Imagine buying a paper magazine (remember those?), only instead of pages it just has a cover and a hole in the middle. Into this hole you place your iPad, which you then use to read the magazine’s contents. Useless, right? But that’s (almost) exactly what Hasbro has done in a desperate attempt to bring its board games into the 21st century.

Earlier this year Apple announced their plan to help revitalize the American Education System by putting digital textbooks on iPads into the hands of high school students. Apple’s belief is that learning on an iPad is a far superior experience to lugging around printed books that aren’t interactive. We compappletely agree that interactive learning is the road America needs to take, but getting there is going to be a huge problem. A recent study shows that using paper textbooks in schools is a lot cheaper than iPads, and that’s not likely to change unless Apple takes some drastic steps to reduce cost.

Lensbaby, purveyor of the finest image-degrading lenses known to man, has come up with a new blur-tastic optic. Named the Edge 80, it cuts a sharp, straight slice of focus through the photographic haze.

Hands up if you forget birthdays all the damn time. Hey, whoa, slow down. I can’t see all of you at the back. Waaaaay too many hands. Wait. No, OK, hands down. Let’s do this differently.

We’ll forget about the counting bit, and just assume that pretty much everyone forgets birthdays and ends up hating themselves just a tiny bit more each time. Especially when a few months later, the person whose birthday you forgot remembers yours, and sends a perfectly judged gift too. Dammit.

Life is too short to date PCs. That’s the belief of dating site Cupidtino, which since its 2010 launch has amassed 32,000 Apple aficionados.

Whether you believe that affinity for a consumer electronics brand can spark romance or not, narrowing down the dating pool by trying to find some commonality can’t hurt. And Apple’s insanely great devices are as good a place to start as any. With Cupidtino, you can use the website and recently-released iPhone app for free; for $4.99 a month you get unlimited access to messages and a chat feature.

Cult of Mac got these Mac-loving dating tips from co-founder and CTO Amol Kelkar. Kelkar, once a PC by day and a Mac at night (he worked for nearly a decade as a software engineer at Microsoft), tells us what kind of opposites attract on a Mac-centric dating site, a place dripping with single Macs in the real world and whether a PC-version is in the works.

Your iPhone and iPad are great paper replacements, but they couldn’t actively stop it. Until now: PaperKarma is an iPhone app which lets you stop paper junk mail, just by snapping a photo of it.

When we were at CES this year, Intel and other PC makers were absolutely insane about ultrabooks, the new ultra-slim, ultra-portable form factor that they thought was going to save them from Apple’s one-two punch of the iPad and MacBook Air.

We were skeptical ultrabooks could make a dent against the Air, and looks like we were right: JPMorgan analyst Mike Moskowitz has just sent out a new note to clients, downplaying the impact of ultrabooks on the MacBook Air’s success. Ultrabooks, he says, are a dud.

Using your iPhone on Valentine’s Day to maximize your chances for love is potentially a great idea, but it could also prove to be disasterous if you use the wrong apps. These are those apps.

It’s been so long since Apple refreshed the Mac Pro that a number of reports have speculated the machine is set to be killed off. But it’s still available from the Apple store, and according to a new report, it’s going nowhere. In fact, it’ll soon to get a refresh that will introduce Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor and the new Kepler GPU from NVIDIA.

Gas prices remain high, but over-achieving parents still need their status symbols. So I declare that the stroller is the next SUV, or Strolling Utility Vehicle. Exhibit A, the Origami stroller.

OS X Lion’s new Launchpad feature isn’t exactly known for its customizability. The whole point is to give Mac noobs more familiar with iOS than OS X a way to effortlessly interact with their Mac, with little drama or tweaking. One of the few things in Launchpad you can tweak, however, is the way your desktop background is displayed on it. By default, Launchpad defaults to blurring it, but if you want to deblur it (or even turn it into a nearly black-and-wite), it’s just a short keystroke combo away.

A Scottish School is prepping its iPads for exam season. Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Inverclyde, was the first school in the world to deploy an iPad to every one of its pupils. Now it may become the first school to try to stop its pupils from iCheating in exams.

A trademark dispute currently ongoing between Apple and Proview Technology recently saw the iPad banned in one Chinese city, but things could be about to get a whole lot worse. A lawyer for Proview, which claims to own the rights of the “iPad” name in China, is seeking a ban on iPad shipments into and out of China.

Not only would that mean that Chinese customers cannot get their hands on the device, but the rest of the world would be without the iPad, too.

Zynga’s latest iOS game Dream Heights received a lot of stick when it was first announced, and there’s no denying that it was all deserved. After all, it is a blatant clone of Tiny Tower, the App Store’s best game of 2011, from a small team of independent developers called NimbleBit.

The title is now available to download from the U.S. App Store, and according to the reviews it’s already received, Zynga employees love it.

Apple has reportedly ordered a whopping 65 million high-resolution 264 ppi Retina Displays from Samsung and LG Display for its upcoming iPad 3. The device is expected to make its debut early next month, and its production is now well underway, according to the report.

With so many rumors surrounding a smaller iPad of late, even the most skeptical amongst us are beginning to believe. The latest reports comes from The Wall Street Journal, which claims Apple and its suppliers are currently testing a new tablet with a smaller screen said to be around eight inches, that will “broaden its product pipeline amid intensifying competition.”

Everyone’s favorite 8-bit world building game just got better thanks to an update. Minecraft Pocket Edition received its first Survival update, allowing users to choose between Survival and Creative mode when creating a map. Other great additions include:

The Wall Street Journal has published a report confirming that the iPad 3 will feature 4G LTE networking technology for both AT&T and Verizon customers. Apple’s next-generation iPad is expected to be announced on March 7th, and the device is rumored to feature an A6 quad-core processor and Retina display.

What do you do when your lover helps run the largest mobile social network in existence? You give him a Valentine’s Day gift only he could really appreciate. That’s exactly what Kaitlyn Trigger did for her boyfriend, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

Kaitlyn learned how to code so she could create Lovestagram, an easy way to make and send Valentines with Instagram photos. That’s a gift that would make any hipster blush.

Apple has announced that it will broadcast Tim Cook’s talk at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference tomorrow. The live stream will begin tomorrow, February 14th, at 12:30 PM PST/ 3:30 PM EST.

Cook has presented at the conference several times in past years. This will be his first presentation as the CEO of Apple, and he is expected to give “forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties” regarding Apple’s business.

There are sure to be some interesting statements given by Cook tomorrow, so be sure to tune into the audio stream at Apple’s Investor Relations page.

Fashion and photography go together like peanut butter and jelly, or Kentucky and Bourbon. So it’s not surprising that the newest Hipstamatic Pak, Made in America, is influenced by famed fashion photographer Chiun-Kai Shih, and released just ahead of New York Fashion Week. And it’s free throughout the 16th.

Some arguments about Apple never seem die despite the fact that reality has moved on. Arguments like the Mac not being compatible with Windows file sharing or disk formats and that all Apple products being inherently more expensive than any competitors. This morning, Computerworld’s Preston Gralla pulled several of these outdated arguments together to support his opinion that Apple would never unseat Microsoft in the enterprise.

Virtually every argument in this piece is easy to debunk with facts. What’s more important than responding to these outdated myths, however, is realizing that Apple doesn’t want to unseat Microsoft from its current place in the enterprise. Microsoft is actually doing a lot of enterprise heavy lifting for Apple.

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file or share a contact with your iPhone over Bluetooth? Unfortunately, iOS 5 doesn’t have a built-in method for Bluetooth file sharing, so you’re out of luck if you don’t jailbreak.

A new Cydia extension called AirBlue Sharing brings zero-configuration Bluetooth sharing to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Following an earlier report from AllThingsD that the iPad 3 will be unveiled during the first week of March, iMore claims that Apple’s event is set to take place on Wednesday, March 7th.

The rumored tablet will reportedly feature a quad-core A6 processor, 2048×1536 ‘Retina’ display, and possible 4G LTE chipset technology.

The makers of the popular iPhone and iPad IM client Verbs, #include tech, are set to release a task manager application in partnership with River called Steps that looks almost identical to the highly-anticipated Clear todo iPhone app from Realmac Software and Impending.

Clear is set to go live in the App Store on Wednesday, but that hasn’t stopped #include tech and River from promoting its eerily-similar task management app.