Apple CEO Tim Cook has been invited to participate in a roundtable discussion at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s (NCCN) annual conference on clinical practice guidelines and quality cancer care. The topic of the discussion is Cancer and Corporate America: Business As Usual. At the moment it isn’t clear if Cook will attend (NCCN lists both speakers that have confirmed their attendance as well as those that have not).

The invitation raises some questions about why the organization chose to invite Cook. One obvious answer centers around the role that Cook played in managing Apple while Steve Jobs was fighting the pancreatic cancer that eventually led to his death last year. While that is certainly plausible, there could be other reasons behind NCCN’s invitation.

The Quad Lock case is a universal mount and case for the iPhone 4/S. Wait. Where are you going? This case is actually very cool. I promise, especially if you have a home, a car or a bike.

A few weekends ago, I had some friends over, and we all got drunk and played Beatles Rock Band for a fun couple of hours. It was great. There really is something for everyone in the Beatles’ music catalogue.

One particularly funny moment came as I was singing “I Am The Walrus.” John Lennon has always claimed that the song is a blistering parody of caterwauling crooner Bob Dylan’s nonsense lyrics, but a friend of mine made an utterly bizarre case that the song is, instead, a subversive anthem in support of polysexual sodomy… an interesting interpretation, to say the least.

The key to the interpretation, he argued, is the chorus line. “Ooompah oompah! Stick it in your jumper. Everyone has one,” my friend quoted, his eyes bulging meaningfully. I found the whole exchange so funny that I immediately made myself an iPhone ringtone of the appropriate section of the song.

On a tangentially related note, The Fab Four has just released their first ever batch of iTunes ringtones. “I Am The Walrus” isn’t there, making my ringtone unique and signaling a conspiracy, but there are a ton of good songs available. Full list below.

We’ve seen countless tributes to Steve Jobs since he passed away on October 5, but the latest is really incredible. It’s a Facebook timeline that documents Steve’s entire life since the day he was born, and it’s truly jaw-dropping. I can’t imagine the effort that must have gone into this.

Can there be any clearer way to say “Don’t breed with me” to a lady than to wear these dorky keyboard jeans? Named Beauty and the Geek, the QWERTY-toting pants come from Dutch design duo Erik de Nijs and Tim Smit, who look like pretty normal guys. The pants, however, seem designed less for wearing and more for tech bloggers to write jokes about.

As we all age, chances are our senses will age along with us. As someone with great vision most of my life, I was aghast a couple of months ago when I couldn’t read the writing on a watch battery, no matter how close or far I held it from my eyes. So sad!

Luckily for us, and for thousands of users with visual impairments, OS X has a plethora of ways to interact with the Mac, all built right into the operating system. In this tip, we’ll focus on the vision side of things.

As the Mac approaches its thirtieth birthday and its progeny, the iPhone and iPad, grow to eclipse their parent, the resale and collector values of vintage Macs is steadily increasing. One of the things attractive to collectors when looking for old systems is original packaging – outer boxes and inside accessory packs. Such items add to period completeness and can significantly increase the value of an item.

Employees at Foxconn factories in China claim that the company hid underage workers during the recent inspection by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) so that they would not be discovered, according to the organization Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM).

Just days after confirming its plans for its data center in North Carolina, Apple has confirmed that it is gearing up to build another one in Prineville, Oregon, neighboring rivals like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The Cupertino company purchased the 160-acre lot for $5.6 million from Crook County.

25 iPhones worth over $16,000 have been stolen from an Apple Store in Northlake Mall in Charlotte, North Carolina. Unlike the familiar attacks in which thieves smash in Apple’s trademark glass doors, the suspect in this case was an Apple store employee and had easy access to the store’s stock room.

ABC aired an episode of Nightline last night showing exclusive video from inside “Apple’s Chinese factories.” In the video, presenter Bob Weir explores the production lines at Foxconn. Two things really stand out. First, the place is clean. And I mean really clean. Second, the iPhone is essentially hand made, with 141 human steps needed to assemble it.

After nearly a year of private beta testing, Cultured Code has finally implemented cloud sync in its popular to-do app Things. Now available as a public beta for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, Things Cloud can be enabled and tested for free by any customer.

When task management apps started adding cloud sync over a year ago, Things users were left behind while the developers at Cultured Code took a laboriously long time to get their sync solution off the ground. Now that iCloud is out and cloud sync is a staple feature of nearly every productivity app, has Things missed the bandwagon?

Apple has brought the iOS 5 Notification Center to the Mac with OS X Mountain Lion. The new interface displays incoming notifications from different apps in one place, mimicking the functionality of the Mac app called Growl. You’ve most likely used Growl before whether you know it or not, as the tool integrates with many popular Mac apps for displaying notifications through popups.

With the birth of Notification Center on the Mac in Mountain Lion, one would assume that Growl has been sherlocked. According to the app’s developers, that is not the case. In fact, Grow will make Mountain Lion’s notification system even better.

Twitter has pushed out an update for both the Android and iOS mobile apps which brings back a few popular features as well as adding a couple new ones. Also, owners of the Kindle Fire will be happy to know that the Twitter app is now available via the Amazon App Store, and if you happen to own a Barnes & Noble NOOK Color or NOOK Tablet, you can expect to receive the app on February 23rd. So what’s new? According to the Twitter Blog, here’s what you can expect:

One of the most beautiful games on the Mac App Store, Trine, is on sale for a limited time only for just $0.99. You should get it.

Playwright Mike Daisey has released the transcript of his influential monologue, The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs, under a royalty-free license.

The move will allow Daisey’s hit play about the conditions in Apple’s Chinese factories to be performed anywhere in the world without restriction.Indeed, Daisey claims that more than 500 groups and individuals in 13 countries have contacted him because they want to stage it.

“No one has done this before,” said Daisey in an email to Cult of Mac.com. “Theater doesn’t do a lot of things like this, and certainly not with a transcript that could have been sold — I had offers from two publishers — for real money.”

Daisey said there’s interest from three major theaters in Germany, a mid-size theater in Spain and two in France. There’s an actor who is planning to perform it in Kurdistan, a group in Nova Scotia that is adapting it, and a group in New York planning to turn it into a full-on play.

“There’s a lot,” says Daisey. “It’s going to be interesting.

Apple has informed Mac developers that the deadline for sandboxing apps has been extended to June 1st. The date was postponed last November and set to take place on March 1st. Apple has been working on technical specifications for third-party developers since.

For those that are unfamiliar, “sandboxing” is essentially confining an app’s system access to its specific functions or entitlements, thereby hindering the possibility of an app behaving maliciously on a system level. Developers now have more time to appropriately implement sandboxing into their apps for the Mac App Store.

The big new feature in Mountain Lion’s Mail app isn’t really a Mail feature at all: Notification Center will now flash up an alert for every new e-mail you receive. But this can get old fast, especially if you get a lot of e-mail. Thankfully, you can tweak these setting to be finer-grained, and a lot more useful. And you can do this by making your friends VIPs.

As we all well know by now, the smallest decision in an Apple product can be the sort of thing that Cupertino designers can have spent man years deciding upon, experimenting with iteration after iteration until inspiration finally and serendipitously strikes. But this obsession with detail isn’t just visual: it goes right down to the sounds you never think twice about.

Here’s one great example, shared by sound designer Jim McKee on the 99% Invisible Podcast. The sound of your iPhone or iPad unlocking itself? It’s actually the sound a vice grip makes opening itself up.

Screens is one of many VNC apps available for the iPad and iPhone. Screens 2.0, which was released today, takes the concept of remote controlling a Mac or PC to another level. The update offers some very nifty features to the two year old app including integration with iCloud Siri, and AirPlay.

Screens isn’t one of the cheapest VNC solutions for iOS – it has a price tag of $19.99. The software backs up its somewhat steep cost by delivering a great user experience.

Remember that Office for iPad product shot that was floating around earlier today? Well, Microsoft won’t actually come out and call it bogus, but they do say any report of Office for iPad is based on “inaccurate rumors and speculation.” So is that a denial or what?

We recently showed you how to control iPad games using the Joypad app on your iPhone, and today we have another Joypad trick that’s guaranteed to impress your friends: controlling games on your Mac. That’s right — you can use your iPhone as a touchscreen gamepad for your Mac.

Here’s how to get set up.

The new Timbuk2 Command Messenger 2012 ($140) is nothing like the first Timbuk2 bag I ever owned, some 11 years and 20 pounds ago, back when I was heavily commited to the world of cycling. Timbuk2 called it the Bolo, and it was a real messenger bag — though messengers almost always opted for it’s larger sibling, the Tag Junkie — crafted from a single piece of vinyl and Cordura; just a massive main compartment with not much more than a small pocket sewn on the outer face for coins and maybe a patch kit.

Although it’s just about as tough, the Command Messenger is light years away from my Bolo (and is really as much a messenger bag as a Chevy pickup is an ox cart): It’s sophisticated, uses several advanced materials, has loads of pockets and a trick feature that makes air travel easier for laptop-toting jestsetters. My how you’ve grown, Timbuk2.

RIM has released the first major update to its PlayBook tablet. The update includes some of the core features that didn’t initially ship with the PlayBook last year – including a native email app. The company is also launching the first version of its new management suite for BlackBerry and PlayBook devices, which will also manage iPhones and iPads as well as Android devices in a later release.

Reading RIM’s press release really adds to the sense that company is out of touch with reality and its customers, particularly its business customers.

Next month, students at the Kensington and Chelsea College in West London will be able to sign up for a course on iPhoneography. Anyone can do the course: all you need is an iPhone, £115 ($182) for the course and all your Thursday nights free throughout March.