Another great looking product from Apogee.

Ross Miller from The Verge talking about the final version of Windows RT on a Samsung tablet. The video is funny. Microsoft is screwed.

One of the most famous gangsters of all time.

[Via Jim Coudal]

The Daily Mash:

MALE hair loss-related anxiety can be cured by growing a pair of balls and getting on with it, it has emerged. As scientists claim a baldness cure will hit pharmacies within two years, researchers at the Institute for Studies have found a link between worrying about hair loss and being unmanly.

I love the Daily Mash. The UK’s answer to the Onion.

A distinctively different kind of weather app for iPad and iPhone with stunning Retina-quality visuals and a refreshingly fun and touch centric UI.

Weather 2x is the perfect balance of aesthetics, intuitive functionality and the right amount of detail.

Check out the latest version with great new features including iCloud sync, Twitter & E-mail sharing, local weather detection, and images of Jim’s igloo for when it reaches those sub-zero temperatures.

I’ve been using Weather 2x since it first came out and love it.

After using his Nexus 7, David Chartier wonders why the 7-inch product category even exists.

An incredible story that our own Peter Cohen has been living.

Katy Steinmetz for Time Techland:

Are you plagued by dropped calls? Is your download speed slow as molasses? Well, that could be because your metropolis is on this list. As part of TIME’s look at how wireless technology is changing our lives, we partnered with data firm OpenSignalMaps to find out which cities had the spottiest service.

Bakersfield, Calif., Colorado Springs and Oklahoma City make the top three.

Jessica Wohl for Reuters (via PCWorld):

Walmart is testing a new system that not only would save the company money but reduce the amount of time customers have to interact with the world’s largest retailer’s self-checkout machines, an experience some people find annoying.

You can’t pay directly on your iPhone, but the system allows you to scan barcodes on your phone, then transfers that data to a self-checkout kiosk, which you then use to pay. So you spend less time at the self-checkout and more time getting out of the store once you’re done.

The local grocery store chain I frequent, Stop & Shop, offers a similar system for iPhone and Android phone users. I’ve tried it out a few times. It works.

Neil Sears for the Daily Mail:

[Bruce Willis] is said to be considering legal action against technology giant Apple over his desire to leave his digital music collection to his daughters.

The report says that Willis’ lawyer contends that the iTunes terms of service only allows him to “borrow” the music, not own it outright. He wants to put it in trust for his daughters in the event of his death, as he would for other assets.

In 2009, Apple removed DRM restrictions on the music sold through the iTunes Store (users with tracks purchased before then can pay to “upgrade” them to a DRM-free version).

Those tracks can be copied to other computers unencumbered with any restrictions, though that’s not ownership as defined by the iTunes Store terms of service, according to Willis’ lawyers.

Update: Bruce Willis’ wife disputes the report on Twitter.

Brad McCarty for The Next Web:

Let’s pretend that you’re a blogger. You’re given the chance to review new, hot hardware from a major company. All that’s required is that you participate in some tasks, but these tasks would fit into your coverage so you agree. In return you get to be one of the first to go hands-on with devices and give your opinion on them. Sounds like a good deal? Well that’s what a couple of Indian participants in Samsung’s Mob!ler program thought too, until Samsung threatened to leave them stranded in Berlin, Germany.

This is an ugly story that makes Samsung look like a bunch of assholes.

I think Clinton Jeff is being disingenuous about expecting to maintain journalistic credibility after accepting Samsung’s offer to fly him from India to Germany and put him up in a hotel. Junkets aren’t cheap, even for global companies like Samsung. Quid pro quo, Clarice.

As Robert Heinlein noted in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

HTML5 Boilerplate helps you build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites.

Don’t make it too obvious.

Apple on Friday filed an amended complaint with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, adding two versions each of the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note to its original claims of patent infringement against a number of Samsung smartphones and tablets.

This is a different complaint than the lawsuit Apple just won.

Nick Barber writing at Macworld:

Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Camera, introduced at this week’s IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, takes clear, colorful images but is buggy and slow.

App Cubby developer David Barnard posted an interesting piece on pricing apps.

It’s important to realize that with this build you can’t add or reauthorize any accounts. If you delete an account or de-authorize an existing account you will not be able to add it again until the final version comes out.

Amazing that these developers are still trying to improve their apps and Twitter can’t release an update for their piece of shit app.

Thanks Twitter.

But at some local restaurants, the hospitality appears to be wearing thin. At least two eateries admit they allow servers to add an automatic gratuity on the bills of diners who appear to be Québecois. Why? Because Canadians are presumed to be bad tippers. A few local servers even have a nickname for the surcharge: They call it the “Queeb tax.”

It’s not just Vermont. Quebecers are notoriously bad tippers, even in Canada. Slap the tax on them.

Matthew Handrahan for Gamesindustry.biz:

Ngmoco has laid off up to 20 people from the team at Freeverse, a Mac and iOS developer it acquired in February 2010.

The report comes from an anonymous source cited by TechCrunch, but layoffs were confirmed by a statement released by the vice president of studios for Ngmoco, which acquired Freeverse before it itself was acquired by Japanese mobile game company DeNA.

Freeverse was long associated with the independent Mac game market, having produced beloved titles like Burning Monkey Solitaire, WingNuts, Big Bang Brain Games and many more. The company leapt into the iOS gaming market with the advent of the App Store and were one of the App Store’s early success stories, earning high praise (and lots of money) with early releases.

Last week, company co-founders and brothers Ian and Colin Lynch Smith e-mailed friends and colleagues to let them know they had left the company.

Work on several projects continues among the remaining staff members, and the studio is now run by Nathan Camarillo, most recently an executive producer at Freeverse, whose resume also includes stints at Crytek and Electronic Arts.

There’s a question for you.

Shawn Blanc put together a few tricks he’s come across for OmniFocus users.

Many thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Pixelmator – beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X.

Charles Babcock:

What a patent and legal system should aim to prevent is theft by copying, such as stealing the technology of a competitor’s product, or creating such a conscious, copycat duplication that one product can be confused with another, thus letting the profits of an originator be taken by an imitator. Samsung did not do this.

Did Charles not see the same trial the rest of us saw? That is exactly what Samsung did. Documents from Samsung’s own executives proved that’s what they did and the jury said that’s what Samsung did.

So Microsoft will help teachers out on pricing, sort of.

Samsung confirmed that it will immediately sue Apple if the latter releases products using advanced long-term evolution (LTE) mobile technology. LTE has been emerging as the top standard in the global mobile industry. According to data from Thomson-Reuters, Nokia ranked top with 18.9 percent in terms of the number of LTE patents, followed by Qualcomm with 12.5 percent, Samsung Electronics with 12.2 percent and Ericsson with 11.6 percent.

This is going to be an interesting year.

About 10 million pounds of syrup was stored at the site, at a value of more than $30-million.Anne-Marie Granger Godbout, executive director of the federation, said the organization is still trying to determine how much is missing and declined to offer an estimate. But a spokesman from the Sureté du Québec said the loss was significant.

Only in Canada.