Jim and Shawn talk about drum loops, Home Screen apps, the CIA and David Lee Roth!

Sponsored by Backblaze (Visit the link for a free trial and then it’s just $5/month per computer for unlimited backup, and it backs up fast) and lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/thebeard and get a FREE 10-day trial where you can access all of their 2,400+ courses).

Wall Street Journal:

Barnes & Noble Inc. has terminated its commercial agreement for its Nook e-reader with Microsoft Corp. , a move it said provides a clearer path toward the impending split of its business.

The bookstore retailer bought out Microsoft’s preferred interest in Nook for about $120 million in cash and stock, freeing the software giant from further investments in the business.

Barnes & Noble added it expects the planned split of its Nook Media unit from its retail stores to occur by the end of August, behind its initial projection for a separation by March. Ending the partnership would also make it easier for Barnes & Noble to sell the division if it chooses to explore that option.

Considering that Microsoft poured $300 million into the deal in the first place, with a commitment of another $300 million to stave off debt, I’d call this cutting your losses and moving on.

For those with an interest in such things, here’s a link to the Form 8-K filed by Barnes and Noble. The 8-K is required when a publicly traded US company has news of major financial impact, like the retirement of a CEO or an upcoming merger.

New York Times:

As some in Europe call for multinational companies to pay more taxes, Britain on Wednesday proposed a new 25 percent tax on the local profits of international companies, including tech giants like Google that use complicated structures to reduce their tax burden. > The so-called Google tax, which would go into effect in April, is part of European efforts to force global companies like Amazon, some of which have faced criticism from local lawmakers for their aggressive tax-avoidance structures, to pay more tax in countries where they have large operations.

Google’s response:

A spokesman for Google declined to comment about the British tax announcement on Wednesday, but Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, wrote in The Financial Times in June that restrictions on companies’ tax structures would lead to “less innovation, less growth and less job creation.”

Tax incentives exist to bring corporate earnings to that locality. If you want Apple/Google/Amazon to funnel their money through your jurisdiction, you’ve got to give them a reason for doing so. If you raise the tax rate, they will move the shell game elsewhere. Similarly, when managing personal finances abroad, understanding regional tax policies is essential. For instance, filing your tax return in Thailand can offer expats beneficial tax arrangements, allowing them to make the most of local incentives.

Google is building what it hopes is a much less annoying replacement for CAPCHA, the mechanism that tests to see whether you are a bot or a human.

This latest version uses a much more mobile and human friendly series of puzzles. As an example, the CAPCHA might present an image of a cat along with a series of nine additional images, asking you to tap all the images that also contain cats. This turns out to be simple for a human to solve and much harder for a bot to solve than the mathematically misshapen text in a traditional CAPCHA puzzle.

Interesting article.

The iTunes antitrust trial started on Tuesday and the mud is definitely slinging.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Apple deleted music that some iPod owners had downloaded from competing music services from 2007 to 2009 without telling users, attorneys for consumers told jurors in a class-action antitrust suit against Apple Wednesday.

“You guys decided to give them the worst possible experience and blow up” a user’s music library, attorney Patrick Coughlin said in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif.

When a user who had downloaded music from a rival service tried to sync an iPod to the user’s iTunes library, Apple would display an error message and instruct the user to restore the factory settings, Coughlin said. When the user restored the settings, the music from rival services would disappear, he said.

Apple directed the system “not to tell users the problem,” Coughlin said.

Perhaps Apple is evil. Perhaps the company was so afraid of losing to Real Networks, and other competing music services/devices, that they intentionally erased competing music from users’ iPods. Perhaps.

Another possibility is that this was an emerging design problem. That is, the sort of problem that comes up with brand new technology as it evolves to meet unforeseeable demands. When those sorts of problems occur, you make the best of things, try to find a way to make the customer happy, and then you move on with a lesson learned.

Have you ever lost data due to poorly thought through design? I certainly have. When that happens, do you ever consider that that data loss was intentional, the result of corporate greed?

To me, that’s the dividing line here. Coughlin is painting a picture of evil intent. In all the years I’ve been using Apple products, I’ve just never seen that kind of thinking.

UPDATE: At the heart of this lawsuit is Apple’s reaction to Real Networks’ reverse engineering of the iPod so they could place their music on hardware that Apple built, without any agreement with Apple. When Apple forced a factory reset, the DRM-protected music was restored, but the music uploaded via the Real Networks hack was lost.

Snarkiness aside (you can read about Steve Jobs’ comments here), is this an unreasonable response on the part of Apple?

Bond is back. More importantly, Daniel Craig is back. The new Bond movie has been announced. It’s called Spectre, and it is due for general release in November 2015. And the cast is fantastic. In addition to Daniel Craig (my favorite Bond of all time), there’s Voldemort himself (Ralph Fiennes) and the always interesting Christoph Waltz (in my opinion, the highlight of Inglourious Basterds).

The rest of the cast looks terrific, though I will miss Dame Judi Dench (sniff). Also, there’s a fantastically sexy new car for Bond to race around in, a just revealed custom Aston Martin DB10.

Check out the video below for the official announcement, live from Pinewood Studios, with the cast ( and car) on stage.

Can’t wait!

Reuters:

An anti-discrimination bill championed by Alabama’s only openly gay lawmaker will bear the name of Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook, a native of the state who came out as gay in October.

Democratic state Representative Patricia Todd said on Wednesday the technology giant was initially hesitant about having Cook’s name on her bill but later embraced the idea.

Very happy to see Apple changed their mind regarding this. The bill won’t pass though.

Revenues from online shopping on “Cyber Monday” surged 15.4 percent higher than last year, setting a new all time peak in U.S. ecommerce, with online mobile sales overwhelmingly driven by customers wielding Apple devices.

This doesn’t really surprise me that much. People seem to be very comfortable using their iOS devices for many things, including purchasing items from a variety of stores. This is something I see that sets Apple apart from its competitors—people have confidence in its products, which leads to confidence in doing other tasks, like shopping.

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]

All this time and I never knew that there was a MacPaint-like program hidden inside Preview. It’s no Pixelmator, but it’ll do in a pinch, and it’s free.

[h/t Minimal Mac]

LA Times:

Former L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said Tuesday that he didn’t know anything about the federal probe and that he had not been contacted by law enforcement.

Deasy’s own role in the iPad project drew attention after disclosures of close ties he had with executives at Apple and Pearson. Deasy, who resigned under pressure in October, has denied any wrongdoing, and board members also have said they don’t believe he was guilty of any illegal actions.

The morning after the FBI seized the documents, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said he was shelving the contract.

Cortines said his decision was not based on the surprise visit by FBI agents to district headquarters.

What a mess.

Before Lemieux, before Gretzky, there was Jean Béliveau. A sad day for hockey, a sad day for Canada.

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.

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.

Update: Many people have pointed to Snopes debunking this.

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.