Cult of Mac

We recently got our first look at the Jurassic World trailer, the spot for Universal’s fourth installment in the blockbuster dinosauring-gone-awry franchise. And while I was listening to all of that crappy dialogue and looking at the pretty graphics, something felt weird. Kind of … familiar.

I couldn’t quite figure out where the déjà vu was coming from, but something made me want to watch the trailer for the first movie again.

As it turns out, Universal is recycling a lot of the same imagery from the older ad in hopes of making us excited about the movie in an almost subliminal way. Check it out:

Jewelry maker Mat Brown is getting married, and the romantic in him is hard at work creating wedding rings out of an alloy of silver and gold called electrum.

But on the practical side of sharing a life, Brown recently created space in his kitchen with shelves as unique as his jewelry: Brown used a glow-in-the-dark resin to fill in cracks in the wooden shelves, and happily shared the luminescent process and result on his blog.

It’s hard to believe that the holidays are already upon us, with Christmas arriving next week and Hanukkah already in full swing.

Our very own Leander Kahney weighs in this week with a fantastic gift guide for all those crazy Apple users in your world. This clever gift guide will help you find that special stuff your fanatic probably doesn’t have.

That, plus a fairly tasty gift guide for the cooks in your family or friend group from resident foodie Lewis Wallace, a quick and easy How To on reformatting your Mac’s hard drive from video and graphics whiz Stephen Smith, and some news on the recent spotlight aimed at Apple’s continued problems with Asian labor conditions.

Be sure to see below for these engaging stories and more. And Happy Holidays!

A couple months ago, we wrote about the Continuity Activation Tool, an app that hacks Continuity into older Macs that can’t support Handoff, Instant Hotspot, and AirDrop by default.

The only problem? It was rough: you needed to physically break open your Mac and replace it’s wireless and Bluetooth card. Dongles just wouldn’t work. But guess what? Two months later, and things are very, very different.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is the most powerful (openly) gay man in America, and also the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company. As such, he’s done a lot for gay rights during his interim at Apple, and now he’s doing even more, making a sizable personal donation to a gay rights campaign in his home state of Alabama, as well as Arkansas and Mississippi.

Can you truly find yourself in a video game? Canadian filmmaker and professor Ramona Pringle thinks so. After her mother got sick and she broke up with her New York boyfriend, she spent a year playing World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

During that time, she found many pearls of wisdom, which she’s condensed into 10 “avatar secrets,” which inform her app-based documentary film of the same name.

Video games are an unlikely place to find wisdom, yet, within them, we can find camaraderie, experience the sting of defeat, and help each other become our best selves. Rather than simple time-wasters, social video games like World of Warcraft and Second Life mirror the human condition.

While Pringle doesn’t log in to WoW much these days, the game had an undeniable impact. “This project very much changed my life, my career and my perspective,” she said during a telephone call with Cult of Mac.

After an attack by a group of hackers-slash-cyber-terrorists, Sony Pictures is having a rough time. Countless embarrassing details about the organization — including executive salaries and salacious emails — have leaked to the media. Even worse, threats against theatergoers have caused Sony to pull The Interview — an upcoming Sony movie that is the motive of the hack — from distribution.

Behind the scenes, though, things are just as anarchic. According to a new report, Sony Pictures is now “stuck in 1992” at least as far as IT is concerned. But those on iOS or a Mac have gotten off much better.

The word “app” has always described Apple’s executable programs, but it wasn’t until the App Store appeared in 2008 that the term really took hold as a way to describe the little programs that help make our smartphones not just smart, but also useful and totally fun.

At this point, “There’s an app for that” has become a phrase you’ll hear pretty much everywhere.

We’ve taken a look at our favorite new apps, some of which have been featured on Cult of Mac previously, and chosen the year’s best. Now get downloading!

Still haven’t gotten the most important person in your life a Christmas gift? Great news. Right before the holidays, Apple has dropped the ship times on several popular items — including the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Retina iMac — so that if you order them now, they’ll be on your doorstep in time for Christmas.

If you are tired of the neck strain and uncomfortable sitting positions associated with trying to use your mobile device while it’s charging with an insanely short charging cable, read on.

For a limited time you can purchase the 6-Ft MFi Certified iOS & Android Convertible Charging Cable at Cult of Mac Deals for nearly half price.

Aaron Sorkin’s ill-fated Steve Jobs script is starting to actually become a reality, even after pretty much everything about the project was unearthed by the hacking of Sony Pictures.

After nailing down Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Seth Rogan to play Steve Wozniak, the film’s cast of supporting characters is starting to fill out.

ABC is making life a little bit better for cord-cutters today with the announcement that all Apple TV users will now be able to access full episodes of aired shows.

The Watch ABC app previously required a cable subscription to view all episodes of a season, but starting today every Apple TV owner will be able to watch entire shows of series like Scandal, Modern Family, and How to Get Away With Murder, one week after they air.

In a documentary set to air tonight called Apple’s Broken Promises, BBC One went undercover at Pegatron, one of Apple’s main supply chain partners in China. The findings from inside Pegatron’s walls show that “Apple’s promises to protect workers were routinely broken,” according to the report.

Another alarming revelation was that Apple could be using tin dug by impoverished children in illegal Indonesian mines. Apple is denying the allegations, but BBC One is committed to unearthing a sensitive topic the iPhone maker has spent years trying to put to rest.

We’re still waiting to slap our wrist with Apple’s first wearable, but MIT Media Lab professor Neri Oxman has taken the wearables movement to a freaky new level by designing a new line of wearable structures that “grow” organically.

The project was a collaboration with the Mediated Matter Group and created four grown and 3-D-printed dresses that look like freakishly large organs growing outside the wearer’s body. To create the shape of the wearables, the team used a computational growth process inspired by natural growth behaviors. Each item starts as just a seed and then expands and refines its shape.

Take a look at these hypnotic growth variations MIT created:

Derby the dog has a birth defect that renders his front legs mostly useless. After his original owners surrendered him, animal-rescue organization Peace and Paws took him in, and that’s where he caught the attention of Tara Anderson.

Anderson is the director of CJP product management for 3D Systems, a company that specializes in 3-D printing and prototyping, and when a cart didn’t work well enough for the dog’s needs, Derby received some custom-made, 3D-printed prosthetics. The team decided that spring-like “running man” limbs would get stuck in the ground, so Derby’s new legs are rounded for maximum mobility and comfort.

Apple released the third beta of iOS 8.2 to developers this morning. iOS 8.2 is the first version of iOS to provide support for WatchKit and the Apple Watch, slated for release in early 2015.

iOS 8.2 beta 3 Build 12D5452a can be download directly to devices as an over-the-air update. Developers can also pick it up from the Mac Dev Center, along with a new Xcode 6.2 beta 3. The release notes for iOS 8.2 beta 3 don’t mention any new features, but contains plenty of bug fixes for WatchKit and Messages.

Here are the direct download links:

Grab your diamond pickaxe and get ready to delve once more into massively successful indie-hit Minecraft, only this time, it’ll be within an episodic, story-based game from Telltale Games, purveyor of such fine episodic video game content as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Game of Thrones.

Titled Minecraft: Story mode, the game will launch on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Xbox and PlayStation in 2015 and will release episodically, with new characters and typical Minecraft themes, which we assume will be “mining,” and “crafting,” two major components of the in-game world.

Amazon is upping its delivery game this week by launching a new delivery service called Prime Now that will bring diapers, Fitbits, televisions, and thousands of other essential items, to your doorstep in under an hour.

Prime Now is available today in select areas of New York City from 6 a.m. to midnight, with more cities planned for 2015. The new service is being packaged as part of your annual Amazon Prime subscription, and while includes over 25,000 items.

Amazon even created a video to show what you can order:

2014 has been an intriguing 12 months for movies. With no obvious breakout Oscar winners (a la 12 Years a Slave) or billion-dollar box office smashes (like The Avengers), it’s easy to think it’s been a forgettable year.

But that’s not really true. Peer beneath the surface and it has, in fact, been a very strong year for movie fans — from emotional masterpieces like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and returns-to-form like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street to action-packed blockbusters such as Guardians of the Galaxy, there’s truly been something for everyone.

So what are our picks for the 10 “must see” movies of 2014? Keep reading to find out.

A job ad that made a brief appearance on Apple’s website before being taken down has confirmed that Apple Pay is on its way to Europe. The listing called for a London-based intern who would “drive the roll-out” of Apple’s new mobile payment system across Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa.

Apple’s World AIDS week campaign has earned a big donation for Bono’s Product RED charity this month. The holiday project RED promotions that ran during two of the busiest shopping days of the year – Black Friday until Cyber Monday – raised more than $20 million, according to an internal email obtained by Recode.

Tim Cook sent employees an email revealing that along with raising another $20 million, the iPhone maker has donated over $100 million for Product RED to fight AIDS in Africa.

Analysts agree that 2015 will see the wearable technology sector dominate the consumer electronics landscape. Expected to lead the charge will be the highly anticipated Apple Watch, slated for release early next year.

You could be one of the very first to own this heavily sought after wearable if you are lucky enough to win The Apple Watch Giveaway at Cult of Mac Deals.

Apple just posted a video on its YouTube channel to explain how they made the most recent TV ad for the holidays, “The Song.”

In the ad, a young woman uses GarageBand to sing a duet with her grandmother’s recording from the past. It’s a touching video that strikes a sentimental chord for many of us with grandparents who came of age back in the 1940s, as well as audio geeks who might remember the technology back then to create records: the audio booth.

Check out the video below for the full story from Apple, including the cool fact that they made an actual record using one of these old audio booths, The Voice-o-graph, for the young woman to sing along with.

Apple Pay made its debut in Major League Baseball just in time for the world series. Now the NBA is about to get its first look at how Apple’s mobile wallet can speed up concession stand lines, as the Orlando Magic plan to be the first team to offer Apple Pay support.