The New York Times:
Thanksgiving weekend in 1990, I spent two hours at the loneliest place in the world for an obscure novelist — the book-signing table at a Waldenbooks in a suburban New Jersey mall.I sat at the table smiling like a game show host. Store patrons scurried past me, doing all they could to avoid eye contact. I kept smiling. I straightened out my pile of free bookmarks for the umpteenth time, though so far none had been taken.
A lovely story about perspective.
Jim and Shawn talk about trading in your iPhone, Tim Cook, Google replacements, AC/DC, Rush and The Tragically Hip!
Sponsored by Audible (Visit the link to get a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership)!
My thanks to Pad and Quill for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. I have one of these bags and I love it.
Pad and Quill, a Minneapolis based company, began as an idea on a napkin in 2010. Starting with 4 prototypes, a barter to paint our web designers deck and a Paypal account to track orders, Brian and Kari began shipping cases from their basement and since they have grown to a business selling tens of thousands of unique hand crafted products a year.
Initially riding the Apple iOS wave, Brian and Kari (Mr and Mrs PQ) sought to bring to market iPhone and iPad cases crafted from organic materials such as leather, Baltic birch wood and buckram linen book cloth. Over time, the celebration of the craftsman, the accentuation of natural beauty and the delight of their customers solidified as the core values of the company, driving the creation of an expanded line of iPhone cases, iPad cases, sleeves, and tech bags.
With each product being constructed by hand, by craftsmen and women skilled in the century old trades of woodworking, bookbinding, and leather craft every customer receives a product that was essentially made for them. While they’ve come a long way from passing packages to the mail guy through their basement window, both Brian and his wife Kari enjoy the day to day interactions with their customers and dreaming up new ideas for future hand crafted products.
New York Times:
Want the best deals on electronics, but don’t feel like camping out for two weeks in front of Best Buy? Stay home on Friday, but don’t wait too long after that to shop online.
The Wirecutter:
The holiday season is approaching once again, and that screaming you hear is the sound of Internet users everywhere becoming inundated with holiday “deals.” Thousands of deals. Tens of thousands of deals. And, as you may know from experience, most of those deals don’t actually result in any kind of savings.In fact, they are often a waste of money due to marketing trickery or just plain bad products. In fact, according to our research so far only 0.6% of the 42,000 deals we’ve studied since early November are actually a good deal on a good piece of gear. Our attitude is dictated by a general idea: if we wouldn’t buy it ourselves or tell our friends and family to do so, we won’t list it. If the price or the item itself is not good, we won’t list it.
This time of year, we are inundated by “deals”. The folks at The Wirecutter do a great job of separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s also a great list if you are looking for gift ideas.
Vox:
I write about economics for a living, so I understand concepts of deadweight loss and depreciation and inefficiency.That said, I still ask my parents for gift cards for Christmas every year. And I buy them for people, too.
I know this is a sacrilege, and you might, too — there are all sorts of articles out there about how gift cards are sincerely a terrible, horrible gift. And yet I keep wanting them. It could be because I’m just a bad decision-maker, but I think there are excellent reasons to get a person a gift card … provided you buy it for the right kind of person.
I think gift cards can have their place for certain people. Do you give gift cards? Do you like to get them?
For those who celebrate Thanksgiving today, here’s hoping you travel safe, end someplace warm, and have a wonderful day.
Vanity Fair:
I am afraid of the cops. Absolutely petrified of the cops. Now understand, I’ve never been arrested or held for questioning. I’ve never been told that I “fit the description.” But that doesn’t change a thing. I am afraid of cops the way that spiders are afraid of boots. You’re walking along, minding your own business, and SQUISH! You are dead.Simply put, I am afraid of the cops because I am black.
I’m not as Black as Bell but I am the same height and weight and I know the feelings he describes.
Mental Floss:
What do Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Toy Story, Reservoir Dogs, Titanic, Anchorman, 22 Jump Street, and more than 200 other films and TV shows have in common? Not much besides the one and only Wilhelm Scream.The so-called Wilhelm Scream is the holy grail of movie geek sound effects, a throwaway sound bite that had inauspicious beginnings and was revived in the 1970s and made into the best movie in-joke ever.
Once you recognize the scream, you’ll be amazed at how many movies use it.
The opt-out feature, available on both iOS and Android, is a periodically updated list of the apps on your phone, which Twitter says it will use to serve you a more “tailored experience,” including “who to follow” suggestions, relevant tweets, and other content it adds to your timeline, as well as its promoted content.
Um, no thanks.
AMPLIFi TT is a tabletop multi-effect that transforms any room into a jam space so you can play, practice and record guitar more easily than ever. Launch the AMPLIFi Remote app and start jamming to the music you love—in your home, office, dorm room or anywhere in between.
This looks like another great product from Line 6. It’s compatible with the Mac and iOS and outputs to any sound system.
A great article from Om Malik on Silicon Valley.
Twitter:
Starting today (in the U.S. only), we’re beginning to test a new way for advertisers to connect with consumers on Twitter and convert them to loyal customers in their stores, on their websites and in their apps. This feature, Twitter Offers, enables advertisers to create card-linked promotions and share them directly with Twitter users.
There is zero chance I would ever use this. Anyone else interested in giving your credit card info to Twitter?
iMore:
AC/DC’s new album is coming out next week, but you can listen to it now for free through iTunes. Rock or Bust, the fifteenth studio album from the group, can be streamed in its entirety through the iTunes Store and iTunes Radio.The album has 11 new tracks and clocks in at a little more than half an hour and you can pre-order the album.
Listening to AC/DC brings me back to memories of junior high and high school.
Blackberry:
Trade in your iPhone 6 to a Passport and BlackBerry will give you up to $400 in trade-in value, plus an extra $150 “top up” for U.S. residents.
They’re not paying enough.
Nerdwallet:
Each year, millions of Americans head for retail stores to take part in that famed post-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza—Black Friday—with some even cutting their holiday short to get a jump on the seasonal deals.Maybe they shouldn’t bother.
As always, shop carefully and shop smart this holiday season.
Mark Cuban is frequently painted as provocative and adversarial. He’s a big personality, but he’s also smart and savvy. Cuban is also one of the more outspoken critics of net neutrality, laying out his arguments in an interview with the Washington Post.
Apple continues its string of iPhone commercials that feature voice work by Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake.
Pad and Quill, a Minneapolis based company, began as an idea on a napkin in 2010. Starting with 4 prototypes, a barter to paint our web designers deck and a Paypal account to track orders, Brian and Kari began shipping cases from their basement and since they have grown to a business selling tens of thousands of unique hand crafted products a year.
Initially riding the Apple iOS wave, Brian and Kari (Mr and Mrs PQ) sought to bring to market iPhone and iPad cases crafted from organic materials such as leather, Baltic birch wood and buckram linen book cloth. Over time, the celebration of the craftsman, the accentuation of natural beauty and the delight of their customers solidified as the core values of the company, driving the creation of an expanded line of iPhone cases, iPad cases, sleeves, and tech bags.
With each product being constructed by hand, by craftsmen and women skilled in the century old trades of woodworking, bookbinding, and leather craft every customer receives a product that was essentially made for them. While they’ve come a long way from passing packages to the mail guy through their basement window, both Brian and his wife Kari enjoy the day to day interactions with their customers and dreaming up new ideas for future hand crafted products.
Where the reporter makes the Stupid Statement of the Day: “Let’s see how the cameras compare!” Here’s a little hint – they don’t. They can’t. Not even remotely. Stop trying to force the comparison.
He does offer a couple of good tips on proper shooting though. So it’s not an entirely worthless video.
Washington Post:
Researchers coated subjects’ hands with Lactobacillus, a harmless bacteria that you don’t typically come across in a public bathroom. The idea was to mimic hands that hadn’t been washed properly. After drying hands, researchers went in and conducted 120 air-sampling tests. They found that Lactobacillus counts in the air were 4½ times higher near high-powered jet dryers than around warm-air dryers. And bacteria counts were 27 times higher near warm-air dryers than when subjects used paper towels.
Ok, that’s it. I’m simply not going to use public washrooms any more.
Handbrake:
HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.
Handbrake has been my go to video converting app for years.
Medium:
Cyberspace may be ancient history for Gibson, but how our future unrolls before us has once again captured his attention. After sticking fairly close to the present for his last half-dozen novels, The Peripheral is Gibson’s most wide open and far-ranging adventure in decades. Multiple futures, near and far, collide. Characters zip back and forth in time, conspiracy theories come true, and an apocalypse unfolds in slow motion, with all the inexorability of a slowly rising tide.
I’ve been a hug fan of Gibson’s since I first read Neuromancer as a kid. It’s is still the first and only book that blew my mind so much that, when I read in pretty much one sitting, I immediately turned back to page one and started reading it again.
New York Times:
Those who saw Odell Beckham Jr.’s acrobatic catch live on Sunday night at MetLife Stadium probably could not fully appreciate it in real time. Those who saw it on video — millions, once the awe spread on social media — were dazzled by his seemingly impossible body control. And those who saw still photographs of the catch might have wondered, how did the photographer capture that?Jeffrey Furticella, a picture editor on the Sports desk at The New York Times, reached out to some of the photographers who shot the catch on Sunday night.
As a photographer, I always love to read the stories behind the images.
This world record jump is not only not what you’d expect, it’s also bat-poop crazy.
Following public outcry, Mattel pulled it’s computer engineer Barbie book. What followed next is a lot of fun.
Do you know the difference between continually and continuous? When to use I/me, who/whom? How about the difference between everyday and every day? A good cheat sheet to bookmark for later retrieval.
This is the season of food drives. The cold weather and holidays heighten the demand for donations of all sorts to local food banks. This fantastic piece digs into food bank donations, highlighting the most useful items and those that won’t survive the trip through drop off, storage, packing, and delivery.
Worth a read and, if you please, worth passing along to your friends and family.
The next big thing just blinked.
Apple on Sunday said it would mark World AIDS Day 2014 by donating a portion of sales at Apple’s retail and online stores around the world on two of the biggest shopping days of the year—Friday, November 28 (Black Friday) and Monday, December 1. […]