It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of our beloved founder and leader for the past 50 years, Jim Marshall. While mourning the Guv’nor though, we also salute a legendary man who led a full and truly remarkable life.

Marshall amps are the sound of Rock for so many of us. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim Marshall a few years ago and was able to tell him the effect his life’s work had on me.

Rest in Peace.

It’s worth checking to find out. I did, but I’m not infected.

Wired Gadget Lab:

There are only around 400 North Atlantic right whales left in the world today, according to International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), one of the collaborators on the app. With such a small population, the right whales are one of the rarest large animals and are close to extinction. Collisions with ships is currently the leading cause of death for these remaining whales.To prevent ships from striking whales, Whale Alerts works by linking near-real-time acoustic buoys that listen for whale calls to an iOS device in a ship’s bridge. Using these whale calls, a GPS system and a vessel’s Automatic Identification System (AIS), the app displays a whale’s location in relation to a ship’s location on a digital nautical chart. The app also sends alerts with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conservation measures when a ship enters a conservation area.

“Find My Whale” app?

Picking up where UA’s original 1176LN Limiting Amplifier plug-in left off, this new 1176 collection provides unrivaled emulations of three distinct 1176 hardware units, and is indispensable for any serious engineer or producer.

Some of the best.

Mat Honan:

Steve Jobs is dead. He doesn’t need to do another day’s work as your puppet pundit. Let the man rest.

Yes, please.

Free MP3 Download from the Red Hot Chili Peppers 2011 Europe Tour.

Google CEO Larry Page:

I think that served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better.

So, Larry looks to make the world a better place and Steve didn’t? Oh please.

The Dropbox Blog:

For every friend you invite that installs Dropbox, you’ll both get 500 MB of free space. If you’ve got a free account, you can invite up to 32 people for a whopping total of 16 GB of extra space. Pro accounts now earn 1 GB per referral, for a total of 32 GB of extra space. Have you already invited a bunch of people? Don’t worry. Within a few days, you’ll get full credit for every referral that’s already been completed. Boom!

Nice little bonus for those of us who use Dropbox.

CIO Journal:

About 46% of corporations now issue Macs to employees, up by half in just two years, according to a Forrester report. “The use of iPads and iPhones in the workplace is creating increased awareness and consideration of Macs,” said Frank Gillett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.Even though more companies are starting to issue Macs, the percent of workers using them is still fairly slim. About 7% of computers companies give to employees are Macs, he said.Macs are the de facto choice of many Silicon Valley startups, and many larger companies now let workers choose a Mac. For example, Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby told CIO Journal that about 25% of Cisco’s 63,870 employees use Macs.

Walter Isaacson:

Even though he will not be around to see them to fruition, his rules for success helped him build a company that not only will create these and other disruptive products, but will stand at the intersection of creativity and technology as long as Jobs’s DNA persists at its core.

“as long as Jobs’s DNA persists” may be the key to the future success or failure of Apple.

Dave Caolo:

I’ve noticed an interesting shift in blogging. In short, there’s a trend moving away from hyper-focused niche blogs, back to what I’d call “personality” blogs. It makes me think of when I started writing online in 2000, and I like it.

Dave’s article really took me back to when I began writing on the Internet.

For me, blogging in 2000 is what Twitter is today. People posted short items or a picture of what they were doing, but then it started to become a business. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it is nice to reminisce.

Erica Ogg for GigaOM:

Snapguide and Paper have two things in common. Both appeal to the creative side of mobile users, and both are themselves beautifully made and deceptively simple to use.I think it’s these qualities that are going to provide a roadmap for more iOS apps to come that will appeal to the artsy, creative side of people, rather than the traditional consumption-oriented theme of what have so far been the most popular types of apps on Apple’s platform.

Absolutely right. We’ve gone through several of these waves of apps from productivity to games and every time developers start to push the envelope of what can be done, we get another one. Creativity looks to be the new wave.

CNET has a stupid article full of stupid about how Apple should dump the iPod touch. Instead of linking to the stupid, I’m going to link to Harry Marks’ article tearing it apart.

It’s smart.

Mark Hattersley for Macworld UK:

BlackBerry’s woes continue after a celebrity party, thrown by the company last night to celebrate BBM, ended in a vicious stabbing that forced police to lock celebrities inside the club and BlackBerry to cancel the event.

I could make a joke like maybe someone threw an iPhone into the crowd, but out of respect for the person that was injured, I won’t.

Om Malik:

The non iOS devices for me are purely for academic purposes and to keep up with the devices, trends and apps.

And there you have it in one neat sentence.

John Gruber took the same scene with both — the iPhone is so much better.

Doug Stephen:

My feed is served up via Feedburner. Feedburner is another Google property, but it seems that it’s been mostly abandoned. They were working on a new, more Google-like interface a while back but they have seemingly abandoned it what with the Beta for this interface being gone. It’s too bad that Google has seemingly lost interest in Feedburner, because it’s an awesome service for RSS feed analytics.

I’ve had nothing but trouble with Feedburner. Actually, everyone I’ve ever talked to has had nothing but bad things to say about Feedburner.

Ars Technica:

Ars recently attempted to delve into the inner workings of the security built into Apple’s iCloud service. Though we came away reasonably certain that iCloud uses industry best practices that Apple claims it uses to protect data and privacy, we warned that your information isn’t entirely protected from prying eyes. At the heart of the issue is the fact that Apple can, at any time, review the data synced with iCloud, and under certain circumstances might share that information with legal authorities.

It’s a a good article and should be read by anyone who uses iCloud but the bottom line is, if you didn’t encrypt it yourself, it can be vulnerable to others.

Clyde Prestowitz for CNN:

As a business, Apple has a right to fear that moving the assembly work from China to the United States will entail raising labor costs so high as to make the company less competitive and profitable. But for it to say that it has no obligation to help solve America’s problems is completely unacceptable.

The problems in the U.S. economy are not for Apple to resolve. They pay taxes — I’m sure they pay a lot of taxes — and they employ tens of thousands of Americans in high paying jobs.

Apple is not a charity, nor should it make business decisions based on a country’s needs or wants. Apple has one financial responsibility — to make money for its shareholders.

Instead of giving trillions in bailout money to companies that have been mismanaged, why not use that money to make doing business in America more attractive.

BlackBook is your new company-wide address book. All users in your company can access these contacts, allowing for an easier flow of information between employees. From the BlackBook Server, you can control who can read contact information, edit contacts, and export/share contacts. And each user can set categories for easy sorting by contact type.

The company says with its built-in cardDAV server, you can get the contacts on your iOS device too.

MSNBC:

None of us living today will ever get beyond our celestial backyard in real life, but there’s a fleet of apps out there that can blast you through hyperspace to explore — and understand — the far frontiers of the cosmos on your tablet computer. The latest app is “The Wonders of the Universe,” a multimedia spin-off of physicist Brian Cox’s coffee-table book and TV documentary series of the same name.The app, sold by Harper Collins for the iPad 2 and the new iPad, organizes more than 200 interactive articles, two and a half hours of video and hundreds of graphics to do a show-and-tell that ranges from subatomic quarks to the largest scales of the cosmic web.

The article also mentions and has video of four other space-themed apps for the iPad: The Night Sky, Solar System for iPad, Solar Walk and my personal favorite, Star Walk.

Huffington Post:

Interestingly enough, the study found that of women with minimal pop culture exposure, the majority surveyed find men to be less attractive when sporting a full face of hair. However, this same group of women also perceived bearded men as garnering higher respect and being more powerful than clean-shaven men.

Fear, and respect, the beard.

Apple says it will disclose its Q2 2012 financial results on Tuesday, April 24 at 2:00 pm PT (5:00 pm ET) and will provide a live audio webcast of the earnings conference call.

Dave Johnson for Macworld:

I get a lot of questions about ISO—many photographers don’t seem to understand exactly what it does. Your camera’s ISO control determines how sensitive the camera’s sensor is to light. On most cameras, ISO starts at 100 and goes up from there; the higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor will be.

When photographers talk to me about things like this I imagine it’s like when I talk to them about my amp settings. However, this is a good article to help you get your head around ISO and what it means for your photos.

This came out for April Fools, but I’m not much of an April Fools guy, so I didn’t post it. However, it’s so good, I had to let everyone see it.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and play the video. It’s hilarious.