Chalk art by David Zinn is pretty awesome. No, not the same old set of ‘3d street chalk art’ either.

A Photo Album full of an OCD sufferers worst nightmares.

Google announces some More spring cleaning of their services.

Great interview with Linus Torvalds on Linux and Git. Great stuff in there.

Web Upd8 has the details on the new Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2, including download links and what’s changed since beta 1.

The Big Picture has some great images Revealing more of North Korea. A very cool look, and not slanted (as previous “revealing insights” have been) in the “hey look at how there are pictures of Dear Leader everywhere and these people are living in the past”. Just a bunch of normal people doing normal things in normal looking places.

Sydney wrote in this morning to tell me about a cool new reality gaming concept on Kickstarter:

Thought you might be interested in covering a kickstarter project called Geoception in your blog. It is a game that runs uses Google Earth as its platform. Check out the project at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/945876709/geoception-reality-gaming-in-google-earth

Just helping the developer promote his project.

Very cool stuff, check out Geoception on kickstarter to see what it’s all about and more importantly, why it’s doing things the way it is:

Google Earth offers us easily the largest map ever in a video game. You could play for years and never explore it all.  And Google is always hard at work with their (real-world) cars, planes, and ships, mapping and modeling the world’s cities and sea floors in great detail.  This means the giant game map that is Google Earth is always improving in quality and accuracy, without any input from us.  And every time you interact with this game map, you learn something about the real world you live in.

Looking at Google’s new Field Trip app and it does look like a great new take on the field trip, or even the concept of tourist in your own back yard. More info here at 9-5 Google.

Grab the Android app on Google Play, or if you’re in iOS land, wait a bit for it to be released.

Cool stuff, Tap Tap Tap has announced Camera+ for iPad, which is basically a blown up version of their great Camera+ app for iPhone (but done properly for the larger real estate. It also incorporates iCloud sync so that you can take images with Camera+ and have them magically appear on the iPad for editing (so you don’t end up on the People Taking Pictures With iPads site).

The iPhone app has also been updated for compatibility with iOS6, the larger screen size of the iPhone 5 and with tweaks and goodies like facebook sharing using single sign on and iCloud sync.

Congrats to the GNOME team for another great looking release! You can check out the GNOME 3.6 Release Notes for details of what’s changed since 3.5.

GNOME 3.6 is the latest update to GNOME 3 and represents 6 months of work by the GNOME Project. It delivers a number of major new features, including a reworked Activities Overview, updated message tray and notifications, an enhanced Files application, as well as improved accessibility support and integrated input sources for using different languages. It also incorporates a host of smaller enhancements. Together, these changes make GNOME 3 better than ever before.

You can get GNOME 3.6 here, either in a live CD or the details for your existing linux distro.

Very cool, an app that was created at the FaceBook World Hack Vancouver is now live! Loupe Cards is actually a cool idea, letting you create personalized greeting cards on facebook instead of clicking the “your friend has a birthday” button and typing in (yet another in a stream that will no doubt be completely ignored because the person knows that you just saw the notification and clicked the button) “Happy Birthday!”. Congrats to the team for the great app and the well deserved win!

TorrentFreak has the story about Megabox, teased by Kim Dotcom. It seems to be a new music sharing / production / something service with the goal of kicking the asses of the old school music industry.

Kim Dotcom is determined to put the major music labels out of business with Megabox. At the same time he promises to give artists full control over their own work and a healthy revenue stream. Today Dotcom released a video on the making of Megabox which unveils some of the service’s features. The video also shows “The Black Keys,” “Rusko,” “Two Fingers” and “Will.i.am” as exclusive artists.

From the video it definitely looks very cool, I can’t wait to see what results!

So Gruber linked to this video entitled Devs, BlackBerry Is Going To Keep On Loving You.

I can’t believe this isn’t a spoof, parody or with tongue jammed firmly in-cheek.

Saw this morning that Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 11 and Premier Elements 11:

With this latest release, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements team has concentrated primarily on improving workflow and the user experience rather than adding a long list of features and effects. Addressing long-standing complaints of hard-to-read text on a dark UI of previous iterations, this new version uses a light gray background and larger type, along with a decidedly app-like icon-based interface to present novice users with only the tools they are likely to use. All of the functionality of Elements 10 remains for more seasoned users, however, and new lens blur filters (from Photoshop CS) and simulated drawing effects are found in Elements 11 as well. As with the previous version of Elements, you have access to the Adobe Camera Raw processing engine with Basic, Detail and Camera Calibration tabs for a wide range of editing options for Raw files.

Valve’s Epic Gift from Weta Workshop - via Forever Geek.

Seriously, that’s friggin’ awesome. I’d sell my firstborn for something like that.

I don’t know if the Tourettes Karaoke version of Lional Richie’s ‘Hello’ is “real” tourettes, but it’s still pretty damn funny.

Note: NSFW language, unless you have a workplace without a good HR policy :)

The latest Ubuntu controversy is that in Ubuntu 12.10 searching from the main “Dash” will return Amazon affiliate results as well as “normal” results. These aren’t “ads” but they are (according to Mark Shuttleworth) simply “products”. OMG Ubuntu has some commentary as Mark Shuttleworth Explains Ubuntu’s New ‘Amazon Suggestions’ Feature:

Amazon product results, whilst undoubtedly useful, generate a small cut of revenue for Canonical and Ubuntu each time a purchase is made. So were they implemented solely to be self-serving? Or is their introduction a win-win; a way to give users a new feature and make money for Ubuntu at the same time?

What do you think? Overblown, or start of a mass migration away from Ubuntu to Mint, Fedora, or another distro?

Personally I’ll be ignoring this until it becomes annoying (if it does).

They’re at it again, you can get up to 2 Free iPhone 5 Cases ZooGue.com, paying only shipping ($10 for me in Canada). Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Creative guy Ze Frank has outdone himself again, with the help of over 2000 people. The 2601 People Wrote This Song episode is truly a masterpiece. Video is embedded below.

Swiss Federal Railways Says Apple Copied Its Iconic Railway Clock, and while my first reaction was “you can copyright a clock?”, it’s really no more odd than copyrighting a black square with rounded corners.

SBB is the sole owner of the trademark and copyright of the railway clock. The railway company will now get in touch with Apple. The aim is a legal, as well as a financial solution. It is not right that one [Apple] simply copies the design.

I don’t know if this will go anywhere, but seems like Apple is clearly in the wrong here, and should pay up or change it, just like they’re making Samsung do for doing exactly the same thing.

The Left 4 Dead Blog has some juicy bits about Steam Workshop coming to Left 4 Dead as Linux.

All of this will also be available not just on the PC and Mac, but also for Linux users as well starting in the middle of next month and rolling out from there. We will have more details as we get closer to launch.

I’m honestly not a L4D player, so I wholly admit that I could be reading this wrong (though where I saw it posted said “Steam coming to linux confirmed”), as I don’t really know what the Steam Workshop is or how that relates, but anything that’s Steam related that is coming to Linux is a good thing, and does follow previous rumors about Valve working on a Linux port.

The Amazing iOS 6 Maps is a tumblr site collection of the, shall we say, “less than stellar” examples from the new iOS 6 maps.

I really like iOS and the iPhone, but this I 100% say is a stumble on Apple’s part. I am hoping that it’ll be getting better over the next while, not only under the careful watch of Tim Cook (read: developers chained to their desks until it works properly) and as more user data comes in (as a lot of things like driving and traffic are helped by users using the maps app more and more).

Some of the examples are pretty facepalming (is that a verb?).

Click and Drag - This XKCD you need to read on the website.

Macworld has a nice iOS 6 Review, going into the highs (and lows) of the update, and catching a bunch of nice little bits that you may not have noticed yet with your shiny new downloaded OS.

There has yet to be a major version of iOS to which we haven’t recommended updating, and iOS 6 is no exception to the rule. As always, Apple continues to demonstrate its methodology of adding features gradually and, for the most part, sensibly.

Evernote has released The All New Skitch 2.0 for iPhone, Mac, iPad and iPod Touch. New iPhone/iPod touch compatibility (it used to be an iPad and Mac app only) and a new UI. Not sure if I like all the UI as much as I did before, but it works well for what it does, and has full Evernote integration.

Just a reminder that today (Sept 19) is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Ensure you be talkin’ like that. Or something.

Nice to see reddit making some minor modifications in honor of it.

Via my buddy StaticRed is this “Untitled Web Series…”, or “Inspector Spacetime”. I think any Whovians will recognize some similarities in this one….

So Canadian iPhone fanatics, want to get a phone on launch day but not really wanting to do the lineup thing? You will want to check out the details from the iPhone In Canada Blog on Future Shop and Best Buy Taking iPhone 5 Pre-Orders In-Store. The short story is you go into your local FutureShop or Best Buy, pop down a $50 down payment, and go back in on Friday (iPhone 5 launch day) and pick it up.

Seems Apple got it’s distribution issues sorted out and (at least the Future Shop I spoke to) has a guaranteed number of phones that they’re going to get in. They do recommend you know the status of your upgrade eligibility to help speed things up for checkout. Seems they’re getting a bit low so you may want to get in before they’re out!

Seagull Steals Camera, Films Itself Flying Off Into the Sunset via Petapixel.

French tourist Nathalie Rollandin came across a camera-happy seagull recently. She was visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, when she set her GoPro camera down while its was recording. Before she knew it, the camera was being carried away in the mouth of an artsy gull. Once the bird was a safe distance away, it set the camera down and recorded some beautiful footage of itself flying away into the sunset.

Wonder if all gulls are as artistic as this one? :)

How cool is this, you can use Google Street Maps to go on a walking tour inside the TWiT cottage. The This Week In Tech guys have got one sweeeeeet setup.

Nice take on the acquisition from Trey Ratcliff: The Importance of Google Acquiring Nik Software.

This is an exciting move from Google, and another indication that Google takes photography very seriously. Most of the silicon-valley-bubble-press probably does not know much about Nik Software, and doesn’t realize that this is a company built by and for professional photographers. Even though their software is designed for “pros”, I’m confident in saying that 90% of their customers are amateurs who are using these same tools to make them look like pros! Nik makes amazing tools, and I am really looking forward to seeing them bleed into my daily life of using Google+.

Personally I’m a bit worried. I really, really love Nik and their SilverEfex and HDR Efex, and with google’s purchases it’s always a toss up between “take this and make it more awesome” and “kill it”. I’ve got my fingers crossed for the former.

The awesome Gentlemen’s Rant guys have put out the “Banned” iPhone 5 Ad that Parodies Apple’s Design Video. I love my iPhone and everything, but this is absolutely hilarious.

Via a Facebook post this morning: Canon announces EOS 6D enthusiast-level Wi-Fi capable full-frame DSLR via DPreview.

Short story is 20mp, full frame sensor, ISO up to 51200 (or 102400 in the high extended noone-will-ever-use-it mode), 3.2” LCD, 97% viewfinder, .71x viewfinder magnification, 1080p video in all the expected FPSs, SD/SDHC/SDXC storage, WiFi and GPS built in, and pretty much everything else that you’d expect.

We won’t know how good it really is until the full hands on and detailed reviews are done, but looks pretty nice that’s for sure! Wonder if this is the start of the end of the APS-C “pro-sumer” cameras, as this will premier at $2099, which is definitely pushing it into the realm of mere mortals (though the sub-$1000 are still going to be more common with the more budget concious photogs out there).

Update: I spoke too soon, DPreview does have a preview up for those wanting a closer look at the new kit.

I’m not convinced this isn’t a cunning PR move by GoPro Inc., but even if not, it’s impressive. The gopro freefall from 12500 feet without case is due to it being bumped at the door of the plane by a skydiver, and then it filmed it’s own freefall to the ground, where it survived just fine.

From the YouTube description:

bumped my head on the door frame on exit unclasping the latch on the box. The camera popped out on exit at 12.500 and fell straight down onto the landing area at the DZ and was recovered by a fellow skydiver. It even caught our landings. Not one scratch on the body or lens. Still can’t believe that I got it back and that it is totally fine. A buddy the same day who is one of our camera flyers had the same thing happen but with his SLR….not the same result. I’m definitely a gopro fan for life these little guys are bomb proof

John Gruber has posted a nice bit on his Thoughts and Observations Regarding Yesterday’s iPhone 5 and Music Event. Good reporting as always, with a few digs here and there:

What does Apple do when it deems a technology past its expiration date? They abandon it. What do tech writers do when Apple abandons these outdated but ubiquitous technologies? They pitch fits. Happened with the floppy drive. Happened when the original iMac went USB-only. Happened with optical drives. Happens every few years with display adaptors.

Black Mesa: Re-visit the world that started the Half-Life continuum - available for download now.

Maybe you make fun of people new to the country for “only” having to pass the drivers test in their country, so the question is, Can you pass the Chinese driver’s license test?

I’ve been driving for 20 years now and I got 4 out of 10.

Good stuff from Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop: Forget iPhone 5 naysayers, this thing is big. The points in his writeup and the linked article make the point that was clearly made on last night’s Jimmy Kimmel… normal people have no clue about technology. They don’t care about a company being open or closed, or if the processor in the latest Samsung is 2x or 10x or .5x as fast or slow as the latest iPhone, or BlackBerry, or HTC, much less the finer points of online religious wars that we in the echo chamber get into heated shouting matches about. They don’t care and they’re going to buy what they are going to buy, and chances are that’ll be a lot of iPhone 5s, no matter how much of a “disappointment” it is to the tech elite.

Another good point was made on reddit in this thread regarding the design changes (or lack thereof) in the iPhone 5.

attention detractors:

this is how you build an iconic brand

remember that the next time you’re comparison shopping between Sony Ericsson Amaze Touch Pros, Motorola Bionic Slide G2 IIs, and Samsung Charge Black G2 2 3Ds

You know what a say, Porsche 911 looks like because it’s look has hardly changed since 1963, or rather it has, but very very slowly. This goes back to the “trade dress” lawsuit against Samsung… Apple is trying to create (or rather, keep) their iconic look of (yes) a black rectangle with rounded corners along with a lot of other combined look and feel attributes, because they know that if they have the iconic “iPhone look” that’s the lasting brand that they are creating. They seem to have settled on the iPhone 4-esque “metal band” look and are tweaking it.

So when the iPhone 5S or 6 comes out and it’s not a completely new look, stop your bitching :)

I’m not sure how long a life this has, but if you are like me and have a box (or 3) of mix tapes or other cassettes that aren’t available easily as digital downloads, you can Revive Your 80′s Mixtapes with this cool hardware/software combination that lets you record them as mp3s to your iPhone.

Found this this morning, that the Ubuntu 12.10 Login Screen Adds Remote Desktop Access. This basically means that you can set it up so that you are able to use the main desktop login screen to also do RDP/VNC/etc/ICA/Vmware View remote logins to other systems.

The feature will allow you to enter a full-screen remote login without needing to login to Ubuntu itself, or install additional apps. It all happens ‘out of the box’.

Now, as if that wasn’t handy enough Canonical are also integrating Remote Login with the Ubuntu Single Sign On service.

Not all news today is Apple related. The Windows Phone 8 team announced some things today too. Sort of.

At a waterfront convention centre in Seattle today, the Microsoft developer group made a big splash officially launching the Visual Studio 2012 suite of tools and services to help developers build the next generation range of apps for new connected devices. The Windows Phone 8 team also made some announcements today, but not from this event. Of course not. That would make too much sense. The announcements strategy surrounding Windows Phone 8 to date has been bizarre to say the least. For consumers, it’s been making big splashes whilst leaving big question marks. No release dates, no pricing information, and no preorders.

Pretty sure that Paul Thurrott will have a great deal to say about this on Windows Weekly on Friday.

I’d say “how have I not heard about this yet” but the trailer video’s date is 3 years ago. So Black Mesa is a free, source engine based recreation of the original Half Life) game set for release in just over a day. Some more info over at their facebook page.

Pretty cool project called Memstash which crams facts into your brain (your “real” brain) by using the method of sending them to you at certain increments to help your memory. It is a bookmarklet connected up to a service, and optionally connects to your Evernote account. Pretty cool idea, be interesting to see if it catches on.

So you can get any of the myriad of coverage of the Coverage of Apple’s iPhone 5 Media Event at any number of locations, but here’s the short version:

• New iPhone 5, pretty much exactly as rumored. Tall and 4”, twice as fast, better cameras. Same prices as the iPhone 4S. Pre-orders Sept 14, shipping Sept 21 to the first wave of countries (US/Canada/UK/Germany/Australia/Japan/Hong Kong and Singapore). Other countries follow after.
• New iTunes, redesigned and lots of nice little features and hopefully a lot less suck. Available late October.
• iOS 6 with no huge new features available Oct 19.
• Redesigned iPod Nano (again) including bluetooth 4, iPod Shuffle the same, iPod touch basically iPhone 4S internals with the option of a 4” screen (odd that they’re keeping both body models around).
• New headphones (“ear pods”, that sounds just silly) shipping with new iPods and iPhones. Look odd, and different, claimed not to suck.

So Flightradar24.com is the coolest thing I’ve seen so far today (granted, the day is young). It’s exactly what it sounds like, a mashup of google maps and flight tracking in real time, allowing you to see as planes move across the map (I assume this is all projected data based on departure / arrival times and not true “real time tracking”). Very cool. Want to freak out? Zoom out over Europe and see how England basically disappears completely under a mass of aircraft.

Trey Ratcliff, of Stuck in Customs, has released a beginner photography level 27 minute video which is pretty cool even if you know what you’re doing behind the lens.

Found on Reddit: NBC’s ‘Today’ Skips 9/11 Moment Of Silence For Kardashian Interview.

At 8:46 AM, in New York City and at the White House in Washington DC, there was a moment of silence to remember when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In New York, the NYPD, FDNY, Port Authority Police and the families of the victims were present, while in Washington the President and the First Lady led the moment.

The cable networks all carried it, with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning” carrying it as well. The only national general news program to not carry the moment of silence was NBC’s ‘Today,” which, in an odd bit of counter-programming, opted to air an interview with “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star Kris Jenner, who talked about the new season of the reality show, and her breast implants.

Sounds like a good use of time to me.

Neat write up from a guy who went from a Linux desktop to OS/X, his From Linux to OSX - 1 Year Later blog.

Am I happier now without Linux? Definitely! Is OSX a better OS than Linux? Absolutely not! It does have a much better desktop experience and since I spend most of the time on a computer interacting with the desktop - that’s a big win for me. Of course I wouldn’t mind seeing Linux achieve this level of desktop maturity and stability.

I have to mostly agree with what he’s found, the good, bad and ugly mostly mirror my own experiences (though I continue to use both Linux and OS/X as my daily work and home desktops respectively), with the exception that I use Vim, the One True Editor, and don’t care about the missing right control key at all :)

Interesting to go through the comments on both the site and the OSNews story to see some of the differing views, as well as their level of, well, aggressiveness (why is it when someone who is not an Apple fan hears any story about someone liking Apple they are convinced that the review can in no way be objective and the person is either a shill, or that any complaints you had about whatever it is that isn’t Apple in the comparison are in fact your fault or “they work fine for me therefore you are wrong”. I suppose this isn’t Apple specific, but more than a few of the comments that aren’t reasonable discourse seem to go in this direction. The level of passive-aggressive insults in the comments are pretty high in some places too, for example this from “ix” in response to his assertions that the hardware support and coupling of Mac hardware and software results in some superior aspects such as power management:

” I think that Macs are good for people who don’t want to tinker with their PC & OS and who don’t mind throwing money away, I think I could buy two normal laptops with the same specs for the price of one Macbook. Plus, I don’t think Macs are good for games.”

Great stuff over at Geeks of Doom: Interview with Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols On Uhura’s Groundbreaking Kiss With Captain Kirk.

It’s hard to imagine that after only one season of playing the now iconic character, Nichols actually considered quitting the show because she felt Uhura didn’t have enough to do. “I thought she was a glorified telephone operator in space,” she once said, before she was famously convinced to continue doing the show by none other than Dr. Martin Luther King himself. “Dr. King was a big fan of the show,” Nichols told me. “He felt it was important that children of all races see an African American female appearing on television as an equal.” “Meanwhile, the NBC guys keep talking to the director about how the station affiliates in the South might react, which just made us all the more tense.”

In the end they were asked to do a kiss and kissless version, and William Shatner to his credit, apparently sabotaged the kissless version, forcing NBC to air the (at that time, 1968) completely shocking and unheard of act of a white man kissing a black woman on TV.

One can only hope that this sort of fear is long gone, or will be soon, and we (the collective viewership and media moguls in general) can start worrying about things that actually matter.

An aside, my favorite story about Nichelle Nicols is her influence on Whoopi Goldberg, found here (at almost the bottom of the page) upon seeing a woman of color on the TV in a position of power.

Whoah, leave the office for a half hour for a quick walk around the block and come back to a full on battle between Instapaper and 9to5Mac, relating back through a few different posts and disagreements between @marcoarment and 9to5 Mac, which as one reader notes seems to have turned into a bit of a shit storm.

For the record, I think it’s a whole lot of misunderstandings all around and while I’ve never met Marco, I love Instapaper and respect him for what he does not only in his blogging but his other projects as well.

Update: Seems everyone has calmed down now.

I head that GoDaddy was down today and figured it was just another blip, but after reading the article on TechCrunch that GoDaddy Outage Takes Down Millions Of Sites, Anonymous Member Claims Responsibility my response is now “ouch”. Their twitter @godaddy indicates the level of panic going on over there right now. Really interesting to find the story behind this.

Looks like that Anonymous leak of iPhone UDIDs weren’t actually from an FBI laptop as Blue Toad Publishing Company Admits Stolen ‘FBI’ UDIDs Came From Them. Not nearly as good a story as hacking into an FBI laptop sadly :(

The H has the story and video: Mozilla shows off Firefox OS:

Mozilla has shown off a recent build of its Firefox OS for mobile devices, demonstrating more of the open source operating system’s features and functions. In a new video on its Firefox YouTube channel, the non-profit organisation shows the browser-centric OS’s built-in Firefox web browser, phone dialer, camera and Gallery image viewer running on a developer phone from Chinese handset manufacturer ZTE.

Looks laggy (granted this is a nightly beta) and like a bad skin over android. Not sure what problem this is solving, but I am glad that someone’s doing cool and interesting things.

The Impossible Project, a gang dedicated to keeping Polaroid film in play has a kickstarter project out there called The Impossible Instant Lab.

The Impossible Instant Lab is designed to transform any digital image via your iPhone into an instant photo that is exposed using only the light from the display, then processed and developed by chemicals. A photo that exists physically - IRL. A photo that is a one-of-a-kind original that can be shared, exhibited and preserved. A photo that no longer needs an electronic device to be seen.

I don’t know if this has the wide appeal to hit the $250k they’re looking for, but I wish them all the luck in the world. It’s projects like this that help projects like The Impossible Project survive.

Sidenote: WTF is with the creepy half-mannequin?

Bad Lip Reading Gives ‘Twilight’ Stars Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart New Dialogue.

The latest video to be released goes after a favorite punching bag in the movie world, Twilight. Multiple conversations between Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) are re-dubbed with some of the most absurd dialogue you can think of, including one of the most dramatic discussions about cake ever spoken. Strangely enough, the writing here feels better than the actual movie.

Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1 is Available for Download and OMG Ubuntu has a nice rundown of what’s new.

WebUpD8 has other news including a video of 12.10.

My “TAKE MY MONEY” moment of this morning happened when my buddy Aryk send me the link of A DeLorean Hovercraft Appeared At Last Night’s Giants-Rockies Game.

Our friends over at Productive Outs let us know about this, one of the more astounding things of the many bizarre ones we’ve seen in McCovey Cove. It’s a DeLorean DMC-12 hovercraft, live and in action.

Via autoblog.

The company behind Wunderlist blogged today on The Future of 6Wunderkinder where they said goodbye to Wunderkit (their all-in-one productivity suite) and, well, just read the link for all the details.

This year we’ll launch Wunderlist 2 and say “Auf Wiedersehen” to Wunderkit. Some of you will be really surprised, while others may have already predicted this. So let us tell you a bit more about what happened - and why Wunderkit will remain in beta and will not be developed any further. Saying goodbye is never easy, especially when we are having to say it to Wunderkit, a product we worked so hard for, but now and forever our heart belongs to Wunderlist.

I was out all day today so I missed all the excitement, so if you haven’t heard about it already today, Amazon had their Kindle Event where they announced a bunch of new toys (that you can see on the front page of Amazon):

• 9” Kindle Fire HD with 4G networking for $499 or $299 wifi only
• Kindle Paperwhite (a 3G model as well) starting at $119 with whiter whites and blacker blacks
• Boring old kindle price is down to $69

All in all good looking, though as a Canadian we don’t get any of the amazon services up here, so the only type of kindle I see are the e-reader ones. Still, I’d love to get my hands on a paperwhite one. Hmm… if only I knew someone at Amazon….

Anyway, kudos to Amazon for what looks like a great release, as Gruber notes having actual product, prices, and availability dates is key.

uTorrent Debuts Native Android Client. Looks good!

Ok, this is pretty damn cool: The Ubuntu ‘Keyboard PC’. Really confusing for any potential computer thieves as well :)

Macstories has the complete list of iPhone 5 Rumors if you’re wanting to get yourself fully immersed in what may or may not be released by Apple on the 12th. Android folks feel free to put your noses in the air and tell everyone how you already have it.

The Verge: Nokia’s new PureView ad is amazing, too bad it’s faked. The commercial, designed to show you how the optical image stabilization in the new Nokia smartphone works, uses a professional film crew.

Update: We spoke with a Nokia spokesperson who agrees that the PureView ad is misleading. They stressed that it was “never the company’s intention to deceive anyone,” but only to demonstrate the benefits of optical image stabilization. Nokia says it’s now looking into updating the original video with a footnote so that it’s clear that the images are simulated, and the original Nokia Conversations blog post that announced the video has been updated with the following text: “the OIS video, above, was not shot using the Lumia 920.”

To be fair, the fact that any ad on TV demonstrating anything isn’t “fake”, done in completely controlled conditions, or is all CGI should be of no surprise to anyone. Biggest advantage of HDTV these days is that you can actually read the fine print like: “screen sequences shorted”, “images simulated”, “lashes enhanced in post production”, etc.

TL;DR - don’t believe anything you see or read.

Congrats to everyone over at the new GIMP Magazine for their release of GIMP Magazine - Issue 1! Looks fantastic, and free!

Something cute to break up your day. You’ve probably seen the .gif of this before, but I haven’t seen the lion hug video in raw format before, or heard the story behind it.

Google’s excellent Chrome browser is 4 years old and to celebrate they have released the Chrome Time Machine, which lets you go through the history of the browser in a cool time-machine like interface.

I didn’t post about it when it was first released, but now that Slogger 2 is out, I may as well. Slogger is a project that pulls in your social feeds (read: rss, foursquare, instapaper, twitter, flickr, etc) into the excellent journalling app for the mac Day One. The new release improves and “plugin-ifys” (is that a real word) many of the data gathering components. Still not a non-developer install and setup, but still pretty good, and seems to work nicely.

Well, not iPhone specifically, but the big “5” shadow in the invite makes it pretty obvious what’s going on.

So who’s going to get the oft rumored iPhone 5? Going to wait or just buy blind, knowing that it’ll probably be pretty good?

Hows this for starting the news cyle for the new school year with a bang? Ok, so what seems like has happened. FBI has a huge list of Apple iPhone UDID (unique phone identifiers) along with names, device types, and other personal identifiable information. FBI has this on a laptop. Hacker hacks into laptop and retrieves said information. Anonymous then leaks this information to the web.

Hacker news has the story: AntiSec leaks 1,000,001 Apple UDIDs, Device Names/Types, along with others.

During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of “NCFTAiOSdevices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

Obviously a few questions come up. Why does the FBI have this information? Where did it come from? What (if any) connection does Apple have? Is it legit? Does this mean that the FBI is actively tracking users, or just gathering device information? Are these American citizens, non-Americans, or maybe just racially profiled iPhone users?

It’ll be interesting for sure.

Update: Marco links to more information including a potential cause for the leak.

Interesting look at Ubuntu vs Windows 8.

But as a desktop OS, Windows 8 got a universal thumbs down from our testers. They didn’t like being forced to use an OS designed primarily for touchscreen devices with limited real estate, such as a tablet or phone, on their multi-core desktops with wide-screen FullHD displays. Ubuntu’s Unity had pretty much the same criticisms in its early incarnations, but they have evolved since. In fact, much to our surprise, existing Ubuntu users had a much smoother experience with Windows 8 than existing Windows users!

On the Wolfram|Alpha Blog there’s news about their Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook, which requires you to connect the WA app to your facebook account and then it number-crunches down all your facebook history. Pretty amazing to see.

In a shocking turn of events, the wildly circulated story about Bruce Willis suing Apple over his iTunes library was refuted by his wife. Ok… a lot of times I get pulled into really juicy sounding stories, especially when they’re about tech or companies that I like, but this one for me just didn’t pass the smell test. Bruce Willis caring about iTunes? Enough to sue Apple for millions? Not surprising it isn’t true.

Remember last week when Miguel said the gnome desktop was dead? Well, Linux creator Linus Torvalds with “GNOME Are In Total Denial”.

Linus Torvalds responded to Icaza’s claims on Google+, claiming that suggestions that the Linux kernel were responsible for instilling developers with an attitude that resulted in problems for GNOME were ’laughable’.

There’s a lot of talk about what “the desktop” is and what “dead” is, and many, many comments related to this. I believe that Miguel’s original post mostly stands however, in terms of the “people moved to OS/X because they don’t want to screw with their audio setup every six weeks just to get sound” part anyway. But that’s just me.

Everyday Hulk - great find by JWZ. Here’s the authors website.