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Petapixel:

This September, Airbus took to the skies to capture photos of five of its massive test and development A350–900s. The photo shoot was meant to celebrate the certification of the company’s latest twin-engine, wide-body jetliner.

It was also probably one of the most expensive photo shoots we’ve ever come across.

At a cool $300 million for each of the five A350–900s, the cost of the subjects alone totals $1.5 billion dollars.

Any five element photo shoot is complicated. An airborne photo shoot is a thousand times more complicated. Doing it with five massive, quarter of a million-pound aircraft is utterly remarkable. Great video.

Eddy Cue:

“We feel we have to fight for the truth,” says Cue. “Luckily, Tim feels exactly like I do,” he continues, referring to Apple CEO Tim Cook, “which is: You have to fight for your principles no matter what. Because it’s just not right.”

Preach it, brother. I agree.

Colossal:

Ontario-based photographer Stephen Orlando is fascinated with human movement and uses programmable LED light sticks attached to kayak paddles, people, racquets, and other objects to translate that movement into photographic light paintings.

As I photographer myself, from an artistic point of view, these photos are fascinating. But the technical aspect of capturing the images in this way are equally interesting.

Twitter:

In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we’re enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to “block”.

This issue is a giant hairball for Twitter but one that has been long overdue for them to address. I’m looking forward to seeing this rolled out. I’m not looking forward to seeing how it will inevitably be abused.

I really like Amazon and Bezos for that matter. I hate the way the company continues to say how good it is without providing any kind of numbers to back it up. As much as I like them, the criticism is well founded.

Tech Republic:

Jonathan Zufi decided to take some of his thousands of photos of Apple products and collect them into a giant, self-published coffee table book. The result was Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple, a 350-page tome filled with gorgeous pictures of products from Apple’s 30-year history.

I don’t think it’s the ultimate gift (a working Apple I would be), but I have this book and it is gorgeous. It would certainly make a great gift for any Apple fan.

Medium:

Every day tens of thousands of high-speed optical recognition cameras silently snap digital photos of plates, capturing in milliseconds an image of each tag and sometimes the driver as well. They are difficult to see if you’re not looking for them, but the sleek devices can be found clamped to patrol cars and the vehicles of debt chasers as well as mounted along streets and highways and in parking garages and shopping centers. A single reader, once activated, works furiously without assistance, capturing thousands of plate scans per shift.

But there are bugs.

We are being spied on in ways we don’t imagine, for reasons we can’t fathom and by “authorities” with little to no oversight.

The documents reveal that the agency worked behind the scenes for years, beginning after the release of the disco-inflected “Push Comes To Shove” single in 1981…

HAHAHAHA

“The last thing we wanted was to have another ‘Panama’ on our hands,” he added.

LOL!

“That being said, none of us could possibly have foreseen that For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge would indirectly result from our actions,” he added, solemnly shaking his head.

This is just classic. I love The Onion.

This is quite an article from former Google+ UX designer, Chris Messina.

[Via BGR]

The New York Times:

The technology, which has a microchip in the card and requires consumers to enter a PIN at checkout, has been required in Europe and some countries elsewhere for about a decade. Now, Americans retailers and banks are preparing for the wide release of the technology, in a wholesale security upgrade that will cost billions of dollars. The change will start next year and is expected to take several years to complete.

It can’t happen fast enough. Most of the rest of the world is already protected by this tech.

The Globe and Mail:

The first Shaw Fire log – Canada’s answer to what had been a sensation in New York since the 1960s – dates back to 1986; a way to broadcast content on a round-the-clock channel in Edmonton so employees could take Christmas off. Every year, Shaw’s vice-president of community programming invited his employees to his house for a party, and they taped a new fire log, which ran on a continuous loop over the holiday. It caught on elsewhere.

I’d be embarrassed to tell you how often this video plays on my TV during the holidays. Thanks to Lesley for the story link.

Use your iPad or iPhone to highlight and draw freehand on a PDF, sign a contract, make corrections, fill out an application, make comments on a presentation and much more.

A great app from a great company.

I really like Line 6 gear and software. This is one of my go-to apps for iOS.

From 1984.

If the XL1 was equipped with an 18 gallon fuel tank, and you did all highway driving, you could fill it up with an oil change and when the next change was due you could change the oil and keep driving without filling up for and additional 2,400 miles. But it comes with a much smaller fuel tank, because if it could go that long on a single tank chances are the fuel would foul before it got used. The tank is only 2.6 gallons to prevent fuel age related problems from happening. So fill ups are cheap.

The band’s latest album is out and on iTunes for purchase and download. I pre-ordered it and I’m enjoying most of the songs so far.

Marco nailed this one.

Om Malik:

“Pico” is a prefix in the metric system denoting one-trillionth. It is also a small corner of the ever-growing web where I keep a record of my conversations with interesting people. Some are famous, some are young. Some are unknown, and some are wise and old. These conversations are not about technology. Instead, they are about transformation through technology as observed by those who are living through it.

Typically, these are the types of stories I enjoy reading the most.

The Essential Watermarking App for Professionals, Business and Personal Use. A new breed of iOS 8 app that works as a standalone app or photo editing extension. As an extension it can be used directly/quickly from within Apple’s Photos and other apps.

There’s versions for iPad, iPhone, Mac and other platforms too.

Algoriddim, creators of the world’s best selling DJ app with over 15 million downloads on iOS, has partnered with the AppStore and (RED) to bring you an exclusive (PRODUCT)RED version of djay. Available for a limited time only, djay 2 for iPhone and iPad contains a free (djay)RED skin as well as an exclusive (djay)RED sample pack available via In-App Purchase. From now through December 7, 100% of the proceeds when buying djay 2 or any of the (djay)RED In-App Purchases go to (RED)’s fight against AIDS.

Stand with Algoriddim, App Store, and (RED) to fight for an AIDS FREE GENERATION.

Get djay 2 on the App Store today: Mix Tracks. Save Lives.

Make your days more productive with this bundle of awesome Mac apps! Name your own price for Paperless, Data Backup 3 and Pixa, and if you pay more than the average price you’ll receive all the apps in the bundle plus an e-learning course that’ll teach you to master them all.

Looking at the page, the average price is pretty low for these 10 apps.

Bono was recuperating from his bike accident, so he got Chris Martin, Carrie Underwood, Kanye West, Bruce Springsteen, and Bill Clinton to fill in. Not too shabby. The band was brilliant.

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Issue 30 of The Loop Magazine posted yesterday on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. We have nine stories available in the latest release, including a couple on iTunes Festival London that took place in September; Nathan Barham looks at tools for education; Johannes Zhou tells us what memory athletes do; Darren Murph talks about what he learned from buying his mother an iPhone; Rob Annese looks at his experience being an iPhone convert; Brock Winstead looks at real estate and Zillow; Alex Davies delves into Google search and advertising; and finally Darren Murph takes us on vacation… for a tenth of the price it would normally cost in “Travel Hacking.”

The Loop Magazine cost $1.99 per month and you get about nine articles to read. There is a preview of each article in this month’s issue, so you can try before you buy.

Tekrevue:

So, what does this mean? At best, it means only very modest improvements for some models, certainly less than most would expect from a system as old as the 2012 Mac mini. At worst, it means a dramatic decrease in performance, with some 2012 configurations absolutely destroying their 2014 counterparts in multi-core workflows.

The good, bad and downright ugly of the latest Mac mini. Not a machine I have a lot of faith in recommending.

The Independent:

Turn off the spine-tingling music and forget everything you thought you knew about this solitary, “mindless killing machine”. Sharks have individual personalities. They socialise, choose best friends and create social networks of unusual complexity. They can be trained by humans to complete simple tasks, much more quickly than rabbits or cats, for instance, and retain the knowledge for much longer.

Sharks also teach each other new tricks: how to find food, identify predators and charm mates. Like sea turtles, some travel huge distances to return to their own birthplace, again and again, to give birth themselves. Most don’t need to swim continuously to survive. And rather than being near-blind and reliant on smell, which is the general perception, they in fact have advanced sight. They feel pain. And the boldest sharks face a greater risk of dying before adulthood.

Why does any of this matter? Well, we’re killing about 100 million sharks every year, 11,000 an hour.

Like many of us, I have been fascinated by sharks since first seeing the movie “Jaws” as a kid. But, far from giving me nightmares, it instilled a lifelong fascination with these amazing animals.

Animagraffs:

Speakers push and pull surrounding air molecules in waves that the human ear interprets as sound. You could even say that hearing is movement detection. So what makes a speaker travel back and forth at just the right rate and distance, and how does that make sound?

I thought I knew how speakers worked. After watching this cool web page, I realized I had no clue how speakers worked.

More tech deals for today. Go get ’em.

The Roosevelts:

2014 is coming to an end and if you didn’t get all the majestic locations checked off your travel bucket list this year we have 50 photos that inspired awe and wonderment in 2014.

Spectacular images showing the awesome beauty of our planet.

The Passion of Former Days:

A terrific set of cigarette cards depicting a flight from London to Amsterdam in the early days of commercial air travel. The images (each “from an official photograph supplied by Imperial Airways”) are accompanied by text detailing “our” flight, from check-in and take-off, to views over the Channel, France, and Brussels (where we land for lunch), to the final landing in Amsterdam.

I’ve included the backs with the text, as the little details are fascinating insights into a time when planes held “as many as” 20 passengers, reached cruising altitudes of 3,000 feet, and got from London to Brussels in “only” two and a half hours.

For the vast majority of us, flying is an awful experience but, in the 1920’s, if you could afford it, flying was a lot more genteel. The descriptions on the backs of these cigarette cards are also wonderful insights in to how writing has evolved and how information was presented to customers of the day.

Oregon Live:

With emotions running high as speakers were addressing the crowd, he noticed a young man with tears in his eyes holding a “Free Hugs” sign among a group of people.

After talking to Devonte about such things as school, art and life, Barnum said he pointed to the sign and asked, “Do I get one of those?”

I’d seen the picture all over but the stories of the event and the people behind it, in particular Devonte, are amazing. Don’t read without a tissue or two handy.