A new project from Shawn Blanc that he describes as:

Tools & Toys is a collection of hand-selected items for the pickiest of gadget geeks, software aficionados, snowboard junkies, music lovers, writers, coffee nuts, and all around collectors of fine paraphernalia.

Wall Street Journal:

Boast that you’re going to attack Apple’s iPad with your $499 TouchPad. Then dump your TouchPad in a $99 fire sale and announce you’re just not going to offer it anymore.Telegraph to the world that you are just too dumb to make smartphones.Raise your financial estimates, twice. Then miss them, twice.

There is a lot of stupid going on at that company these days.

Air Users Blog:

A week after starting I had to tell her that I was unable to complete the project. I had more chance of growing tits than giving her an album worth pressing.

Mixing an album takes a lot of talent even if the artist is good, but if they’re not…

MG Siegler has the scoop:

Again, the device is a 7-inch tablet with a capacitive touch screen. It is multi-touch, but from what I saw, I believe the reports that it relies on a two-finger multi-touch (instead of 10-finger, like the iPad uses) are accurate. This will be the first Kindle with a full-color screen. And yes, it is back-lit. There is no e-ink to be found anywhere on this device.

I think Amazon’s tablet will be successful because of the brand. People trust Amazon, so they’re likely to buy.

IndustryGamers:

Developers seem confident that Apple will be just fine without Jobs steering the ship. In fact, the timing may have been just right for Jobs to step down, in advance of the iPhone 5 likely being revealed.

Glad to see that iOS game developers share the same confidence I feel that Apple is in good hands with Tim Cook and the rest of the executive team that Steve assembled.

Macworld:

One in six Macs now runs Apple’s latest operating system, a Web metrics company said Thursday.According to California-based Net Applications, Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, accounted for 1 percent of all desktop operating systems that were used to connect to the Internet last month.

We’re just over a month since the release of Lion. Lots of people like audio engineers, musicians and other creative pros hold off on upgrading to a new OS until all of their apps are throughly tested. I still haven’t upgraded the Mac Pro in my studio and probably won’t for some months to come.

SFWeekly:

Dangerfield says that, after conferring with Apple and the captain of the Ingleside police station, he has learned that plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio Calderón, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers “did not go inside the house,” but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured Calderón’s home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5. The phone was not found, and Calderón denies that he ever possessed it.

Does anyone know what’s going on over there?

Florian Mueller:

I just provided a detailed update on the current state of affairs in the ITC investigation of Apple’s first complaint against HTC, and I saved a true gem for this separate blog post. It’s a story that’s remarkable per se — allegedly, Android started at Apple — and it could also have major legal implications for a future Apple lawsuit against Google or possibly even for Apple’s dispute with Motorola Mobility after its proposed acquisition by Google.

Classic argument by Apple.

Peter Jamison for SFWeekly:

If accurate, his account raises the possibility that Apple security personnel attempting to recover the prototype falsely represented themselves as police officers — a criminal act punishable by up to a year in jail in the state of California — or that SFPD employees colluding with Apple failed to properly report an extensive search of a person’s home, car, and computer.

Uh oh.

The Next Web:

There has been a misquote being passed around the net like wildfire this morning. According to the quote that is being reported widely by tech and Apple blogs, Eric Schmidt said that he stayed on Apple’s Board of Directors until he “couldn’t stand the board anymore.”But that quote is incorrect, Schmidt actually said: “I was on the board until I couldn’t stay on the board anymore,”

The SF Chronicle has corrected its original story, but the error is still echoing over the blogosphere.

AllThingsD:

In fact, the creation of a $20 million investment kitty that Arrington has dubbed CrunchFund is simply the formalization of a long-standing arrangement that has already been going on since he founded his popular tech blog.That is to say, in which the basic standards of journalism are first warped by calling it newfangled truth-telling and then endlessly corroded by using a wily and unusually aggressive combination of favors and threats to extract, from start-ups and VCs in need of press, both exclusive access and information.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was given his walking papers by AOL this week (at least as head of TechCrunch, though he appears still to be employed by AOL Ventures) after it was revealed that he started a venture capital fund; the move violates generally accepted journalistic standards (and indeed goes against AOL’s policy). AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, already an outspoken critic of Arrington, assembled her thoughts in a particularly vituperative editorial that, for maximum effect, should be read while listening to Gerald Fried’s music from the original Star Trek episode “Amok Time.”

I’m proud to know him; he’s a poetic fellow, an artist and a businessman. Just because he’s been extremely busy, that doesn’t mean that he and his wife, Laurene, have not been thinking about these things. You don’t have to be a friend of his to know what a private person he is or that he doesn’t do things by halves.

Patrick Moorhead for TechPinions:

My assumption is that Apple will find a business model the content providers will find advantageous or tempting enough to cross the cable and satellite companies. If not, then you would expect them to declare war and do everything in their power to circumvent this by investing in the “pipe” or content companies themselves. This market is too huge and too big an opportunity for the most valuable company on the planet to pass up. I know, this sounds impossible, but when Napster arrived on the scene, how plausible did iTunes sound? How plausible did downloadable movies sound with bit-torrent around?

I know the naysayers are convinced an Apple television will never happen, but I’m not so sure. What I do know is that Apple will enter a product category when it feels it can change the market, the same way it has done in the past.

The iPod, iPhone and iPad are perfect examples of how Apple has entered existing markets with fresh ideas and dominated. With iTunes selling movies, videos and TV shows, and iCloud on the way, I wouldn’t count Apple out of this market just yet.

BusinessInsider:

Because we’ve licensed so much other great content, Starz content is now down to about 8% of domestic Netflix subscribers’ viewing. As we add a huge more content in Q4, we expect Starz content to naturally drift down to 5-6% of domestic viewing in Q1. We are confident we can take the money we had earmarked for Starz renewal next year, and spend it with other content providers to maintain or even improve the Netflix experience.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings notes that they have licensed more network and cable shows, as well as more first run movies from big studios. Maybe Starz just wasn’t worth the money to them anymore.

Bloomberg:

Starz LLC, the premium cable channel controlled by billionaire John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp., said it ended contract renewal talks with Netflix Inc. (NFLX) after failing to come to terms. Netflix shares fell.

Terrible news. I watched a lot of Starz movies on Netflix.

IndustryGamers:

Dave Castelnuovo – Owner, Bolt Creative“I would like to see a personal anti-grav device built into the ipad 3 so that I could sit on it and allow me to hover around instead of walking. Kind of like of like a Segway, but without the Segway. Seriously though, I’m not even sure what else they can add to the iPad.”

Other suggestions include Flash support, 4G data support, “retina display” and more. Regarding Flash, I think Castelnuovo’s hoverpad idea has a better chance.

As a result, we’ve put a location switch on the compose screen for each message or comment, so the user will have full control in its use, message by message. And when you add your location, its not only private to that board, but its specific to that moment in time. Glassboard does not track your position over time, and no one else will have access to this information.

I definitely think Sepia Labs is taking the right approach here.

ZDNet:

Mind you, there is one word in that previous paragraph that really caught my attention, “suspected.”It leads me to wonder whether these organizations can really say with authority that the manufacturing organizations and sites that it is targeting are actually working with Apple, or whether they are making an educated guess based on Apple’s voluminous supply chain. No one really knows, and that is part of the problem.

Apple gets in the crosshairs of environmental organizations because they are a high-profile organization. Saying “Apple” draws attention to their cause. The SEO sure can’t hurt their Web traffic, either.

AllThingsD:

Here’s new Apple CEO Tim Cook’s first org chart move: He has given media boss Eddy Cue a promotion, pushing him up from vice president, iTunes to senior vice president, Internet Software and Services.

Eddy Cue previously took over MobileMe following its launch – and Steve Jobs’ infamous dressing-down of the MobileMe team. In his expanded role, Cue assumes responsibility for iAds, filling a slot vacated by Andy Miller, who’s become a partner at a Boston-based venture capital firm.