kevin, here’s that giant box of poison you asked for.”

That’s pretty bad but what might even be worse is the fact that, I’m sure like a lot of you, I actually had many of those old Hardy Boys books they talk about!

TIME:

The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was retired from active service on Saturday. The Enterprise was the largest ship in the world at the time it was built, earning the nickname “Big E.”

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was the eighth U.S. ship to bear the name Enterprise, but it won’t be the last.

My dad was in the Canadian Navy for many years and I still remember getting a tour of the ship as a ten year old.

SiliconBeat:

As Apple dreams up details of its new spaceship-shaped headquarters in Cupertino with the starchitects over at Sir Norman Foster’s shop, big-time fanboy and computer historian David Greelish has a suggestion:

“Hey,” he wrote in his blog, “you know what Apple needs? A visitor’s center, that’s what.”

Greelish has gotten something else for all his hard work: a big fat “Thanks but no thanks” from Apple.

And yet, even after being told no by the company, he’s still petitioning Apple online to include this “feature” on their new campus. Anyone else think this is a really bad, dumb idea?

Many thanks to Pixel Research Labs for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop with Ringer.

Ringer for iOS and Mac. Effortless iPhone ringtones, text tones, and alert tones. Easily select just the right part of your song to turn into your ringtone. See the waveform for your media so you can quickly find the spot you are looking for. Control fade in and fade out. Choose the gap between rings. Auto volume balance keeps ringtones from being too loud or too quiet. Ringer on the Mac lets you use just about any media including video and automatically imports tones into iTunes, ready to sync to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

David Barnard, founder of App Cubby, explains and apologizes to users of Timer for one of his decisions.

Much respect David.

Andrew Liszewski for Gizmodo:

Great news for anyone who’s ever dreamed of their boring desk lamp coming to life as their lovable sidekick. Inspired by the animated Luxo lamp that greets moviegoers at the start of every Pixar film, Adam Ben-Dror, Shanshan Zhou, and Joss Doggett created the Pinokio lamp which moves and reacts to its environment with what appears to be genuine emotions.

The accompanying video is very cute. I wonder if the creators of Pinokio will try to get it to balance on a ball someday.

This week, however, a Swisscom spokesperson told Telecoms.com that: “Apple only enables 4G access after testing their device on an operator’s live network.”

[…]

It proved, he said, “who is running the industry”, adding: “Apple have put themselves in the driving seat; it’s really changing the game quite a lot.”

Apple has exerted more control over carriers than any other handset maker. Before Apple, carriers had the control, and still do in a lot of cases.

Apple today announced the Wi-Fi versions of iPad® mini and fourth generation iPad with Retina display will be available in China on Friday, December 7, and iPhone 5 will be available on Friday, December 14.

This is huge for Apple.

Jon Brodkin for Ars Technica:

Each year, Consumer Reports surveys some 60,000 cell phone subscribers to find out which service providers are the best and worst. AT&T is on a real hot streak in these rankings—a hot streak of finishing dead last in customer satisfaction.

Well, AT&T has one thing going for them anyway: Consistency.

There was a bright spot: AT&T’s LTE service scored well amongst customers using it. But in terms of voice quality, value, text, data and support, AT&T scored last or tied for worst.

You can now buy the unlocked iPhone directly from Apple, although it will cost more.

This is just terrible. Not Apple’s fault, but there definitely has to be a way to track this.

Top Gear:

In a special edition of Top Gear, Richard Hammond celebrates 50 years of James Bond films with a look back at 007’s legendary cars. He also talks to Daniel Craig and Sir Roger Moore, gets exclusive access behind the scenes of Bond’s latest adventure, Skyfall, and pays special tribute to 007 by attempting to turn a Lotus in a fully working submarine car.

This is the 50th anniversary of James Bond and of all the people jumping on the bandwagon, I’m most looking forward to the Top Gear take on some of the iconic Bond cars. Sadly, this show, while available on the iTunes Store, doesn’t include the full Top Gear complement – it’s just The Hamster.

Give a gift that gives back this holiday season with Starbucks iTunes (RED)™ eGift basket. You can send loved ones a thoughtful gift of two digital eGifts—$15 eGift to Starbucks and $15 eGift to iTunes—for $30. Plus, for every gift sold, Starbucks and iTunes will together contribute 5% of the purchase price to the Global Fund to help deliver an AIDS free generation by 2015. With the convenience of a Starbucks Card, Starbucks Card eGifts can be used for purchases in-store at participating company-owned and licensed stores in the U.S. and online. This unique and meaningful eGift basket can be purchased online

Since launching our partnership with (RED) in December 2008, Starbucks has contributed more than $11 million to the Global Fund to help those living with HIV/AIDS. Starbucks continues to support and drive contributions to the Global Fund while raising awareness toward an AIDS Free Generation by 2015.

A San Francisco judge on Wednesday granted a temporary restraining order compelling Twitter to continue providing access to its “Firehose” – the full daily stream of some 400 million tweets – to PeopleBrowsr Inc, a data analytics firm that sifts through Twitter and resells that information to clients ranging from technology blogs to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Inspired by the ultimate collection of legendary and boutique amps and effect pedals, GuitarTone offers a vast array of high quality tones. Sonoma passionately created tonal interpretations of essential vintage and custom amps, pedals and microphones, and assembled them into GuitarTone.

You can do dual amps with this too. Looks great.

Philip Berne:

I stopped downloading any pirated content about 5 years ago, when I was caught and sent a nastygram by my cable company. But it wasn’t really the cable company who caught me. It was HBO. I was trying to download The Wire. The warning I received said they were not pressing charges immediately, but they wanted me to stop and destroy my copies. They also reserved the right to sue me at any point in the future. I’m probably in the clear, but hopefully this screed will go some way to convincing HBO that I’m completely on their side. I have seen the error in my ways.

I bet that would be enough to make anyone stop illegal downloading.