Dornbracht:

At Swissbau 2012, kitchen and bathroom fittings manufacturer Dornbracht presented an expansion of the groundbreaking shower technology Ambiance Tuning Technique with the addition of a new application: the Horizontal Shower.With the Horizontal Shower, showering with the Ambiance Tuning Technique can be enjoyed lying down.

Wait, what? How lazy do you need to be that you have to shower lying down? It does look kind of cool though.

Another fun podcast with Myke Hurley and Terry Lucy on The Bro Show.

Eric Caoili for Gamasutra:

Organizers for PAX East have inked a deal with the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority to keep the annual game convention in Boston through 2023, and to donate $325,000 to the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute.

The show’s organizers had already committed to keep PAX East in Boston through at least next year, but this news extends the deal to 2023. The event drew about 70,000 attendees when it moved to the mammoth Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in South Boston in 2011.

PAX East is put on by Reed Exhibitions and is owned by the makers of the popular Penny Arcade Web comic.

Wired’s Raw File:

With some well-placed wire, creative lighting and a provocative sense of visual puns, sculptor and photographer Terry Border has given life to everything from peanuts to pill bottles. His cleverly cartoonish scenes are often viral hits on the internet and they’ve brought his blog, Bent Objects, a global audience.“I don’t mean for everything to be funny,” says Border, who lives in Indianapolis. “We all have different perspectives and my perspective happens to be kind of strange and twisted.”

“Strange and twisted” in a hilarious way. Be sure to read the article to get the link to his more NSFW stuff, “Really Bent”.

Photoshop Content Aware Sneak Peak:

Adobe is previewing CS6 features prior to release. In a video posted to its YouTube channel, Adobe demonstrated an update to the CS5 content-aware fill tool but the cool comes with “content-aware move”. It adds the ability to move any piece of a photo with little disturbance to the pixels around it and replaces the background in a very natural way.

Zach Epstein:

In an effort to justify its policies surrounding data service throttling for subscribers with unlimited smartphone data plans, AT&T on Tuesday issued a brief report regarding data usage on its nationwide wireless network. Senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations John Donovan wrote on a company blog that data traffic on AT&T’s network has grown a staggering 20,000% over the past five years. Usage has doubled between 2010 and 2011 according to the executive, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones.

Oh, so it’s our fault.

Cracked:

As e-book sales overtake paper-book sales, it seems like everybody is crying and wringing their hands about what it means — serious, society-changing ramifications like the end of ownership, or ease of piracy, or environmental impact, or whether it makes things easier or harder for publishers or aspiring authors.Like most important issues, those are boring. What are some effects of going to an all e-book world that haven’t been talked to death? I dug around and tried to find some e-book ramifications that would appeal to the type of people who spend more time preparing for a zombie apocalypse than like, unemployment, or retirement, or something. You know, realists.

“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”

Funny post by Abdel Ibrahim and Jon Dick evaluating the Galaxy Note. Check out the second pick for the timezone joke.

Terril Yue Jones for Reuters:

Working conditions at Chinese manufacturing plants where Apple Inc’s iPads and iPhones are made are far better than those at garment factories or other facilities elsewhere in the country, according to the head of a non-profit agency investigating the plants.

It’ll be weeks before the Fair Labor Association’s reports are done and ready for public consumption, but Auret van Heerden, president of the FLA, suggested that the Foxconn facilities where Apple products are made are “first-class,” at least compared to the garment factories that have been FLA’s stock and trade in the past.

Joel Rosenblatt for Bloomberg Business:

Apple Inc. asked a bankruptcy judge for permission to sue Eastman Kodak Co. over allegations it’s infringing patents that Apple says cover technologies used in printers, digital cameras and digital picture frames.

Kodak is looking to sell that part of its business, according to a statement Kodak issued last week. It’s likely that Apple’s looking to square that issue away before Kodak (and its creditors) make any money from the sale of its consumer products.

Ben Sisario, for the New York Times:

Sony stayed quiet about the price change, even as criticism spread online. But on Tuesday the company said that the changes — which were in effect only on the British version of iTunes, and were reversed Sunday evening — were made by mistake.“Whitney Houston product was mistakenly mispriced on the U.K. iTunes store on Sunday,” the company said in a statement. “When discovered, the mistake was immediately corrected. We apologize for any offense caused.”

Some “mistake.” There has to be more to the story here than Sony is willing to admit. Unfortunately, many knee-jerk reactions to this “mistake” have blamed Apple for being greedy, rather than laying the blame at Sony’s feet where it belongs.

Jesse Hamilton, for Bloomberg Businessweek:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has told AT&T Inc. and other telecommunications companies they must include a resolution supporting wireless net-neutrality in annual shareholder votes.

The move has been pushed by Trillium Asset Management, an investment management firm, which represents in this case three AT&T investors, including Michael Diamond (Mike D of the Beastie Boys), and his wife, movie director Tamra Davis.

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The Loop is a media sponsor for the MacTech events, so they have put together a deal for our readers if you’re interested in attending.

Mac Rumors has a text version of Cook’s speech today.

The Verge:

Over the course of the past week, a firestorm has erupted in the world of iOS apps, thanks to the discovery that Path was uploading data from your iPhone’s address book without asking for explicit permission.Stated simply: any iOS app has complete access to a large amount of data stored on your iPhone, including your address book and calendar.Over the course of the past day, we have been using the method explained by Arun Thampi (who discovered Path’s privacy violation) to investigate several dozen popular iOS apps. Our findings should bring both comfort and concern to any iPhone user.

Apple:

Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, where he was interviewed on stage by Bill Shope, Goldman Sachs’s IT hardware analyst.

This is the audio of that interview.

42 Lasquite Saint Bernards

Video of us out for a walk with our 42 Saint Bernards.

That’s a lot of drool…

Tim Cook talking about the Apple TV:

So, with Apple TV however, despite the barriers in that market, for those of us who use it, we’ve always thought there was something there. If we kept following our intuition and kept pulling the string, we might find something that was larger. For those people that have it right now, the customer satisfaction is off the chart. We need something that could go more main-market for it to be a serious category.

Hmmm, what could that be?

Bloomberg:

As of October, 3 million to 5 million people subscribed to Prime, a program begun in 2005 that provides two-day shipping for $79 a year, said the people, who asked not to be named because the figures are private. Amazon is working to reach 7 million to 10 million in the next 12 to 18 months, the people said. Analysts have pegged the current number at 10 million or more, with expectations for it to climb higher this year.

Prime is a good value for people who order a lot from Amazon because it nets you free shipping; you can easily make money on the cost over the year if you buy enough stuff. It has its limits, however (affiliates who sell through Amazon.com aren’t covered). But with the country still recovering from a devastating recession, are analysts actually that surprised at the low uptick?

Redmond Pie:

Unlike the many clones and pretenders looking to essentially copy the format, Spire simply installs the necessary files of Apple’s voice-recognition utility, requiring a server host and a legit iPhone 4S certificate to leave users with an all-singing, all-dancing port of Siri. In order to prevent such treachery, Apple seems to have added a “SetActivationToken” which stops Spire right in its tracks.

Pocket-lint:

“TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.“So, from that perspective, it’s not a great concern but it remains to be seen what they’re going to come out with, if anything.”

Seems a lot like what RIM said about the iPhone in 2007.

Does this mean they are extinct?

John Gruber talking about 8-inch iPad reported by WSJ:

This is not the iPad 3, which I believe will have a same-sized (9.7 inches) double resolution display. This is a different iPad, which, last I heard, Apple was only considering, not committed to bringing to market. I wouldn’t bet on it.

I agree with Gruber. We’ve known for a long time that Apple has been testing different screen sizes and there is no reason to believe that they have stopped. With advancements in display technology and other factors, it may make sense for a slightly smaller iPad at some point.

Yawn.

Josh Ong:

The U.S. Department of Justice approved on Monday several patent purchases and acquisitions, including a collection of Nortel’s intellectual property to be acquired by Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion and others and Novell patents that Apple has purchased.

Google also got the nod for its purchase of Motorola Mobility.

Michael Geist:

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews is expected to introduce lawful access legislation tomorrow in the House of Commons. An Act to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend the Criminal Code and others Acts…The push for new Internet surveillance capabilities goes back to 1999, when government officials began crafting proposals to institute new surveillance technologies within Canadian networks along with additional legal powers to access surveillance and subscriber information.