SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 –There’s no great secret to understanding what Apple has up its sleeves, according to Jason Snell, editor-in-chief of Macworld magazine, who spoke to attendees about “How Apple Does It” at the Macworld Conference and Expo Industry Forum Wednesday morning.

Anyone who makes a habit of keeping up with technology news understands one of the longest running games in the business involves predicting what Apple will do next.

Despite its reputation as an obsessively secret company that consistently produces products no one ever thought they needed until Steve Jobs invented them, Snell described Apple as a consistent, rational company that doesn’t do anything unexpected — and doesn’t rely on crazy mind control to achieve its success.

From the company’s very founding, the roles Jobs & his cofounder Steve Wozniak played suggested Apple’s future: Jobs understood marketing and Woz was technically brilliant at making complex technology work. One of them understood products and the other understood technology; the way they worked together would become Apple’s greatest strength and one day set their company apart from all others in American business.

Mike Daisey isn’t afraid to rant. The mercurial storyteller first made a name for himself on stage by decrying the state of American theater. Tech is a natural target for him – he’s survived a stint at Amazon.com and takes apart computers to relax – so he really makes his point forcefully with a two-hour monologue called “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” onstage now through Feb. 27 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. (See our review of the show here.)

During our 40-minute conversation, I get the uncomfortable feeling he’s ranting directly at me. In fact, the show takes tech journalists to task for being subservient to the industry as well as missing the whole story of where all the shiny gadgets we report about so breathlessly come from. Ahem.

Cult of Mac talked to Daisey about why both Apple fans and PC people will enjoy his show, as well as his own gadget gear and why donning Steve Jobs’ signature black turtleneck on stage would’ve been “fucking stupid.”

A crazy gadget called the Looxcie LX1 sits on your ear like a Bluetooth headset. A built-in video camera records constantly, capturing everything you see.

The video recording and uploading takes place via a phone — until now an Android phone. But now, just in time for Christmas, the company has optimized their product for the iPhone.

The idea behind the $199 Looxcie LX1 is to capture every moment in order to capture any moment. What that means is that the device is constantly recording video, but dumps it continuously unless you choose to save it. In other words, unlike with a convention video camera where you choose to record video before you record it, the Looxie lets you choose to save video after an event occurs.

With the recorder going all the time, you won’t miss that alien abduction, sasquatch sighting or even being run over on the sidewalk by Steve Wozniak’s Segway – or any other sudden event.

To permanently retain footage, you have several options. The easiest is to simply press a button on the Looxcie, which grabs the previous 30 seconds and saves it on your iPhone. You use the app on your iPhone to upload a clip to YouTube, Facebook or send via e-mail. You can also connect to Mac or PC via USB.

The Looxcie LX1 talks to your iPhone via Bluetooth. It weighs 1 ounce, and records video at 480×320 resolution and 15 frames per second. You can get it at BestBuy.

Imagine entering a large, circular war room in the deepest, most hidden bunker of Cupertino headquarters, modeled similarly to the one in Doctor StrangeloveAfter shaking hands with Peter Sellers doing his classic Steve Jobs impression, you’d cast your eyes up at the enormous map on the wall, and as you looked upon it, you’d see countries around the world suddenly light up.

Those lights, though, wouldn’t indicate nuclear explosions… they’d represent the megaton blasts of the iPad launching over the past two days in Taiwan, Denmark, Portugal, The Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, Nortay, Hungary, Finland and South Korea. Later this week, Brazil is also slated to get the iPad.

Of course, you’d never get into such a room. As General Woz Turgidson would be sure to point out, it would be a serious breach of security. I mean, you’d see everything. You’d… you’d even see the Big Board.

Apple has become the largest landowner in Cupertino, Calif., the city which headquarters the computer and media giant. Apple recently purchased for a reported $300 million a 98-acre campus which formerly housed Hewlett-Packard. The site adjoins Apple’s 50-acre site it purchased in 2006.

“We now occupy 57 buildings in Cupertino and our campus is bursting at the seams,” Apple PR chief Steve Dowling told the Mercury News. “The offices will give us more room for our employees as we continue to grow,” he added.

I’ve read a lot of Steve Jobs interviews but until now I’d not seen this 1985 interview from Playboy.

It catches Steve Jobs at age 29, one year after the Macintosh was launched. He is by far the youngest person on Forbes’s list of richest Americans and one of only seven who made their fortunes on their own.

He’s portrayed by Playboy as the Mark Zuckerberg of his era: a Valley wunderkind with a magical gift for foreseeing the future. Of course, it’s interesting to look back and see how the future actually panned out.

Jobs comes across as a confident and knowledgeable, but not brash and arrogant. Here’s a few of the highlights:

It’s too late for Halloween, but there’s plenty of time to get a mask of your distorted mug taken with Apple’s Photo Booth to make a splash at carnival celebrations.

Brooklyn-based designer Mark Pernice first made these huge grimacing masks out of his own face working with F/X superstar sculptor Christian Hanson. People liked these disturbing, wearable doppplegangers so much that Pernice is stumping to raise money to make more masks.

The series of six masks his making this time will eventually end up in an exhibit– we’ll keep you posted on details — and if you pledge the most, he’ll make one of you.  Or your favorite pet, or maybe a relative.  (Kick in $20 to the cause and you get a poster of one of his masks).

Cult of Mac talked to Pernice about which figure in Apple history he’d most like to make a mask of and why he decided to dress up as Freddie Mercury this Halloween.

You might consider yourself at home with your Apple computer, but Johannes P. Osterhoff went so far as to build himself this little abode mimicking the OSX Home icon.

It’s the latest project from the eclectic Osterhoff — Cult of Mac last caught up with him for his iPhone William Tell 2.0 project — who built the mini-home, complete with door, shutters, and chimney then wore it around over the summer.

He shares with us the blueprints for making this Apple icon come to life and how carrying a house on your back can be the ultimate ice breaker.

Want to get your iPad engraved with a foul limerick, or a portrait of Woz realized in ASCII, or a hip-hop style roll call of everyone who has ever shown you disrespect, or — I guess — some pithy line of sentiment? Apple’s finally offering to engrave iPads for customers. Like their iPod engraving program, getting some letters laser-etched into your iPad’s case is free if you order the tablet through Apple’s online store.

Isn’t that nice? Just remember that if you opt to get your iPad engraved, you can no longer exchange it unless it arrives as dead as a door stop.

During his anti-Google diatribe this afternoon, Steve Jobs said the Google-versus-Apple, open-versus-closed debate is a smokescreen. It makes no sense to say Apple is closed while Google is open when the real issue is fragmentation versus integration.

Jobs said Google’s Android platform is fragmented. There are too many different versions of the operating system and too many devices, making it a headache for consumers and developers. Apple’s iOS devices on the other hand aren’t fragmented, because they are “vertically integrated.” Apple closely integrates the software with the hardware, and they “just work.”

But what does he mean exactly by “vertical integration?” And why is it so important?

I wrote about this at length in my book, Inside Steve’s Brain. In fact, I think it’s critical to understanding why Jobs and Apple are killing it in consumer electronics right now.

So here’s Chapter Eight — “Total Control: The Whole Widget,” — in its entirety.