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GMIC – Silicon Valley’s largest mobile internet conference – is about to get underway in just a few short weeks. Over 10,000 developers, executives, entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world will descend on San Francisco’s Moscone Center on October 21-23 to talk about all the latest changes in mobile.  Attendees will get to listen to speakers from Facebook, Qualcomm, Y-Combinator, PopCap, and many more, as well as party as hard as some Silicon Valley nerds can muster.

To hype up the conference GMIC hooked us up with two Golden Tickets (valued at $599) which we can’t wait to send to two lucky readers. But first, we just launched our awesome Cult of Mac Magazine in Newsstand a few weeks ago and would much rather promote it instead, so here’s how to enter our contest to win one of the GMIC tickets:

Note: This article originally appeared in the Newsstand magazine” target=”_blank”>Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.

Michael Frauenhofer is an indie developer who currently lives in Pennsylvania. He and his mom made Demon Chic, a story-based, decidedly indie game available for iPad. The game focuses on three roommates trying to live life while battling monsters, giant babies, and floating heads. It’s an experience that turns the traditional idea of monster battles on its head, as the main characters all are really fighting their own inner demons.

Demon Chic is a hallucinogenic trip through the lives of three ordinary people who must learn to live with their illness, not cure it, and find some sort of fulfilling life while doing so.

This ain’t no Angry Birds sequel, folks, so buckle up.

Readdle has this week updated two of its most popular productivity apps for iOS, adding next-generation image processing to Scanner Pro, and a number of new features to Calendars 5. You can now enjoy much-improved scans with better legibility in the former, as well as task creation and an app icon badge in the latter.

Just like those isolated soldiers that used to be discovered from time to time thinking that WWII was still on, years after it had ended, there’s a designer hidden deep in the offices of Porsche who thinks we still need to use USB thumb drives. Yes, it looks beautiful, just like Hiroo Onoda’s doubtlessly crisply-pressed uniform, but that doesn’t make it right.

This story first appeared in our weekly newsstand publication Cult of Mac Magazine. 

Long before Apple’s “Think Different,” ad campaign, before the dot-com boom, before zany became the norm in startup culture, there was Nolan Bushnell, Pong and Atari – the company where Steve Jobs landed his first job.

Bushnell is the godfather of the think different mentality, an unconventional character who ran unconventional companies. He made it a personal mission to attract similarly creative, passionate people to help him to realize some of his ideas, which many people considered wacky at the time.

You’re probably sick of Kickstarter projects that turn your iPad or iPad mini into a giant camera, so here’s something a little different. It’s an iPad mini camera rig, but this one is actually available to buy. Now. From Amazon.

Bitdrop is an interesting new app/service for sending encrypted files to anyone over the internet, with the big advantage that the receiver doesn’t need to install anything. This is pretty good for the paranoid and careful alike, letting you share files using e-mail, but without sending them over the open internet.

Yesterday, we saw new pictures of the silver and space gray iPad 5, and today, we see the same thing, shrunk down a spell: the iPad mini 2, in space gray and silver, natch.

Here’s a fantastic tip for iPhoneographers: did you know that you can transfer photos from your Wi-Fi-enabled SD card to your iPad while it is connected to the iPad using the camera connection kit? This amazing nugget was discovered by The iPad For Photographers author Jeff Carlson.

Want a new iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c but don’t have the dosh? If you have any smartphone that can boot up, Best Buy will be running a promotion next week where they’ll let you exchange it for $100 off a new iPhone 5c or 5s.

UPDATE: Looks like FreshPatents isn’t so fresh. Despite labeling this patent as “new,” it seems it was first published back in March. Nevertheless, it’s still a pretty interesting one, so we’ll leave it here for those who haven’t seen it before.

You don’t know the true meaning of pain until you’ve dropped your shiny new iPhone on a hard surface. If you’re lucky, it will land on its back and your case will protect it, but if you’re not, it’ll land flat on its face and you’ll need a new display. But what if there was a way of ensuring it landed on its back every time?

A new Apple patent that covers a “Protective Mechanism for an Electronic Device” describes how future iPhones and other mobile devices could have built-in motors that automatically flip them over in mid-air after they’ve been dropped to protect vulnerable areas.

Behold, the iKettle, a water-boiler that can be almost completely controlled from your iPhone while you laze around in your bed.

There isn’t much to say about Cloudpaint in the cloud other than it’s MacPaint… in your browser. That’s right – go browse to the site and enjoy the wonders of 1984-style B&W ink and square brushes.

The Brother ADS-1500W scanner is the first of a pair of wireless small office/home office scanners the company is releasing this month; the two fall between its recently redesigned portable wireless scanners and its ADS-2500W workhorse.

I remember a few tech bloggers going nuts over Vine when it hit the street back in January. I wasn’t convinced; it seemed too limiting, felt too gimmicky. Vine turned out to be a more creative tool than I’d imagined — at least for others. But the concept never really hooked me enough to want to use it.

Cameo, on the other hand, had my juices flowing almost immediately. Like Vine, Cameo shoots short, six-second HD (720p) clips that can be uploaded to Cameo’s website or shared via social media and email. Unlike Vine, multiple six second shots can be combined into a two-minute (maxiumum) clip, with light editing tools, effects and music added to the mix. And Cameo even lets you collaborate with friends.

The iMessage dot indicator lets you know when the person on the other is ignoring typing you, which can be a wonderful thing. It can also be one of the most annoying things in the world when you see someone start to type and then stop, or supposedly “type” for a long time.

Here’s a mischievous little prank you can play on unsuspecting iMessage users. Go to the website below and save the GIF to your Camera Roll. Just send it to random people and watch frustration ensue. Rinse, then repeat. You’re welcome.

Source: Infinite Text-In-Progress

The year is 2013 and we have all kinds of way to share content between mobile devices, but there still isn’t an easy, frictionless way to send money to someone wirelessly in a secure manner.

Then there’s AirDrop, Apple’s new sharing platform in iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks that’s as easy as dragging and dropping. What if something like that existed for transferring cash between different bank accounts? Simple has the answer with a new feature called MoneyDrop.

If you don’t know what the upcoming fifth-gen iPad is going to look like by now, you just haven’t been paying attention. We’ve seen leaks on leaks of both the next 10-inch iPad and the second-gen iPad mini, each of which sport a slimmer, more streamlined design.

More photos of the iPad 5 in Space Grey and Silver have surfaced, and they look great. The colors match up with the iPhone 5s color options very well, except for one glaring omission: gold.

Foursquare released an update for its iOS app today that includes an updated look and feel, as well as a new real-time recommendations feature. Using your iPhone’s location data, the app now serves up recommendations such as what to eat at a restaurant or sales coupons for a store you’re already shopping at. Users can also expect to see recommendations for places of interest throughout the day when visiting new cities.

The feature has been on Android for a month now, but Foursquare plans to roll it out to a small batch of iPhone users today with more added every day. The app also brings back a feature that lets you see what your friends are up to by filtering between nearby and worldwide. The free update is available now in the App Store.

Here are the full release notes:

It seems to me that we do a lot of unnecessary worrying in our lives. There’s a lot of generalized anxiety floating out there, and–absent a clinical diagnosis of anxiety–perhaps we could all benefit from keeping track of what we worry about, and how often. If nothing else, it’s a good way to figure out whether we truly have issues to stress over, or if we’re maybe creating a bunch of it for our own need to feel worried.

In addition, we might also have some moments when we realize that our worries are nothing more than irrational fears of our own making. The problem is, we forget these moments when gripped by worry again the next time.

The developer behind iOS app Worry Watch has created a gorgeous and useful way to track our anxious moments as well as the moments when we realize that our worries might be irrational.

Warner Bros. / DC Comics-owned Vertigo has published this amazing ongoing series called Fables since 2002. Written by Bill Willingham, the stories all revolve around the idea that all the characters in fairy tales are real, and they’ve been banished to upstate New York until they can reclaim their ancestral homelands.

One of the most interesting characters is Bigby, better known as the big bad wolf from tales like “Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs.”

Bigby is the sheriff of this winged-horse town, and he’s kind of a badass. Check out the trailer below for a glimpse of this gritty noir-thriller based on the award-winning comic, Fables.

We’re still waiting for the iPhone to make its big debut on China Mobile, but we’ve seen lots of evidence to suggest that the move is imminent. The latest indication comes from a job listing on Apple’s China website that seeks a new engineer with extensive knowledge of China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network.

One of my favorite games of all time is a little 1993 adventure game called Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers. Taking place in New Orleans, the Sierra classic follows the titular smooth-talking, trenchcoat wearing horror novelist as he attempts to get to the bottom of a voodoo murder mystery.

When I say I loved this game, I don’t mean I played it and kind of liked it. To this day, I wear a black overcoat everywhere, just like Gabriel Knight. I have had serious conversations with my significant other if we can name our firstborn son “Gabriel Knight Brownlee.” So you know I was going to be all over this: Gabriel Knight is coming back, to the iPad and Mac.

Apple has today announced that the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c will both reach another 35 countries on Friday, October 25. Italy, Russia, and Spain will be included in the second phase of the new iPhone rollout, along with a number of other countries across Europe and Asia.

The devices will then reach India, Mexico, and more than a dozen more countries on Friday, November 1.

NPD DisplaySearch is one of the more reputable sources of supply-chain chatter there is, and they are currently making some bold predictions when it comes to Apple’s future iOS device line-up, from the iPhone 6, Retina MacBook Air, Apple HDTV and iWatch. Not only do they say that Apple is intending on announcing a retina iPad mini later this month (fingers crossed), but they say a larger iPhone is a certainty. In fact, they think every Apple display will improve across the board.