Best title (though obvious) is from Techcrunch: iTunes — It Goes To 11. (In Design, If Not Performance.). I had a feeling it was coming today, and raced to upgrade. If you’re not a crazy apple person you might want to wait to see if there are any early adopter woes.

Yes, after much delay (about a month), iTunes 11 is here today. And yes, it is one of the biggest overhauls of the media management service yet. Perhaps the biggest. And yes, it is now better positioned to compete in the era of the cloud. And yes, they even made the icon a bit better.

Overall, there’s a lot to like in this new iTunes. It certainly feels new and looks great. Several annoying processes in the older versions have been streamlined, with search and the Up Next area being particularly amazing. And the iCloud elements no longer feel tacked-on — I doubt I’ll ever keep my entire library of media on a computer again.

Personally the thing I’m looking forward to most is improved performance and the ability to queue up a song to play next (welcome to 1999 Apple).

Via Daring Fireball, answering the simple question of Which Bond Villain Plan Would Have Worked?

Running Windows XP? Be scared, you have just under 2 years of Windows XP Support Left.

Great look at The past and future of popular logos, from Coke to KFC to Ford. Hilarious future versions.

Some images and details of the last-week-teased Will.i.am iPhone Camera Accessory has come out.

The product, which will be available in £199 C.4 “contemporary” and £299 V.4 “vintage” models for the iPhone 4 and 4S, also contains a slide-out keyboard and launches on December 6. The C.4/V.4 versions use the existing iPhone camera and contain interchangeable lenses for standard, fish-eye, and zoom photo capabilities, while the more advanced C.5/V.5 models for the iPhone 5 that will come with a dedicated 14-megapixel sensor and flash won’t launch until next year.

The service page at i.am is alive as well if you want to sign up. Personally I like the ‘modern look’, but am more interested in the 14mp version that’ll be coming for the iPhone 5 next year.

Photoshop CS6 Retina Display Support Coming on December 11?

Adobe announced in late August that it would be bringing Retina display support to Photoshop CS6 “this Fall”, with the company’s other applications also receiving updates “over the next few months”. Several of those updates have already appeared, but Photoshop will be the most popular of the company’s applications to receive the upgrade to Retina resolution.

Nice look at the Crapware that Lives On Windows 8.

The third category, trialware and junkware, is the most egregious. I can’t count the number of times I had to troubleshoot someone else’s system because the preloaded Roxio CD/DVD burning package’s drivers were doing horrible, unpredictable things to the rest of the system, or because some buggy variety of factory-added antivirus software was creating more problems than it solved.

Good table in the article on how much is installed on a bevy of Windows 8 systems.

Note that this is not (really) Microsoft’s fault, but the fault of the consumers, who demand a $300 laptop.

Saw that the Chrome extension Evernote Clearly Now Reads Pages To You With Text-to-Speech. This is a premium feature, so if you’re not an Evernote premium user already, nows a good time (especially if you didn’t take advantage of the MacHeist deal to get 12 months of the service for a super-cheap price). Other nice updates include highlighting and themes (at least I think these are new).

Just wish that Clearly was available for other browsers! Doesn’t seem to be working with Chromium on Linux though :(

Just discovered the Consultant’s Canary, a nice little script that will print out a report of, well, pretty much everything on a mac system. Very helpful for debugging questions like “why is my my friend’s computer running so slowly?”

“Dustgate” (my name) is the new drama associated with release of the Nikon D600 and it’s apparent tendency to accumulate more dust on the sensor than normal. A Photographer created a time-lapse showing D600 ‘dust’ accumulation, via DPReview.

Canadian photographer Kyle Clemens just bought a Nikon D600, but rather than get straight out and start shooting with it, he decided to investigate the widely-reported claims of a ‘dust problem’. Clements set his D600 up with a fixed 50mm F1.8 lens, pointed it at a white wall, and shot 1000 images. Then he created a timelapse video which shows the slow accumulation of debris on the camera’s sensor. Although the exposure of the individual frames isn’t uniform, Clements’ video clearly shows a steady buildup of debris over the course of shooting the 1000 frames. 

Skyfall Proves that James Bond is a Time Lord. Impeccable logic. Beware, Skyfall spoilers in the text.

I saw Skyfall last night, and after breaking it down, I can come to only one conclusion: this is the Bond film in which it is revealed that James Bond is a Time Lord.

Texts From Dog [Episode 1] on YouTube:

If you don’t follow text from dog, you’re missing out.

Apple Launches International Black Friday Sales. In typical apple fashion though, the most you’ll get off is $105 off a Retina display MacBook Pro. Still, I guess $105 in your pocket is still better than a kick in the pants (as my dear pa used to say).

Diaspora 0.0.2.0 was released today, the second community release.

Not bad for $200,000 investment#Development), right?

Great imgur album of a 7’ Serenity Model done in Lego. Reddit discussion here.

For those who couldn’t care less, but want a humorous look, check out Twilight - a summary by `kangel on deviantART.

Skitch And Evernote: A Letter From Keith Lang addresses some of the concerns, and upcoming fixes, for some of the negative reactions that have appeared since Skitch was merged with Evernote.

I’ve come to the realization that we’ve underestimated how deeply ingrained Skitch had become in many people’s daily workflows and how disruptive changes to the product could be. I’d like you to know that we’re going to fix it.

Personally I’m not an “old-school” skitch user, but only a more recent user since it was merged with Evernote, and personally love the integration, but do understand some of the new UI changes being a step backwards compared to the previous versions.

Good stuff as always from Ars: Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal a mix of promise, pain.

Write this down: Ubuntu 12.10, the late-year arrival from Canonical’s six-month standard release factory, marks the first new release within the company’s current long-term support cycle. Got it? Good, because it may be the best takeaway from the latest Ubuntu release, codenamed Quantal Quetzal. After that, it’s a bit of a rocky ride.

Fascinating set of Internal Videos Show Why the Microsoft Kin Cratered:

Given Microsoft’s slew of new releases that break from the past, like Windows 8, Windows RT, Surface, and Windows Phone 8, these Kin videos seem worth a second look to see why the company so badly needed to start over from scratch. Also? They’re kind of hilarious.

Really interesting to see “real people” using tech gagets.

Via a facebook link is a kickstarter project for a Self-Cleaning Fish Tank That Grows Food. Now I’m not a fan of mushrooms at all, but anything that lets me have green things, fish, and not have to do any work to do cleaning? I’m in.

Check out their video below.

Only big downside is $50 shipping to outside the US? Boo!

The talking one from Penn and Teller speaks out with the secrets of “Celebrity Apprentice” and the byline of “Donald Trump is a whackjob!”

Like all desperate celebrities, I’ve been on more than one reality show. I also did “Dancing with the Stars.” I was amazed to find out that “The Celebrity Apprentice” was more honest and straightforward than “DWTS.”

Color me unsurprised.

Written about photography, but definitely applicable to many other types of business. 5 Reasons Not to Use Groupon Marketing for Your Photography Business is a good read, and mostly centers around the sort of clients you attract with the groupon model, the type you want to attract, and knowing and valuing the time you use to do your craft (be it photography, web design, plumbing, etc).

That breaks down to under $6 per hour for those clients who didn’t choose to purchase any additional products and I spent over 285 hours laboring to earn 5 repeat clients whose current session/product purchases cumulatively totalled 2 of my average session’s sales.

Perspective Shift and Living Filters are the new toys available to Lytro photographers.

Perspective Shift allows Lytro photographers to interactively change the point of view in a picture after it has been taken. On a computer or mobile device, both the photographer and viewers can move the living picture in any direction; left, right, up, down and all around. When pictures with Perspective Shift are shared to the web, Facebook and Twitter, friends can experience Perspective Shift without needing any special software. Perspective Shift works on any light field pictures previously taken with a Lytro camera and with any new light field pictures.

Wow.

Commentary from Marco on What happens when a Twitter client hits the token limit. Remembering a while back when Twitter seemed to go thermonuclear on client apps, but left a lot of questions about what exactly “work with us” would actually mean.

The real rule, if Twitter was honest and direct, is simple: “We don’t permit anyone to exceed the limit unless we feel like it.” But even then, it would be stupid for anyone to build a business on Twitter with such unstable footing. And if your plan is to stay under the 100,000-token limit, you’d be a fool to believe in the safety and longevity of that exemption.

I wonder what happens when a higher visibility client like TweetBot hits the limit? I’m going to guess the same thing.

App.net here I come…

Full story.

Microsoft Sued Over Surface Tablet’s Disk Space

The 32G device has 16G of space for users, as the operating system uses the other 16G.

This is as stupid as people suing Apple because the iPhone doesn’t have a removable battery, or any of the other hundreds of stupid lawsuits you hear about all the time. Get a life. If you really hate your new device that much, take it back and get your money back.

Michael Winslow: Whole Lotta Love.

Wow.

Yea, he’s that guy.

It’s been in beta for a couple of weeks, but this morning Evernote 5 for Mac is Here Packed with Over 100 New Features. I’ve been on the beta for about a week and love it. The UI is not a radical departure, as the iOS app update was (and that was a good departure in my opinion), but more a tweaking and refining.

I’m a huge Evernote fan and am very happy that the update is out. Kudos to the team!

Apparently a Nine-Minute ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ Prologue will Hit With ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ in IMAX 3D.

In case you needed more reasons to see The Hobbit. In IMAX.

Trailer #2 for Oz the Great and Powerful is up.

I’m pretty sure a large part of this video / song is parodying itself, and I pray deep down in my soul that the singer and songwriter know it’s horrible, terrible, and an indicatino of the fall of wester society. I present for your consideration Nicole Westbrook’s “It’s Thanksgiving” Is the Most Blatant Rebecca Black Rip-Off Ever.

Why, dear god why.

This might be a repost, but I don’t care. Check out this great mashup of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters”. Too awesome to be a coincidence. See it below for yourself.

I don’t agree with terrorist tactics, but the fact that Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends if You Don’t Support Gay Marriage seems a compelling way to make a point.

Seriously, all these men would be way better husbands than I am right now. They are all ripped.

Funny video Poking Fun at Clueless DSLR Users as part of a mirrorless camera marketing campaign.

I’m secretly terrified I’m all of those people. You guys would tell me if I was, right?

Right??

Via forgetfoo: - Racist, Or Just Dumb? I’m going to go with “yes”. Gotta love the flippant attitude towards human life, just because she doesn’t agree with his politics. Go America.

Extreme Rube Goldberg.

Yowza.

Ok, I had forgotten about this one too, and man, World War Z looks good.

The world needs another fast zombie movie.

Ok, my birthday is coming up and I just found the perfect gift for me: Romo - The Smartphone Robot for Everyone. Sure you need a second smartphone to control your smartphone controlled robot, but that’s a small price to pay for a freakin’ personal robot (especially one with that cute a face).

Fascinating look Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown, via my buddy Staticred.

Instead, volunteers couldn’t get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign’s headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.

Sounds like a cluster-fuck of presidential proportions (pun intended), but also one that could have been avoided with more time, testing, and all the other things that IT people ask for but rarely get.

If you’re a Windows user you’ll know want to know uTorrent Is Now Ad-Supported (and How to Disable it). Thanks torrentfreak.

From the NVidia press release: NVIDIA Delivers Massive Performance Boost to Linux Gaming

NVIDIA today announced the latest NVIDIA® GeForce® drivers — R310 — double the performance(1) and dramatically reduce game loading times for those gaming on the Linux operating system.

Can’t wait to give this a try and see if it fixes my Desktop Ubuntu performance issues and crashes too :)

If you’re a Ubuntu user you can grab the drivers from the x-swat PPA.

Uhmm…. WTF? If this article about Built-In Advertising in Windows 8 is true then they deserve all the mocking they get.

Despite the fact that I’ve been using Windows 8 for the past three weeks, I somehow managed to overlook a rather stark feature in the OS: ads. No, we’re not talking about ads cluttering up the desktop or login screen (thankfully), but rather ads that can be found inside of some Modern UI apps that Windows ships with. That includes Finance, Weather, Travel, News and so forth. Is it a problem? Let’s tackle this from a couple of different angles.[…]

Famous Musical Artists Remixed to Sound Like Different Music Genres. Yup, exactly what it says. Also as awesome as you think it will be. The death metal version of Beiber is possibly my favorite.

To take a break from the Apple loving, Microsoft hating, and random tech stuff and here is a great post from Laughing Squid of Reginald the Kitten Getting Blown Dry in Slow Motion After a Bath.

Seriously, the cutest thing I’ve seen all day.

Ed Bott blogs on Why there’s no Office for Metro (yet).

That’s the reason some of the built-in apps in Windows 8 are scrambling to add features now (Mail and Music, most notably). You can’t build full-featured robust apps until the underlying platform is solid.

The obvious question is then “why not wait until the platform is stable before releasing the SDK and waiting for devs to use it to create the new system and OS?” Isn’t it a bit of a black eye for Microsoft that on Windows RT they have to have the weird add on of the Windows Desktop that you can’t run anything but Office on? Is the obvious answer “they had to release now to stop Apple and Google from getting another half-year ahead.”?

Personally I think that the Windows RT that has a desktop that’s not a desktop but runs some things is potentially a huge cause of confusion for “normal” people. Windows RT that’s pure Metro Windows 8 App Store Style (or WTF they are telling people to call it), running only App Store apps, no desktop, and a Metro-ized office (and enough apps on day one to show you gave your developers the SDK a few months before release) would be a huge win. This weird two headed monster, no matter how nice the Metro environment and hardware is, will not be the winner it could be, in my opinion.

NASA - Spot The Station is a site where you can sign up for email and text alerts when the ISS is above you.

NASA’s Spot the Station service sends you an email or text message a few hours before the space station passes over your house. The space station looks like a fast-moving plane in the sky, though one with people living and working aboard it more than 200 miles above the ground. It is best viewed on clear nights. For more information on the International Space Station and its mission, visit the space station mission pages.

All this time I thought I needed to be a skydiver or a racecar driver to get good use out of a GoPro, but turns out all you need to be is a cat owner to make good use of it.

The Verge has some tidbits on Microsoft Office for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

‘Steam for Linux’ Beta Released, but only to a subset of beta testers. Still, can’t wait till this goes live for everyone.

Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome trailer.

Yum. Can’t wait. There’ll be 10 short webisodes, but I know already I’ll want more.

Via facebook, check out the Miniatur Wunderland which is a huge model railroad installation. Seriously, this is enough to give model railroaders a heart attack.

Originally cribbed from an Ars forum post, but I had a little giggle at the list of The Apple Haters’ 7 Stages of Grief.

I’ll give you up to 5 or 6 personally, but I don’t know about 7.

Note: Pretty sure a find/replace of “Apple” for “Android” or [your favorite company] will work just as well :)

Instagram has taken a page from Microsoft an has Announced Instagram Profiles on the Web.

Sadly they aren’t available to everyone. Mine looks like this:

I’m not a huge fan of Chris’s style, but his Microsoft Surface Review shows me that maybe I was wrong. The content of the review seems fairly unbiased, though he definitely comes out on the side of “don’t buy”, though there is a lot in there that he likes, and says many positive things.

“Microsoft’s still playing in a different galaxy”

However, spoiler, it’s just not there yet.

Just a little bit of piling on, but Microsoft posted a disk space FAQ regarding the amount of space actually available on their new surface tablet. Basically a 32G Surface has 16G free (after OS, recovery tools, Office and other built in apps), and the 64G Surface has 46G free.

Via 9to5 Mac where the story obviously has a pro-Apple bias, and one should note that if you were to include the Apple office software you get:

• Numbers - 255mb
• Keynote - 286mb
• Pages - 231mb

So you’d have to add an additional 800mb (approximately) to the size of the 1G iOS install size to be a more fair comparision. Of course, even 2G is a far cry from 16G used by the Windows RT install. Something to consider when doing an apples to apples comparison of various different tablets.

Why Offline Privacy Values Must Live On In The Digital Age is a very cool story from TorrentFreak about what the similarities and differences are between digital and analog privacy are, and why they matter.

First, the letter was anonymous. You, and you alone, determined whether you identified yourself as sender on the outside of the envelope for the world to know, on the inside of the letter for only the recipient to know, or didn’t identify yourself at all when sending a letter. This was your prerogative.

Quite possibly the coolest use of lego I’ve ever seen: LEGO Milling Machines from my friend Fozbaca.

Special mention to the milling machine… wow!

Nice open leter and rant: No One Cares About Your Decision to Leave Apple Products and No One from Apple Will Read Your Poorly-Written Open Letter.

It is an odd relationship with a few companies now share with the so-called “tech press” where rants and complaints aren’t presented as stories, but often as these silly open letters to Apple/Google/Amazon/etc.

Great read regardless.

You can now checkout the release notes for Preview 1 of Ruby 2.0.0.

Drobo announced today that the Drobo Mini and 5D Storage Arrays Are Now Available. You’ll remember I broke this news a few months ago. I’m still on the list to try to get a proper review unit and will see what would happen with a proper hands on.

A DIY Block I Apollo Guidance Computer Replica. Not a bad sunday afternoon (times 4 years) project.

A comrade in arms of mine, Rachel, found this great htaccess tester, which lets you put in a URL, a set of apache htaccess rules, and it'll analyze them and let you know what the output and any errors are.

Definitely a great tool for your web developer toolbox!

5 Second Films posted A Real Found Footage Horror Movie. Most realistic one I’ve ever seen.

Thanks to my buddy Squiz for the link.

Pretty awesome Air New Zealand / Hobbit viral video.

Apparently Kim Dotcom is avoiding “Unsafe” .Com, Picks Me.Ga for New Megaupload. Nothing there but a splash page right now. Interesting to see what results.

I don’t think that his assertion that .com are any less safe or unsafe. If it’s hosted on US servers, I assume that a three letter agency will be able to grab the server, and regardless of it’s domain, if it’s deemed as something against Big Brother, I presume that a three letter agency will be able to sneak into all the main DNS servers and block the domain or TLD.