Sam Radford:

Then there’s the size though. For some reason—and I’m really not sure why—the larger screen makes reading the magazines a much more enjoyable experience for me. Perhaps it’s because the apps were originally designed for the larger size and then scaled down for the Mini. But, whatever the cause, having my magazines on my retina screen Air is a whole lot more desirable. I’m choosing to read there rather than picking up the physical copies lying around my house.

Interesting thoughts from Sam. Personally, I still like the reading experience on the iPad mini more than the physical copy.

I don’t know how accurate this is, but clearly they make a lot of money.

Kirk McElhearn:

I had noticed that, in an album I bought, Hilary Hahn’s In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores, there were no Composer tags. This is a bit irksome, because there are 28 different composers on the album, and manually tagging takes some time.

I thought for sure Kirk must have been wrong, so I downloaded Beethoven’s 5th conducted by Herbert von Karajan (my personal favorite) and sure enough, there was no composer information. It doesn’t make any sense that Apple would do this on purpose, but they need to fix it.

Apple setup a donation page on iTunes dedicated to helping the Red Cross support victims of the Philippine Typhoon. Apple said that 100% of the donations will go to the Red Cross. This isn’t the first time Apple has used iTunes to help people around the world—an iTunes page was also setup to help victims of Superstorm Sandy, the tsunami in Japan and the earthquakes in Haiti when those disasters happened.

Not sure if it’s the imagery, the music, or just the rhythm of the whole piece, but this is ten minutes well spent. I love the faces of the glass-blowers as they puff out their cheeks, sometimes smoking a pipe at the same time. Lovely.

Glas won master film maker Bert Haanstra a well-deserved Academy Award® for Best Short Documentary in 1959. The film contrasts the production of hand made crystal from the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory with automated bottle making machines in the Netherlands. An industrial film with a bebop heart, its lyrical use of light and sound still looks and sounds fabulous, nearly 60 years after it was made.

If you’ve got a MacRumors forum account, change your password and change the password for any other accounts that use the same password.

This is where it all started for me, my first exposure to Apple. The first bit of money I ever made was writing a game called Library Adventure for the Apple II. Much of the code was written with peeks (to access hidden bits of the OS) and pokes (to hide our own stuff for later retrieval) in memory. We used packages from PenguinSoft and Beagle Brothers. Pulled many all nighters and had a grand old time.

Now the Computer History Museum and Digibarn Museum have released the Apple II DOS code into the wild (non-commercial use only). Here’s the link if you want to grab a copy for yourself. As of this writing, the server returned an internal error. I suspect the servers have been overwhelmed with requests.

Sigh. Such sweet memories.

Hard not to like the iPad Air. It’s got an incredible screen, it’s light, it’s fast. Yup, they like it too.

This morning, no models were showing as available for in-store pickup. That has now changed. For example, I’m seeing the 64GB and 128GB Silver and Space Gray WiFi models as available for pickup in my local Apple Store, even though both show 5-10 day shipping.

As always, check with your local store, your mileage may vary.

Pretty interesting study on the statistical failure rate of hard drives. Have you backed up your drive recently?

This is a pretty useful tip, new to me. Click on a document in the Finder, then hit space to open the Quicklook preview. In the upper-right corner, you’ll see a button that says “Open with xxx” where xxx is the default application for that document type. If you press and hold the button, you’ll see a list of other applications that will also open your document.

Nice.

Great heist story from Dan Lewis and Now I Know.

Ran a little Twitter survey this morning. The new Retina mini appears to be available for purchase now in the US, Australia, Canada, Singapore and throughout much of Europe. That’s who I’ve heard from so far. Poll results show shipping in 1-3 days for the WiFi model, 5-10 days for the cellular model, though Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland show shipping as 5-10 days for both models. The models range from 16GB up to 128GB.

In the US online Apple Store, as of 6:30 am ET, the 16GB and 32GB WiFi-only models show as ready to ship in 1-3 days and everything else is marked to ship in 5-10 days.

Just fascinating to read.

Outdoor Photographer:

Aerial imaging using consumer-level “drones” is now within reach of any photographer.

In the past few years, developments in a new form of remote-controlled unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) called “multi-rotors” have opened up easy-to-accomplish, aerial imagery to photography on a budget.

Eric Cheng is a world class photographer and does a great job of explaining how you can get into aerial shooting.

Smile has released a new app in their PDFpen suite of PDF editing tools. PDFpen Scan+ lets you scan documents, articles, receipts, and more, using your iPhone or iPad camera.

PDFpen Scan+ includes OCR on the device, with support for 16 languages. The OCR is performed on the device, so you can use it even if you are not connected to the internet or if you have sensitive documents you can’t share with an online service.

Once OCR has been performed, the text in the scanned document can be copied and pasted into another document or the PDF can be exported with searchable text included. You can also open your scans in PDFpen for iPad or PDFpen for iPhone for further editing or share them via Dropbox, Evernote and other services for seamless editing on your Mac.

PDFpen Scan+ is available on the App Store at the intro price of $4.99. Check out the video demo to see all the powerful features packed into this indispensable tool.

The only thing scummier than Samsung are its lawyers.

Today is Remembrance Day (in the Commonwealth countries) or Veterans Day (United States). Thank you to all those who sacrificed their lives so we could be free.

This is huge news, both for Amazon and for the US Postal Service. Starting with LA and New York, Amazon Prime customers will now get package delivery on Sundays at no extra charge.

Amazon prime customers – who pay a $79 annual charge – will now be able eligible for free two-day shipping on millions of items, and can receive their packages on Sunday. The company announced on Monday that it has teamed up with the U.S. Postal Service and plans to roll the service out to a large portion of the U.S. in 2014 including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix.

USPS has really been struggling, with 7 consecutive quarters in the red.

The semi-independent government agency has suffered in recent years with the introduction of email and the drop in sales from stamps as well as a 2006 congressional mandate to prefund up to 75 years of its future retirees’ health care.

Earlier this year, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made pleas to lawmakers to allow the financially troubled Postal Service to switch to a five-day delivery schedule for first-class mail in an effort to reduce costs to return the organization to financial stability.

Package deliveries – which was never part of this plea – continues to grow and Donahoe said in the press release on Monday that the Postal Service is very happy to offer shippers like Amazon the option of Sunday deliveries. Research on the websites of rivals FedEx and UPS suggest that the two companies do not currently offer a Sunday delivery service. Both were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

The internet and e-commerce have been tremendously disruptive to the Postal Service. This plan will help the USPS find a financial model that allows them to prosper instead of fade. A real win/win.

Ever since I read the book Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer, I’ve been fascinated by attempts to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Incredible how many people died trying to reach the summit or, having reached the top, died on the descent.

They are grisly, but these pictures are a part of the Everest story.

The engineer who oversaw development of Apple’s Siri technology is now at Samsung building an online service for linking together the “Internet of things.”

Luc Julia, a vice president at Samsung’s innovation lab in Menlo Park, California, demonstrated the project, called SAMI, or the Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions, at a conference north of San Francisco on Friday.

I don’t really know what to say.

Despite the incredible “power” of Office’s productivity, Microsoft’s own depiction of its software running on its hybrid tablet results in a $500 error. Charged with adding up just seven rows of numbers, Microsoft Excel running on the Surface comes up with a total of $9,000, as can be seen in the zoomed in detail below.

Frank Shaw’s head must have exploded.

I thought this was a great quote.

Last weekend at Garrison Bespoke, an upscale tailor shop in Toronto, a potentially lethal scene was unfolding in the back room, where employees were taking turns trying to stab Michael Nguyen, Garrison’s co-owner, with a hunting knife.

The latest technology improvements don’t always come in the newest phone.

Love the American Masters series.

Hear My Train A Comin’ traces the legendary guitarist’s remarkable journey from his hardscrabble beginnings in Seattle, through his stint as a US Army paratrooper and as an unknown sideman to R&B stars until his discovery and ultimate international stardom. With previously unseen footage of the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, home movies, and interviews with those closest to Jimi Hendrix.