Buster Hein - page 250

Nothing helps me turn my swag on more than when I’m listening to rap music during my morning jogs. Swimming in a tidal wave of beats fused with magically crass lyrics, I get this uncontrollable tick that slowly mutates into spasms of weird arm movements as I trot along. I think it’s called “crunking”, but I’m not sure. All I know is I need my terribly cheesy rap music to survive my jogs, but today I loaded up songs on my iPhone using iTunes Match and there was a subtle but devastating difference in the tracks I listened to: all the curse words were gone!

iTunes Match had successfully filtered out all the profane and derogatory words by changing the tracks to clean versions of the albums, which pretty much ruined my jog because I was really really wanting to sing along and drop 50 “F-bombs” a minute. Maybe this is just a rare glitch in iTunes Match’s system, but it’s a travesty tantamount to treason in my eyes and I want it fixed.

Having someone snoop into your private life is a horror that sends most Americans into a state of demonic rage. People went completely nuts over the Carrier IQ controversy,  and we wonder how most people would react if the internet had transparent access to all their text messages. Unfortunately, Apple’s iMessage has revealed what such a scenario might look like, and it’s not only not pretty… it’s something that can happen so easily that even an Apple Store Genius has had his private text message history exposed, sexting and all.

There are less than 12 hours left on our awesome deal for the Ruby programming course. Head over to Deals.CultofMac.com to check it out

What do Groupon, Twitter, Hulu, and 37 Signals all have in common? They all use the incredibly powerful, dynamic, and highly scalable programming language of Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Why is that supposed to get your heart fluttering? Because this language is the future of the web. Not being a developer myself, I shamelessly Googled to find out why Ruby on Rails is such a popular language/framework and I came across a Quora post from Ian MacLeod that sums it up nicely:

1. The Ruby community moves quickly, adopting new technologies and patterns – and refactoring or throwing out the old. Programmers love being on the cutting-edge.

2. Ruby seems to be one of those languages that maps well to a developer’s mental model. It’s frequently mentioned as one of a few languages that developers find a joy to code in.

3. Ruby is one of the major languages that promotes widespread use of “language magic” to createeasily-readable DSLs. This makes it very easy for casual developers to learn the language.

So, whether you want to start your company or just lock-in job security for the rest of your life…this tutorial is where it all starts.

With more than 27 step-by-step video lectures, this Ruby Programming course is only $79 (normally its 3x that much…and well worth it) and will teach you the ten steps to creating your first web app.

Are you following Cult of Mac on Instagram yet? If not, you probably should because it’ll change your entire Instagram experience from “kinda cool” to “insanely amazing.” Last week we asked readers to show us where you spend your time blogging or surfing the web. You guys took to Instagram and Twitter and showered us with photos revealing small glimpses into your digital lives. There was a lot of great photos to sort through but here are the ones that we thought stood out the most.

There are a couple of solutions on the market that combine simple hardware with an iOS app to take control of your entertainment system, but Peel is probably the coolest and most easy to use solution that we’ve played with. Peel invisibly controls your entire entertainment system — TV, cable box, Blu-ray player, AV receiver, Apple TV, and more — without the extra hassles of plugging stuff into your phone and dealing with network passwords. Normally the Peel system retails for $99, but for the next 3 days you can pick one up from Fab.com for only $45.

Ready to Supercharge your Mac? We’ve got you covered! Packed full of goodies our Mac SuperBundle is hear to take your Mac to the next level.  Run Windows in OS X with Parallels 7, Take Pixel-Perfect Screenshots with Little Snapper, Monitor your Mac at a Glance with iStat Menus 3, Create Powerful HTML5 Designs Easily with Flux 3, Plus Six Other Amazing Apps for Pennies on the Dollar! We’ve stuffed this package full of awesome-sauce and the savings are oozing out. You’ll get $471 dollars worth of software for only $49! That would be an amazing deal for Parallels 7 alone, but you’ll get so much more.

Want to know about everything you’ll get in the Mac SuperBundle? Head over to Deals.CultofMac for the full scoop and to make your purchase.

ATTENTION all devs, designers, geeks, engineer-newbies, iLovers, creatives, and dreamers who want to learn the mastery of iPhone app design from the beginning – we have a special offer that will BLOW you away!

This iPhone app design course not only comes with a complete video tutorial overview of how to design your first iOS app, but also comes equipped with 40MB of pixel-perfect photoshop templates to accelerate you along the way.

Getting ink inspired by your favorite company is a huge commitment. Our Portuguese friend Francisco decided he was ready to take the plunge and recently got this Steve Jobs portrait inked on his forearm.  We’ve seen quite a few Apple tattoos over the years but Francisco’s is one of the best.

So what would compel someone to get a Steve Jobs portrait tattoo?

When riding your fixed gear bike to the Apple Store is no longer cool, how do you take your hipsterism to the next level? Penny-farthing.

Have you seen anything more ridiculous than this at your local Apple store? Tell us about it in the comments.

This week on our Instagram feed  we’ve created a new series called #ThisIsWhereiBlog to give readers a glimpse of what it’s like to write for Cult of Mac. As interesting as it is to see how Nicole Martinelli enjoys cozying up in an Eames Lounge Chair, and that John Brownlee blogs in the company of budgerigars, we’d love to see what life looks like from YOUR end.  This weekend we’ll be compiling a gallery of reader-submitted photos that reveal where they blog/surf the web. Do you blog in a secret cupboard under a staircase? On the beach? We wanna see it.

To get included the gallery, take a picture of where you blog  and post it on either Instagram or Twitter with the tag #ThisIsWhereiBlog. We’ll collect the best ones and display them on Cult of Mac this weekend.

There are less than 16 hours left on our Illustrator CS5 deal. Hurry and get it before it’s gone.

Have you checked out our new Instagram feed yet? It’s pretty sweet and we’ve been having a lot of fun seeing snapshots of our readers’ lives as well as giving you guys some behind the scenes looks at Cult of Mac. This week we were inspired by Austin Radcliffe’s blog Things Organized Neatly so we asked our Instagram followers to upload pictures of their Apple products organized neatly and include an #AppleOrganizedNeatly tag so we could share them with the rest of the world. Here’s a gallery of the best pictures we saw on Instagram this week:

I cried like a kindergartener on the first day of school when I watched Water For Elephants. Sure, while I was really sad about the elephant, most of my tears were spilled for Robert Pattinson because he’s so stinking dreamy. Even so, the film opened my eyes to the plight of the big top pachyderm. Compared to me and Robert Pattinson, PETA is about a year late to the scene, but they’ve recently released a new iOS game that gives tortured circus elephants the last laugh while also raising awareness of animal cruelties by raining down horror on humans. Sounds like fun, huh?

What do Dr. Seuss, William Faulkner, J.K. Rowling, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Stephen King have in common? All six were repeatedly rejected when trying to publish their first famous novel. With the announcement of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author, Apple isn’t just giving the education system a much needed boost: they’re attempting to resurrect the dying art of the written word by taking absolute power out of the hands of publishers and putting it in the hands of aspiring writers. We’re on the cusp of a renaissance.

I’m undoubtedly the least musically inclined person I know, which makes me furiously jealous as I watch my guitar playing friends pick up a guitar and serenade girls à la John Mayer. I need to learn how to play guitar, which is why I’m excited about this new iPad guitar accessory we came across at CES.  Ion Audio, makers of the iCade iPad arcade machine, unveiled their newest accessory that helps users perfect their guitar shredding chops on the iPad, so that even those of us without musical talent can look cool playing guitar.

Our HTML5 Crash Course has less than 14 hours left before the deal expires! Get it now before it’s gone.

Is one of your New Years Resolutions to build a website? Well our newest deal is here to help you achieve your web development goals. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, founder, dev ninja, creative, or web geek, this HTML5 Crash Course will only help you enhance those skills to get after your next BIG idea or project in 2012. With more than 3 hours of detailed instruction you can’t go wrong with this expert course taught by Robin Nixon, author of Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript – one of the most POPULAR books on web development worldwide for over two years.

Learn everything you need to know about HTML5 and how to use it with this highly informative and popular course, already taken by over 1,000 people. Learn the tricks on how to use the power of HTML5 to create highly dynamic websites.

And because it starts with the first principles of HTML, you need no prior knowledge of the subject.

Holy guacamole, we won! To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how this happened. Wired is bigger than Cult of Mac in almost every measurable aspect (except sex appeal, obviously), and their magazine is cool as hell. But somehow, we went off like Tom Brady and managed to melt their faces off with our awesomeness during our “Insta-gram Challenge.”

Even though we were slightly somewhat heavily inebriated at the Wired Party in Las Vegas when we challenged them, you guys managed to pull it off for us. First off we owe a big thank you to our readers for making this momentous feat possible. Secondly, Wired deserves some credit for playing along with us and being good sports even if they obviously aren’t the better Instagramers. Thirdly, I guess we’re obligated to thank ourselves in that prototypical KanYe West fashion. I heard whispering around the office today that CoM’s John Brownlee credits the “Kobe System” for helping him come up with hilarious tweets and pictures during CES.

What’s next? Don’t worry, our Instgram feed isn’t going dormant until the next CES. We’ll be pumping out more Cult of Mac pictures for your entertainment because we realize that taking down Wired is cool and all, but who we really want to beat is The Biebs. We’re coming after you’re next Justin!

We don’t have to tell you that there are a ton of amazing apps on the App Store, but how much profit do those apps make? We all know Angry Birds is raking in the money, but what about the others guys? Take Camera+ for instance. 18 months ago TapTapTap released Camera+ and have been enjoying consistent success ever since. On average, a copy of Camera+ is sold approximately every 3 seconds. Recent sales numbers released by the company show that the app has earned a grand total of $5,125,844 to date….that’s after Apple got their 30% cut.

We started an Instagram account a few days ago and have had a blast posting pics of what life at Cult of Mac looks like. Interacting with readers in this new way has been one of the funnest projects we’ve started. Wired.com had the same idea as us a few days ago but we’ve already amassed more followers than them. We threw down the gauntlet to them last night to see who can get to 3000 followers first and they’ve haughtily accepted. We need your help to kick their ass.

If you haven’t started following us on Instagram we’d love for you to open up your app right now, search for “cultofmac” and follow us.

What will you get from following us on Instagram? Here’s some samples of our awesome feed –

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – There are some really awesome products on the showroom floor of CES this year, but we think we’ve found the greatest Microsoft product of all time. OF ALL TIME! Microsoft lipbalm. Admit it. You’re jealous that you don’t have your own stick yet aren’t you?

To make up for your absence at CES, we’re going to have a caption contest, and the winner gets a bag of CES swag that we got from the floor today.

To enter the contest, just comment on this article with your caption for the Microsoft Chapstick picture. Funniest caption wins and we’ll announce the winner on Friday, Jan. 13th at 12pm PST. Good luck.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – As a kid who grew up in the ’80s, I feel robbed by the tech industry. Robbed, spit upon, and laughed at by a bunch of bald guys in suits who have deprived the ghost of my youth by failing to give me the technology they flaunted when I was a kid. I was promised holograms, damn it, so where the hell are they? Compared to holograms, touchscreens just seem like caveman technology.

Wading through the heaping mess of CES rubbish, I got lost in a time vortex. When I popped out the other side, I stumbled upon this little beauty. Behold! The holographic iPad!

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — I hate having three different cameras to address various situations in life – iPhone for when I’m lazy, DSLR when I want to pretend I know how to take pretty pictures, and a GoPro for when I’m doing something adventurous. Thankfully it looks like I’m going to be able to discard at least one of those cameras from my bag now that the MiVue is in existence.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Odds are that giving away free stuff will attract people to your CES booth no matter how high the level of suckiness of said free product. Earlier this morning Case-Mate wasn’t even giving away free cases, they were giving away fragments of free cases, but their booth was still mobbed by an army of swag seeking CES attendees, proving once again that freebies and booth-girls are still a viable way to get your product a momentary flash of attention.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Remember the days before you had an iPhone and played games outside? Using sticks for swords and your hand as a gun? I bet you spent hours outdoors pretending you were some movie superhero trying to rescue Julia Roberts from a a plague of mutant zombie pandas. Then you got into video game consoles and iPhone games and your imagination just went in the toilet. Well, AppGear is here to bring back the nostalgia for your youth and make alien invasions a (virtual) reality.

Well looky here! Turns out the rumors are true and Apple really will be hosting an Education Event in New York City on January 19th. There are no details on what Apple will actually announce at the event, but our guess is it will involves textbooks on the iPad.

The event will be taking place at the iconic Guggenheim muesum, though no information was given on who will be the main speaker.