John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
Steve Jobs had a life-long fixation on LSD, and often ended up asking potential Apple employees during interviews how many times they had dropped acid to throw them off guard. Steve Jobs personally considered doing LSD to be one of the formative experiences in his life, and was insistent that others should do it, too.
With such a famous advocate working for free, it’s not a surprise that the man who invented LSD eventually contacted Steve Jobs. What is surprising, though, is how long he waited to get in touch… until he was 101 years old!
Still having battery life issues on your iPhone 4S under iOS 5.0.1? We’ve already proven the issue is a software problem, not a hardware problem, which means Apple should be able to fix the iPhone 4S’s electric arterial spray… but when?
Real soon, as it happens. In fact, one Apple software engineer says the iOS 5.0.2 update is coming next week. In addition, Apple’s working on its first big point release of iOS 5, which will bring new extensions and abilities to Siri!
The sound from my iMac is actually pretty good, but for parties, I’ve long wanted a better speaker system that can really blast my iTunes tracks across the house, vaporizing any plaster that stands in the way. There are plenty of good options around, but I don’t like how they would disrupt the minimalist, contained aesthetic of my office.
The Tango Bar looks like just what I might want. It’s a USB powered sound bar that contains six, perfectly self-contained speakers, and looks great sitting beneath an iMac, matching its clean lines. And you can even use the build in 3.5mm jack to amplify your iPhone or iPad in a pinch.
Gorgeous, and not too pricey at just $100. Someone add this to my Christmas list.
We’re unabashed fans of Mojang’s Minecraft, and we’ve been waiting forever for the popular block-based exploration game to hit the iPad. Now it’s just twelve or so hours away from being here, but for those of us hoping for the full Minecraft experience, think again.
Do you prefer to do your typing on a real keyboard with your iPhone or iPad? iOS already allows you devices with a Bluetooth keyboard, but what if you don’t have a spare one handy? Let’s say, for example, that your Apple Bluetooth Keyboard is already paired to your Mac, or you’re on the go and only have your MacBook Air handy. What then?
Enter Type2Phone, a great new app that allows you to make your Mac show up as a Bluetooth keyboard to iOS 3.2 or above. Now you don’t need a dedicated keyboard to type on your iPhone or iPad… your Mac can do it for you.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been blunt about Cupertino’s plans for adopting LTE: they’d love to, but they’re waiting on next-gen LTE chipsets that aren’t so power-thirsty they’ll turn your iPhone’s battery pack into a desiccated husk within seconds of flipping the 4G radio on.
Well, Qualcomm may have just announced the next-gen LTE chipset that might finally allow Apple to roll out 4G speeds to iDevices in 2012.
In a press release sent out just moments ago, Apple has just announced that former Genentech CEO Arthur D. Levinson has filled the vacant Chairman of the Board position that Steve Jobs left empty by his death in October.
Levinson has been on Apple’s board since 2005 as co-lead director and served on all three board committees over that period.
In addition, Apple has announced that Disney President and CEO Robert A. Iger will be joining Apple’s board and will serve on the audit committee.
Steve Jobs’s legacy on the mobile industry is uncontested, but instead of just changing the balance of power between handset makers and the carriers, Jobs’s original vision was even more revolutionary: he wanted Apple to become a carrier using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum.
You’re not going to exactly want to replace your tape measure, but as far as iPhone hacks go, this is about as cool as it gets: Acoustic Ruler allows you to measure distance up to 82 feet using a blast of pure sound.
Great spot by 9to5Mac: Amazon just dropped the price of the Apple TV by $10 to just $89.99; they’ve also rechristened it the ‘2010’ model.
Could Amazon know something the rest of us poor suckers don’t? Is an updated 2011 Apple TV incoming in time for Black Friday? If so, don’t expect much besides a bump to an A5 chip: if Apple were to, say, bring Siri to the Apple TV, they’d definitely make a big fuss over it in an event.
Even if you’re not a jailbreaker, TinyUmbrella is a great little app that allows you to save your iPhone, iPod touch or iPads SHSH blob files locally. What is the actual use of such a technobabble practice? Simple: if you have your blob files stored locally, you can downgrade your iDevice to an earlier version of iOS; useful if your iPhone gets hit with a bug in the latest version of iOS, or an app you can’t live without stops working.
If you are running iOS 5.0.1, you might want to head on by TinyUmbrella’s official website and grab the latest version: it’s been updated to slurp down the latest version’s SHSH blob files.
At Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, they serve up to 15,000 meals per day to some of the illuminati of tech, including more than a few celebrities, without a blink. But according to Google superchef Charlie Ayers, when Steve Jobs entered the Google cafeteria, everything was different: the employees parted like “Moses before the Red Sea.”
Jobs liked Ayers’s food so much that when Ayers left Google to open his own restaurant, the Calafia Cafe, Steve Jobs followed him, and even brought his entire family to the restaurant for a last-minute Easter dinner. Even though he was a regular, Ayers says no one ever approached Steve Jobs, except one customer: a little boy who asked for (and received) an autograph. Awww.
As part of the streaming video on demand service’s push towards consolidating its user interface across all tablets, Netflix just unveiled the new GUI to their official iPad app. Sayonara, whitespace!
We’ve seen a lot of Steve Jobs tributes since his death in October, but this one is particularly impressive. Speed painter Aaron Kizer took to the stage at the 11th Hour Live Music and Arts Show in Owensboro, Kentucky and in a blur of brushes painted an incredible portrait of Steve Jobs in just six minutes.
Sometimes you need to give your iPhone just a little bit more oomph. Maybe you need to output just a little more sound so you can DJ the impromptu breakdancing showdown that’s spontaneously popped up in your NYC subway car, or maybe you need to give your iPhone’s battery a jolt after being declared MTA Breakdancing Champion Of The Lower Boroughs And The Universe.
Either way, Spar’s Zephyr has got you covered. Think of it as a metallic JamBox with a lightning rod inside: a Bluetooth speaker and hands-free speakerphone, paired with an external battery that can juice up your iPhone in a pinch.
A Vietnamese book publisher has just published a touching, beautifully designed 2012 memorial calendar to the life of Steve Jobs, filled with the most iconic Steve shots of the last thirty years and aspirational quotes from the fiery, passionate Apple founder himself on the way to live life.
Oh, wow. The engineers over at app developing firm Applidium say they’ve cracked Siri’s security protocol wide open. In fact, using their method, they say that any app and any device can now use Siri in theory. In reality, though? There are a few obstacles remaining.
iTunes Match went live earlier today as a beta, but Apple apparently can’t handle the demand: it’s already temporarily unavailable for new subscribers, who are being told to “check back in an hour.”
Honestly, want our advice? Check back in a week. Even in developer beta, iTunes Match took ages to match our libraries, and a million people hammering on the service on launch day isn’t going to help matters.
Okay, we’re stretching it a bit with the headline, but we couldn’t resist: Apple has just sent a shut down notice to an online retailer called iPopMyBaby that sells nothing but onesies and diapers featuring Apple’s products: namely, the iPod clickwheel and iPhone homescreen.
The iPhone 4S has some bodacious battery life problems and no one seems to know what’s going on. Apple themselves have released an iOS update, iOS 5.0.1, to fix the problems, to no avail. Meanwhile, some iPhone 4S owners find their batteries draining at a rate of 10% every ten minutes, while luckier customers can only report the same excellent battery life the iPhone 4 was known for.
What the heck is going on? Are some iPhone 4Ses just defective? Will Apple have to initiate a recall?
Thankfully, no. Although no one knows what the problem exactly is, it has at least been proven to be a software problem… not a hardware problem.
Two weeks late, Apple’s match-and-mirror music in the cloud service iTunes Match has finally launched while retaining its beta status. In the meantime, iTunes 10.5.1 for both Windows and Mac has been released, so get downloading if you intend on using iTunes Match.
On Mac, the iTunes 10.5.1 update is 102MB, and is available now on the official iTunes homepage or through Software Update.
iTunes Match is Apple’s much anticipated cloud music service. For $24.99 a year, users can match any of the songs on their hard drive into the cloud to be redownloadable on any iOS or Mac device in 256Kbps AAC CD quality, even if their original track was of much lower quality.
iTunes Match is launching as a beta service. However, for subscribing to iTunes Match Beta, we hear you get 15 months of service instead of just 12. Not a bad deal, but be warned that Apple will delete your iTunes Match library at the end of the beta, meaning you’ll have to go through the matching process all over again.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve found that Apple has been having problems getting iTunes Match’s mirroring service to work reliably. We’ll report back and let you know if they’ve worked out the kinks.
Pugs are the adorable little walleyed goblins of dogs, but through years of selective breeding in the shallower end of the canine gene pool, they aren’t exactly the brightest pups out there.
I guess we shouldn’t feel too betrayed by this cute pug’s lack of taste then. Check out how upset Coco the Pug gets when the latest iPhone 4S commercial pops up during his channel surfing. Check out the video below.
If you’ve ever taken part in a freshman biology class (or seen Pauly Shore’s Bio-Dome, you know what a terrarium is: an enclosed space for keeping animals and plants by simulating that species’ native ecosystem. For example, that heated tank full of sand and rocks you keep your iguana in, or the dark moist basement Leander keeps Cult of Mac’s writers imprisoned in.
The only problem with terrariums is that it can be difficult to keep the conditions inside of them just so for the plant or pet you’re trying to make feel at home. It’s too easy to get the temperature or humidity or light just slightly wrong. But what if your iPad could control all of the fiddly knobs for you?
Remember Project Black Mirror, those hackers who claimed to have hooked up an some EEG suction cups, an Arduino and a MacBook Pro to an iPhone 4S and got Siri to read their minds? Lying bastards, the lot of them. And shame on us, we fell for it, at least in part.
OS X already comes with a sizable library of some of nature photography’s most beautiful pictures, curated personally by Steve Jobs for use as wallpapers. But as breathtaking as OS X’s default wallpapers can be, if you have your Mac desktop set to randomize, you’re probably sick to death of them at this point.
The foremost name in beautiful nature photography is here to help you supplement them. Every year, National Geographic holds a photo contest, and this year, they have put up all of their entries in downloadable JPEGs suitable for the desktop, iPhone or iPad.
![albert_hofmann_steve_jobs[4]](https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/albert_hofmann_steve_jobs4.jpg "101 Year Old Inventor Of LSD Asked Steve Jobs How Dropping Acid Helped Him Create The Mac")
