Normally a story about a stolen iPod touch wouldn’t be worthy of major news coverage. That changes, however, when the iPod touch in question is used to control its war veteran owner’s prosthetic hand.

The iPod touch belongs to Afghanistan vet Staff Sgt. Ben Eberle, 27, who lost both his right hand and two legs in a bomb explosion three years ago while on a tour of duty. The device features an app called i-limb, which allows Eberle to use his prosthetic hand.

The creator of minimalist text game A Dark Room has just released an intriguing new title entitled Gridland. Although the game has yet to arrive in the App Store, it is playable on iOS devices using Safari.

Gridland is a match-3 game, which requires players to make matches in order to gather resources and build buildings during the day — and then to fight off creatures at night. In other words, it’s every bit as “out there” as A Dark Room — and quite possibly as immersive as well.

Apple has updated its lineup for next month’s iTunes Festival London, adding several new names including Tony Bennett and Mary J. Blige, demonstrating just how wide-ranging the festival is in terms of its music.

The festival kicks off in September, taking place at the Roundhouse in London. As always, tickets are 100 percent free, although attendees will need to win competitions (organized by Apple and local partners) in order to get hold of them.

The current festival lineup can be seen below:

Los Angeles teachers union president Alex Caputo-Pearl has called for an investigation into Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy’s relationship with Apple, which led to the announcement that the school system had blown its entire $1 billion tech budget on giving an iPad to every student last year.

Although the iPad deal was later put on hold, the L.A. Board of Education is being pressured by Caputo-Pearl to investigate why Deasy and his then-chief deputy, Jaime Aquino, were apparently discussing the deal with Apple and education publisher Pearson up to two years before the official bidding process was finished and contracts were approved.

AAPL is back in a big way. After breaking an all-time high of $100.53, the price of Apple shares have continued to climb upward, and according the a WSJ report, hedge funds are piling onto the stock in droves.

Over the second quarter of 2014 henge funds have purchased $855 million in new positions in Apple, giving AAPL the second highest level of new buying activity among S&P 500 stocks.

SACRAMENTO — California just flipped the kill switch for smartphones, in a move to make iCrime a thing of the past.

Governor Jerry Brown signed into law State Sen. Mark Leno’s Smartphone Theft Prevention Act (Senate Bill 962). The law will affect any smartphone manufactured on or after July 1, 2015.

There’s some reason to hope that the kill switch will do for smartphones what sophisticated alarm systems did for cars: make stealing them less appealing than a pair of leg warmers. Car thefts plummeted 96 percent  in New York City when engine immobilizer systems came into play.

The world’s top tennis players are descending on New York City this week to slap the fuzz off some tennis balls in pursuit of an unprecedented $38.3 million purse, and Ralph Lauren is ready to support the cause by arming the tournament’s ball boys with its new line of iPhone-connected smart shirts.

As the first round of the tournament gets underway today, the luxury clothing line announced its first move into the space of tech wearables with an entire line of smart shirts with built-in health sensors for both athletic and professional occasions.

China is planning to take on Apple and Google with a new homegrown operating system that will launch this year, as Chinese government seeks to distance itself from imported rivals.

The new operating system created by the Chinese government will hit desktops first when its released in October, according to a report from Reuters, and will hopefully supplant Windows, OS X and Chrome OS as the top desktop operating system in China within one to two years, with a mobile version planned as well.

Until today, Google had free apps for making documents and spreadsheets on iOS: Google Docs and Google Sheets. To complete the trifecta, Google Slides has been released in the App Store for creating Powerpoint-like presentations.

Google is gunning hard at Apple’s iWork apps and Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Docs, Sheets and Slides are not only completely free, but they have offline mode and the ability to convert and edit Microsoft Office files.

Dong Ngyugen’s highly anticipated follow-up to Flappy Bird finally landed on iOS last week, but after months of waiting for an addictive new 8-bit game, fans found Swing Copters to be Ngyugen’s most impossible game yet.

To make Swing Copters slightly less impossible and a few degrees more enjoyable, Ngyugen released an update this morning, tweaking the gameplay so that your little copter is able to make a few more corrections before flying through the diabolical maze of swinging hammers and propeller-annihilating green steel bars.

In today’s Cult of Mac TV video we go hands-on with the Swing Copters update that certainly doesn’t make the game easy, but does manage to put the gameplay on par with Flappy Bird’s addictiveness.

Check out the Cult of Mac TV hands-on review below:

Our ever-popular podcast – The CultCast, hosted by Erfon Elijah – is now on the Cult of Mac TV YouTube channel. It’s a whole new way to digest your favorite 30-minute (-ish!) Apple conversation.

Click the video above to check out the latest podcast, which covers topics like NFC on the iPhone 6, Steve Ballmer landing the perfect job and a mobile payment system for iPhone that will make credit cards obsolete.

Watch the latest episode above and don’t forget to subscribe to Cult of Mac TV to stay up-to-date on all the latest happenings from the world of Apple.

Apple is still reliant on Samsung for many of the iPhone’s internal components, including the fabrication of its almighty A-series processors, but in an effort to secure more processor orders from Apple, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is already ahead of schedule with production of the next-generation A9 processor.

Almost three years ago to the day, I enthused about Legend of Grimrock, a throwback to the first-person dungeon crawlers from the 80s (Dungeon Master, The Bard’s Tale and even the first Phantasy Star game for the Sega Master System) that was coming to iPad “by the end of the year.”

What a joke. While Legend of Grimrock did eventually come to the Mac, it’s iPad version most definitely come out by the end of 2011. But good news! A new update at the official Legend of Grimrock blog says the wait is almost finally over.

With the iPhone 5s, Apple debuted its first non-A-series chip within an iOS device. Called the M7, it was a motion co-processor that tracked your movements while drawing minimal power, making the iPhone 5s the first smartphone that could passively do what an activity band like the FitBit can do: track all your steps during the day.

We haven’t heard much about whether or not we can expect an update to the M7 in the iPhone 6, but according to the latest leak, we can. An Apple chip internally code-named Phosphorus is now believed to replace the M7 in the iPhone 6./

Moshi’s Xync packs a Lightning-to-USB charging cable into a handy, dangly carabiner-clip package, and adds a secret compartment on the side. But is it better than just carrying a regular Lightning cable in your pocket/bag? The short answer? Hmm…

The long version? Read on.

Over the past week, two new leaks from abroad have given us new details about what accessories will be coming with the iPhone 6. The first leak suggested that the iPhone 6 would ship with a Lightning cable with a fully reversible USB plug; the second leak — which came just this morning — suggested that the iPhone charger was also getting a redesign.

We now have video of both the new fully reversible Lightning cable and the new iPhone 6 charger in action. They look great, but unfortunately, there’s at least one disappointment: while the charger will indeed ship with the iPhone 6, our source says that USB Lightning cable won’t be available until next year.

In a new blog post, famed ex-Apple executive Jean-Louise Gassée has given his thoughts on the recent IBM and Apple strategic alliance. And while Gassée notes that most strategic alliances don’t work, he thinks the Apple/IBM one will work out… in favor of Apple, that is.

These days you can easily share data and collaborate on almost anything, from Rdio playlists to photo streams. But when it comes to plain old written text, your options are terrible. You’re pretty much caught between working on a shared file in Google Docs or shuttling versions of your work back and forth via email. Add more than one collaborator and this becomes a total nightmare.

Thankfully, tools exist to smooth the process of collaborating on writing projects. I’m currently editing the second draft of a novella, and I’m looking for a way to work with “beta” readers. I’m testing several pieces of software, and so far one called Draft is in the lead. Not only does it let you share a document with other people, it lets the team comment on any part of the source document and also allows them to edit a copy. Then, when they submit their versions, you can preview any changes before accepting or rejecting them.

Better still, because Draft can sync with a document in Dropbox (as well as several other cloud services), you can sync the edits from your beta team with a local app, like Scrivener. Here’s what you need to make the collaborative magic happen.

It’s time, Tru Believers, to watch the very last episode of HBO’s vampire romantic drama, True Blood.

Overall, this final episode is slow and sweetly-paced, funneling down from the crazy, too-many-characters and plot lines of the past several seasons to a gentle, musing (and ultimately narratively safe) tale of people trying to find themselves and growing up in the process.

Luckily, since this is TV, they all eventually do. Hoyt and Jessica, Jason and Bridgette, and — of course — Bill and Sookie all find their own version of a happy ending, with very few surprises along the way; it’s a very safe finish to seven seasons of fangbangery.

As always, spoilers ahead. So keep reading at your own peril.

Time sure flies. Another week comes to a close at Cult of Mac Deals. Over the past 7 days, we’ve highlighted tech, software, and training deals at bargain-basement prices.

We don’t want you to miss out, so read on to review some of the amazing offers. Don’t forget to check out the Cult of Mac Deals page to see all of the deals currently available.

For years now, the tiny 5-watt charger that has shipped with the iPhone has gone more or less unchanged. But according to a new report out of China, this fall, Apple will ship a new, squatter charger with the release of the iPhone 6.

Tim Cook stepped up as the CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011. The soft-spoken Southerner, who has worked at the Cupertino company since 1998,  had previously acted as interim CEO when Steve Jobs stepped down to battle cancer.

Cook’s ascent to the permanent CEO position marked a sea change for Apple. Once called the stage manager to Jobs’ star, he’s now running the show. After endless speculation about whether Cook’s rule marked the end of Apple or signaled a bright new era, going by the numbers, it looks like he’s earned a solid B.

Here’s a look at his first three years as the head of Apple, a job he got paid $4.25 million to perform in 2013.

At this point, thanks to myriad leaked parts, we have a pretty good idea what the iPhone 6 will look like. One question some of us still have, though, is what the antenna panes of the rear shells we’ve been seeing so far will actually look like.

On the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s, the cellular antenna peeks out of two glass antenna panes, installed specially for just that purpose in the aluminum rear shell. The rear shell leaks we’ve seen so far suggest that the iPhone 6 will keep the antenna panes, but they may not actually be made of glass. Other leaks have suggested the opposite, indicating that the iPhone 6 might look more like the iPhone 5 and 5s in the back than previously thought.

Hedging his bets, iPhone conceptualist Martin Hajek has created renders comparing both possibilities. Check them out after the jump. For my money, the glass antenna panes look infinitely better. What do you think Apple will go with?

Secret, the iPhone app that is supposed to let users share secrets anonymously, is nowhere nearly as anonymous as it first appears. But an upcoming update to the app is looking to beef up the app’s anonymity, by banning real names, preventing users from uploading images on their Camera Roll, and the addition of a new polling feature.