∞ The photography of Joshua L. Smith

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I mentioned last night that I didn’t get why the world’s most expensive photograph sold for so much, so I thought I’d show you so photos that I do like. These are shots from self-taught photographer Joshua L. Smith.

∞ Sparrow

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I’d like to thank Sparrow for sponsoring this week’s RSS Feed on The Loop.

Get mail done. Sparrow, the new mail for Mac, is designed for you to be efficient in the most pleasurable way. Lightweight and fast, it lets you compose, send and read messages in the most simple and elegant manner.

Try our Gmail-only free version or get the full-featured Sparrow at $9.99. Sparrow is constantly updated for free to bring you the best mailing experience on the Mac.

∞ World's most expensive photograph

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Michael Zhang:

Titled “Rhein II”, it’s a 1999 photograph by Andreas Gursky showing the Rhine river. Last night it sold for a whopping $4,338,500 at Christie’s.

Shawn King sent this to me tonight. I have to say, I just don’t get it.

∞ Unicode character recognition

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This is a tool to help you find Unicode characters. Finding a specific character whose name you don’t know is cumbersome. On shapecatcher.com, all you need to know is the shape of the character!Draw your character as best you can in the “drawbox”. You can do this by clicking and holding the left mouse button and moving around. Draw as many strokes as you need to, then click “Recognize” to start the recognition.

Very cool.

∞ Agenda for iPhone and iPad

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The new version of Agenda adds themes from the developers favorite Apple-related Web sites, including one for The Loop.

∞ Sourcebits: Show your design, engineering talent and win a job

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We want to see how talented you are! Sourcebits is giving you the chance to strut your stuff in the most epic job hunt ever. We’re looking for two designers, two engineers and one quality assurance/project lead to help us break in our new San Francisco headquarters, and we only want the best.

Sourcebits is a very talented group of people and it’s nice to see them grow and open a new office. This is a very cool way to recruit some of the talented designers and engineers out there.

∞ Henry Blodget is an easy target

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Henry Bloget is an easy target. He’s wrong more times a minute than his heart gets a chance to beat blood to his atrophied brain. Which is a very harsh thing to say about someone struggling with that sort of disorder, but I can’t always be the nice guy.

∞ Call of Duty gets $400 million in 24 hours

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Shattering its own day-one sales records, Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, announced that its highly-anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has become the biggest entertainment launch ever with an estimated sell-through of more than … Continued

∞ Remembering our Veterans

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November 11 is a day of remembrance. In Canada it’s Remembrance Day, in the US it’s Veterans Day — whatever it’s called, today we remember the sacrifices of the men and women that protect our countries. This is not a … Continued

∞ Slam Tracks hard rock MIDI grooves

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The Slam Tracks Hard Rock Grooves Pack 1 features 527 MIDI files divided between 10 different groove genres. All grooves come with multiple variations, allowing users of all popular virtual drum instruments like BFD2, EZdrummer, Superior Drummer, Addictive Drums, Cakewalk Session Drummer to create quickly and easily complete hard rock and rock drumtracks. This library also includes multiple drum fills as part of the groove phrases — a dedicated collection of Hard Rock MIDI drum fills can be found in our Slam Tracks Hard Rock MIDI Drum Fills Pack 1.

Nice sounding grooves at the bottom of the page.

∞ Mixel for iPad app brings art creation to the masses

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I was fortunate enough to test a new app from former New York Times digital design director Khoi Vinh before its release today. I also had the opportunity to speak with Khoi about the app and why he made it.

Built for the iPad, Mixel allows users to follow friends, browse, create and share digital collages. Khoi calls these collages Mixels.

∞ Fights at the Hong Kong Apple Store

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Giz China:

Last night fights, a riot and a police evacuation were the results of a clash between a group of professional South Asian ‘queuers’, whose job it is buy large quantities of new products at launch, and Hong Kong citizens.

The iPhone 4S officially goes on sale tomorrow in Hong Kong.

[Thanks Shawn King]

∞ Olympus hid $1.68 billion in losses

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Reuters:

Investigations into scandal-hit Olympus Corp revealed an elaborate scheme for concealing losses on risky bets behind a facade of inflated bank deposits and securities holdings

This is going to be painful.

∞ Pro Tools beats

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Russ takes you step by step showing you things like how to make beats using Boom and MIDI, getting your virtual instrument sounds down onto audio tracks, how to use basic effects to transform the stock sounds and extract grooves from one beat and then use them on other beats to lock their grooves together. Russ also shows you how to pitch shift beats, use gates and side chains to create fantastic new electro drum beats, how to destroy beats and mash them up as well as slice beats and rearrange them using Structure

∞ If a MacBook Air Were as Inefficient as a 1991 Computer, the Battery Would Last 2.5 Seconds

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Imagine you’ve got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you’d get a mere 2.5 seconds of battery life out of the Air’s 50 watt-hour battery instead of the seven hours that the Air actually gets.

[Via Shawn Blanc]

∞ New amps from the AmpliTube Custom Shop

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New amps include models from Jet City: the JCA100H and the JCA20H. Two new amps, one new cab and two new microphone gear models have been added as well: the German Gain amp, HiAmp with Cabinet, Bottle 563 mic and Tube VM mic.

∞ Apple releases iOS 5.0.1

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Apple on Thursday released iOS 5.0.1, fixing a number of issues with the operating system. According to Apple, the update fixes bugs affecting battery life; adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad; resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud; and improves voice recognition for Australian … Continued

∞ After Effects productivity tips

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Richard Lainhart: Everyone who works with Adobe After Effects for any length of time, particularly on a deadline, eventually finds himself (or herself) wanting to improve his or her productivity. In this tutorial, I’ll share five useful tips you may … Continued

∞ iZotope Ships Ozone 5

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“Whether you‚re a musician, engineer, or mastering pro, Ozone 5 lets you master music and other audio simply and efficiently,” says Nick Dika, iZotope Senior Product Manager. “Ozone 5 is the biggest update we‚ve ever offered, with improvements that will … Continued

∞ Dragon Express for OS X Lion

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Dragon Express is the latest member of the Dragon family of speech recognition software that lets people control a computer with their voice. It’s the fast, hands-free way to turn speech into text, whether sending email, surfing the Web or posting an update to Facebook and Twitter. Dragon provides an easy, natural way to get more done in less time. Dragon Express is priced to provide the broadest range of people with an opportunity to experience the power and performance of speech recognition.

∞ Steve Jobs nominated for Time's Person of the Year

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Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs was nominated by “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year. If selected it would be the first time the distinction would be awarded to a person posthumously.

Make it so.

∞ Corporate necrophilia

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Ina Fried: RIM, for its part, says it has licensed Adobe’s source code and plans to continue supporting Flash on the PlayBook. As Matt Alexander said to me today: “Dying companies working with dead products? It’s like corporate necrophilia.”