My little red-haired niece approached the casket with a single flower and placed it with the father she looks so much like.

I raised my camera to my eye and made a picture.

Though secure with my reasons for snapping the photo, I understood how taboo this could seem to others. I never made a print to pass around or display. I look at the photo now, 10 years later, and get reacquainted with grief, struck by a visceral appreciation for a chapter that continues to unfold in my family story.

That picture was a fading memory until my recent trip to the Museum of Mourning Photography and Memorial Practice in Chicago, a collection of more than 2,000 postmortem photographs and funerary ephemera.

When you’re a company the size of Apple (whose co-founder Steve Jobs famously made comments about how it’s not the job of users to know what they want) you’d be forgiven for thinking they don’t listen to the little guy.

Over the weekend, a story popped up on Reddit, however, revealing how one user supposedly convinced Tim Cook to change Apple’s on-hold music — telling him that it sounded distorted and therefore surprisingly un-Apple-like in its lack of quality. Cook apparently listened and – hey presto! – people dialling into Apple now get better-sounding hold music while they wait.

The full post can be read below:

The Chinese are so good at cloning Apple’s upcoming products that they regularly release fully functional doppelgangers of the next iPhone before Apple has even officially announced it. But these are ‘clones’ in only the vaguest sense, because they always have one major problem: they run Android, not iOS.

But that’s not true with this iPhone 6 clone. Although it looks exactly like an iPhone 6, it appears to be running iOS 7, not Android.

A new report in Pediatrics claims that an iPad was the cause of a recent itchy body rash in an 11-year-old boy recently treated at a San Diego hospital.

The reason? Like many personal electronic devices — including laptops and cellphones — iPads may contain nickel, one of the most common allergy-inducing metals.

While nickel rashes aren’t life-threatening, they can be very uncomfortable and may require treatment using steroids and antibiotics if skin eruptions become infected. Dr. Sharon Jacob, a dermatologist at Rady Children’s Hospital, who co-authored the report, said doctors traced the boy’s long-running skin to an iPad his family purchased in 2010.

When I wanted to learn how to knit, I went to YouTube. Anytime I need to learn a guitar solo for a cover song my band is working on, I head to YouTube. I’m not alone in my use of the video portal, either. According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more U.S. adults in the 18-34 age range than any cable network.

These types of everyday queries have made YouTube the No. 2 search engine in the world, second only to Google (which just happens to be the video site’s parent company). More than 1 billion unique users head to YouTube every month, and more than 6 billion hours of video — almost an hour of video for each person on the planet — get watched in the same time period.

If you’re a new site, trying to capture enough mind share and traffic to create a successful user-created video content business, how could you ever compete with such a giant?

Apple already has a whole lot of component makers on its books, but according to Digitimes it’s just added one more.

Digitimes is claiming that Apple recently inked a deal with flexible copper clad-laminate maker Asia Electronic Materials (AEM) to provide coverlay orders for next-generation iPhones.

CloudMagic, the best third-party email client for mobile, just got even better thanks to a major new update that’s available right now on Android and iOS. In addition to adding quick filters for things like unread and starred messages, the release brings customizable alert tones, account nicknames, access to spam folders, and lots more.

The residents of Bon Temps are reeling from the latest deaths in the town, Sookie is mourning Alcide but keeping a stiff upper lip, and Arlene is finally chosen to be vampire food in “Death Is Not the End,” the fourth episode in this final season of HBO’s long-running vampire romance drama based on the Charlaine Harris novels. The episode is full of callbacks to the first season, as the last few shows have been. The True Blood team really wants to bring everything full circle, and this week they’ve succeeded more than expected.

While death may not be the end for vampires, it’s certainly the end for a host of folks in this forsaken little southern town. The shockers continue this week, not the least of which is Eric Northman with ’90s hair, some fantastic Pam lines, and a funny little scene as Sam and Jason go to inform Deputy Mayberry’s next of kin that he’s dead. “Kevin was a good man,” says Jason. Pause. “With a funny voice.”

Apple’s iBeacon technology has potentially massive implications across a range of areas — many of them having been demonstrated over the past year.

Up until now, however, Apple has handled only the software side of the equation with the aid of the microlocation technology found in iOS. That may be set to change with new first-party iBeacon hardware, for which FCC filings have just been uncovered by electronics company Securifi.

Registered as the “Apple iBeacon” and with a model number of A1573, the document describes how the technology was tested in collaboration with the Chinese company Audix Technology, between April 30 and May 13 this year. The beacon in question (at least in the case of the model tested) is USB-powered, has a diameter of 5.46″, and a working frequency of up to 2.4GHz, which is standard for Bluetooth.

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Last week there was a big furore when it turned out that a Reuters report about the National Federation of the Blind taking issue with the accessibility of Apple’s apps was based on inaccurate reporting.

Given how seriously Apple takes the issue of accessibility (as seen by Tim Cook’s comments at Auburn University last year, and his angry retort to investors worried about ROI earlier this year) it didn’t take long for Cupertino to spring into action: pointing out just how seriously they take the concept that their products should be used and enjoyed by everyone, including those with disabilities.

Now Mark A. Riccobono, President of the National Federation of the Blind, has chimed into the debate himself, with a lengthy blog post praising Apple’s work on accessibility, but also pointing out what can be done to improve this even more in future — by having Apple work with app developers to make the 1 million+ apps in the App Store more accessible to all users.

After the Chinese media called iOS’s ability to track an iPhone’s location a “national security concern,” Apple has responded with a lengthy statement detailing its commitment to customer privacy.

Yesterday China’s state-run CCTV ran a segment heavily criticizing the “Frequent Locations” feature in iOS 7 that records where the device has been in detail on a map. The implications of the report were that Apple was sharing the data with other companies and governments.

Today Apple responded to the allegations by saying that it is “deeply committed to protecting the privacy of all our customers” and that it has never created a backdoor for any government agency.

This time on The CultCast: thirsty Germans drink the tears of Brazilian children! Ohhh, sorry. Too soon? Also on the docket: the secret Apple eBay store is back at it and selling iPhones at absurdly low prices; we pitch a great new Siri feature we hope Apple bakes in; a Youtuber gets his hands on the iPhone 6’s sapphire screen, and its incredible durability is hard to believe; plus… GEEKN, the new segment where we divulge whatever gadget or activity we’re currently obsessing over. Stay tuned till the end for that.

Have a laugh and catch up on this week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the festivities begin.

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Are you a gamer geek? It’s cool, you can admit to it. Geeks enjoy a certain amount of popularity these days and being a geek or gamer is even considered to be hip.

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When Yo, an app which lets you send out one word messages (hint: they all read “yo!”), hit the App Store and raised $1 million in the process, it seemed that messaging apps had reached their minimalist bottom.

Not so, according to the makers of TAP: a new check-in app looking to snatch Yo’s status as the world’s fastest messaging app. TAP lets you broadcast your location to friends by simply tapping twice on your phone, without even having to unlock it. The location update lasts just ten minutes before disappearing — making this something along the lines of the “Snapchat for Location.”

SAN FRANCISCO — You can buy and sell a lot of things in this boom town, just not public parking spaces. All three parking apps called out by the city attorney for auctioning or selling public spaces have backed off.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera slapped MonkeyParking with a cease-and-desist on June 23 and mentioned that similar apps Sweetch and ParkModo were next in line. Each took a different tack — defiant, conciliatory, quiet — but in the end, all three are on hiatus.

SAN FRANCISCO — There’s a new kind of gold hidden in the hills of this city: A mysterious Twitter account is leading locals on a treasure hunt for Bitcoin.

The folks behind @SFHiddenBitcoin, which has been active since July 1, are hot on the heels of @HiddenCash, the Twitter account that made news doling out the dough of a real estate mogul.

While judges debate whether Bitcoin is money and crashing economies around the globe fear the virtual currency’s wake, it’s the coin of the realm in certain circles here. If you can handle being a “cyphervegan,” you can basically already live on Bitcoin.

Back in 2012, Sharp’s Kameyama Plant No. 1 switched from making larger TV panels to smaller screens for smartphones. Apple became a key partner, and now the plant is at 90% capacity making displays for the iPhone 6.

You’d think that such strong business would keep Sharp happy, but that isn’t stopping the Japanese company from wanting to distance itself from Apple. The main thing Apple seems to be concerned with is that Sharp could end up doing business with Samsung instead.

Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre just made billions off Apple’s acquisition of Beats Electronics, but the company is ready to squeeze out a few billion more from a ring of Chinese knockoffs.

Legal filings from Beats claim that cheap counterfeit headphones are screwing the company out of billions of profits by using the company’s popular “b” logo to rake in an ungodly $135 billion in sales. Now the doctor wants his cut.

Steve Jobs may have been part of some of the biggest tech revolutions of the past forty years, but he was also part of an illegal attempt to suppress employee wages by way of a massive no-poaching agreement with other tech giants.

Another of the companies accused of similar actions by former employees was Pixar, the company Jobs purchased a majority interest in after being booted out of Apple in the mid-80s. In 2011, Pixar’s John Lasseter described Jobs as “forever…part of Pixar’s DNA.”

As it happens, that may not be entirely for the best.

With the iPhone 6, the long-rumored iWatch and possibly a revamped Apple TV expected to be released this year, it’s safe to say Apple is hard at work. As the talk heats up regarding these new products, rumors and leaks spill into the mainstream, making it hard to keep up with it all.

Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup to hear all the latest news and rumors about Apple’s product pipeline. Catch the rundown for details on endurance-testing a sapphire display that’s supposedly for an iPhone 6, smart sweat sensors that might get added to the iWatch and the rest of this week’s big stories.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

Swift, a completely new programming language for the App Age, was one of the biggest announcements that come out of WWDC and now it’s also got its own blog.

Apple launched a new blog dedicated to the development of Swift on its developer site this morning to educate coders on the new language that has replaced Objective-C to build iOS and Mac apps. The blog will give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Swift from the very engineers who created it. News and hints will also spill over the blogs’ pages to help devs become more productive with the Swift language.

Here’s the first post:

The back of your iPhone is about to get a little more minimalist.

Thanks to a new bill introduced in the Senate, manufacturers may soon be allowed to use digital stamps on smartphones, laptops, and other gadgets, instead of using the strange symbols etched onto the back of your iPhone.