Jim Dalrymple, on the subscription bug that plagued the first two releases of the excellent The Loop Magazine app:

You deserved a better experience than what we delivered, and we expected more from ourselves. Please accept my apology and know that we are working hard to deliver a great app for you.

Relax Jim, you’re trying too hard. Bugs in 1.0 versions are not uncommon, and easily forgivable. Especially when developers react timely and work their asses off to release an update. And yes, even if the update doesn’t immediately fix the problem, there’s still no harm done. As the saying goes: “If at first you don’t succeed…”

We don’t expect you guys to be perfect, we just expect you to be professional and respectful towards your customers. And in my book, you certainly have.

Using her scientific metric, Krume goes on to create the most expensive-sounding wine review ever penned: "A velvety chocolate texture and enticingly layered, yet creamy, nose, this wine abounds with focused cassis and a silky ruby finish. Lush, elegant, and nuanced. Pair with pork and shellfish." If that sentence made you yearn for a glass of classy red, congratulations, there’s a very real chance you’re a pompous asshole.

Hilarious.

Via Daring Fireball.

The man has lived an interesting life, I’ll give him that:

I haven’t been involved with McAfee Ant-virus for 21 years. When I ran the company the software was the best and least intrusive on the market, and in 1991 we had 87% of the world market. What happened after I left was none of my doing. As to name association, I am a master at sullying my own name and, all things considered, being associated with the worst software on the planet ranks way down the pole. It’s barely a blip in the ocean of associations – madman, paranoid, child molester, murderer, drug addict, unstable, liar, to name but a few.Thank god I’m 67 and will probably be too hard of hearing soon enough to have to listen to them rattling around wherever I go. Amy, thankfully, did half the job already by bursting my left eardrum when she tried to shoot me in the head while I slept back in 2011.

This was even more surprising than WWDC selling out in under two minutes:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

I’m genuinely happy for Marco. He’s done a terrific job with Instapaper, and now he knows it’s time for him to move on. That takes courage. I have the utmost respect for him, and I truly wish him the best for the future.

Thanks for everything, Marco.

This has the potential to be really cool. The Beetle is an iconic car, probably my favorite car since its last redesign a couple years ago. Next year’s model looks promising:

Volkswagen said it collaborated with Apple to create the iBeetle, making it possible to use an iPhone to listen to music, navigate, make hands-free calls and even monitor the car’s engine functions.

This would probably be my first choice if I were in the market for a new car.

However, look at the first picture. That’s a promotional picture for the car. Isn’t it weird? Look closely, focus on the people in the background.

Yep, they’re riding their bicycles along the beach in a wonderfully sunny day. And they’re not even looking at the car.

’nuff said.

John Yong, writing for Design Taxi:

To help people gain ‘easier access’ to their fries while driving, McDonald’s Japan will be introducing a new ‘potato holder’.

Sounds great. The next big thing will be adding a defibrillator to the console, to help you out with your next heart attack.

Via Coudal.

MG Siegler, on the real motives behind the live coverage of the explosions during the Boston Marathon that ran in most tech sites as events unfolded:

At some point, you’d hope that bloggers, as human beings, would be shocked and appauled enough by what’s unfolding before their eyes that they would lay down their keyboards and stop playing the pageview game, if only for a few hours. Instead, I’m afraid the opposite instincts kicked in.

To paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Well said.

Roger Ebert back in September, 2011:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

What an amazing piece. The ending is priceless.

Damn. Another one of the good ones is gone:

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Dear cancer,

Fuck you.

Sincerely,
Álvaro.

Staff were informed of the shutdown this morning, according to a reliable Kotaku source. Some 150 people were laid off, and both of the studio’s current projects—Star Wars: First Assault and Star Wars 1313—were cancelled. Disney will still use the LucasArts name to license games, but the studio is no more.

There goes one of the most iconic game development studios ever, single handedly responsible for the golden age of the graphic adventure genre: The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Grim Fandango… A piece of my childhood is gone with them.

Ironically, this simpler, more intelligent way of gaming is seeing a significant resurgence in the last few years, coinciding with the explosion of smartphones and tablets as gaming devices. And it’s easy to understand why: these devices are still severely constrained in terms of raw CPU power when pitted against current dedicated gaming consoles or desktop computers. That makes them ideal for playing this type of games, where the focus is on the story and the experience, and not so much on the graphics.

Man, I loved those games.

Wow. Forty years. That doesn’t seem possible:

On April 3rd, 1973, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper placed the first public call from a cellphone. In midtown Manhattan, Cooper called Joel Engel — head of rival research department Bell Labs — saying "Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone." The call was placed on a Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, which weighed 2.5 pounds, a far cry from today’s 4-ounce handsets.

History in the making. That reminds me that the future is ours to invent. Wall will we be talking about forty years from now? It must be something mind-bogglingly great, because if we could imagine it today, we would get there sooner.

We live in interesting times, alright.

This leads to all kinds of little headaches, particularly for programmers. For example, the clock in your smartphone’s GPS is 16 seconds out of sync with the phone’s system clock. This is because the system clock uses Coordinated Universal Time (which has leap seconds), but GPS time doesn’t. They were in sync in January of 1980 and probably never will be again.

Yep, it’s been one of those mornings.

Sea levels will likely rise a few feet by the year 2100. Current fish wet biomass is about 2 billion tons, so removing them won’t make a dent either. (Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century, which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the world’s shipping fleet—leads to an odd conclusion: Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.)

I laughed when I first read this. Then I read it again and it scared the crap out of me.

Milan Kundera (1929 – ), The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

This is great news for all RSS users out there (myself included), especially given Google Reader’s imminent demise.

There is something else worth mentioning though:

As far as sync is concerned, we knew we would likely need an alternative to Google Reader as early as last year. At the time, the option that seemed to make the most sense was to embrace iCloud and Core Data as the new sync solution of choice. We spent a considerable amount of time on this effort, but iCloud and Core Data syncing had issues that we simply could not resolve.

iCloud hasn’t worked out for us and Google’s announcement solidified and accelerated our plans.

This isn’t the first high-profile developer that wanted to embrace iCloud but was forced to look elsewhere due to Core Data’s shortcomings. That’s the alarming reality of iCloud today as far as third-party developers are concerned. If Apple wants iCloud to become the de-facto standard in cloud-based data sharing services, they need to step up their game and they need to do it yesterday.

The EU remains unhappy with Apple when it comes to informing customers about their right to a two-year warranty on their purchases, as reported by Dow Jones Business News. EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding spoke on Tuesday about Apple’s warranty practices, pointing out that the company hasn’t been forthcoming in making customers aware that they can get free hardware repairs past Apple’s standard one-year warranty period, even after facing fines and lawsuits throughout Europe.

It’s a pity, and it’s true: most people in Europe don’t know they are covered by a 2-year warranty by law. Apple could make this very clear it they wanted to, by displaying it prominently on the Apple Online Store as well as informing customers in Apple Retail Stores when they buy a product.

It’s even more of a shame given that Apple is great at honoring this 2-year warranty period, far better than most manufacturers. Precisely yesterday, I kid you not, I went to an Apple Retail Store because the sleep button in my 16-month-old iPhone 4S was stuck, and they replaced the phone with a new one immediately, no questions asked. In 15 minutes I was in and out of the store with a new phone, just like that.

Alas, great customer service is meaningless if customers don’t know their rights. And Apple has the responsibility here to inform its customers of that right. It’s that simple.

St. Peter’s Square, 2005 vs. 2013. Click on the image to enlarge.

For half a century we have been told to avoid saturated fat, even though there is no good evidence that fat is inherently fattening. By diligently avoiding it, we have ended up replacing whole, unprocessed foods, such as red meat and butter, with starchy carbs of the highly refined and processed sort, often containing added sugar. Net result? We’re getting fatter.

Great article.

John Gruber utterly (and in typical fashion) destroys this article from Tim Wu for The New Yorker:

Even more telling, and more damning to Wu’s use of this as a case study, is that soon after Windows 95, Apple radically opened up the Mac OS, in a use of the word “open” that Wu expressly states is what he means by the term: they licensed the OS to other PC makers to produce Mac clones. This was the most open decision — in Wu’s sense of the word open — in the entire history of Apple Computer Inc.

And it nearly bankrupted the company.

The most embarrassing thing for Wu is that his article is actually very well written. It shows that he tried very hard to present a compelling argument. The problem, as John points out, is that his thesis is, well, bullshit:

The dogmatic assumption that openness correlates to success, evidence to the contrary be damned, overcomplicates the argument. “Wu’s theory is that open should generally do better than closed, unless the closed company is run by a genius.” Take the open/closed stuff out of that premise, and you’re left with something like this: Companies run by geniuses should generally do better than those which are not. That sounds about right.

If I were Wu, I’d very much like to be hiding under a big rock just about now.

And this, my friends, is why I love movies. A fun teaser:

“In comes Sam with a burger in his hand and a drink in the other hand and stinking like fast food,” says Richard Gladstein. “Me and Quentin and Lawrence were sitting on the couch, and he walked in and just started sipping that shake and biting that burger and looking at all of us. I was scared shitless. I thought that this guy was going to shoot a gun right through my head. His eyes were popping out of his head. And he just stole the part.” Lawrence Bender adds, “He was the guy you see in the movie. He said, ‘Do you think you’re going to give this part to somebody else? I’m going to blow you motherfuckers away.’ ”