[apple] Abandoned Apples … pictures of long discarded Apple computers that have been left to slowly decay.

[google] The best way to use Gmail and Google Calendar on your iPhone … useful guide to using Google services with the iPad and iPhone … ‘The trick here is combining the Gmail app with two syncing protocols called CardDAV and CalDAV (don’t worry, you’ll never actually need to know what these are to get them to work). You’ll need an iOS device running version 5.0 or above to take advantage of these, but each offers better and more powerful integration with Google’s services than just tapping “Gmail” when you first set up your email accounts on your phone. Much like the momentary pain of digging into your Facebook privacy settings, the five or ten minutes spent setting up this system will save you email stress for months to come.’

[ios] iOS 6 ad-tracking opt-out … useful how-to on the options for stopping ad-tracking on the latest version of iOS for the iPad and iPhone.

[apple] Who queues for an iPhone 5? Protesters, hipsters and the jobless … The Register investigates who’s queuing for an iPhone 5 outside London’s Apple Store… ‘The fact that four of the first seven queuers were making films about why people queue for iPhones speaks volumes about pre-launch iPhone hype. Given the media circus surrounding those who shun more practical methods of shopping and instead queue in the British September air, it’s not surprising that all of the first six were representing interest groups on the lookout for publicity.’

[apple] Leaked Genius Bar manual shows Apple’s smooth seductions … The Register provides some fascinating details from training materials for Apple Store staff … ‘There is also a list of key phrases not to be used by Genius Bar staff. Apple hardware does not “bomb,” “crash,” “bang,” or even “freeze.” Instead it “unexpectedly quits,” “does not respond,” or “stops responding.” Similarly there’s no such thing as a “bug” or “problem,” just a “condition” or “situation.” Such vocabulary rules are not uncommon in the industry (this hack was once told never to write something is “cheaper” in product documentation, only that it is “less expensive”) but parts of the manual do read rather like a manual on seduction.’

[iphones] How to set up mail aliases on iPhone, iPad … useful, if fiddly tip – I’d not thought this was possible with Gmail on the iPhone.

[ipad] What’s On Warren Ellis’ iPad? … ‘Managing information is a big part of my job. So the topslice is: Twitterific, for Twitter. Flipboard. Reeder, for reading Google Reader (which is wired into Pinboard for saving links and Instapaper for reserving long articles for later). BBC news app. Guardian for iPad in Newsstand. Foreign Policy for iPad. The Economist in Newsstand. These are all daily, sometimes hourly checkpoints for me. Can’t do without them.’

[funny] Buying This Thing Will Make Me Happy … ‘It’s really cool. They just started making it and not many people have one yet. It does all sorts of stuff and can fit in my pocket, but it can also get bigger than that if I want it to. Plus it’s made by a company I trust to put out things that will make me happy.’

[jobs] Keep the faith! … A letter from Steve Jobs … ‘Back in the early days of Apple, Inc., long before he began sporadically responding to emails from customers, the inimitable Steve Jobs could sometimes be found signing computer chips, attaching them to sheets of Apple stationery, and then replying to fans of his company.’

[apple] How Robert X. Cringely summed up Steve Jobs in 1992…

The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley sits alone on many weekday mornings, drinking coffee at Il Fornaio, an Italian restaurant on Cowper Street in Palo Alto. He’s not the richest guy around or the smartest, but under a haircut that looks as if someone put a bowl on his head and trimmed around the edges, Steve Jobs holds an idea that keeps some grown men and women of the Valley awake at night. Unlike these insomaniacs, Jobs isn’t in this business for the money, and that’s what makes him dangerous.

I wish, sometimes, that I could say this personal computer stuff is just a matter of hard-headed business, but that would in no way account for the phenomenon of Steve Jobs. Co-founder of Apple Computer and founder of NeXT Inc., Jobs has literally forced the personal computer industry to follow his direction for fifteen years, a direction based not on business or intellectual principles but on a combination of technical vision and ego gratification in which both business and technical acumen played only small parts.

Steve Jobs sees the personal computer as his tool for changing the world. I know that sounds a lot like Bill Gates, but it’s really very different. Gates sees the personal computer as a tool for transferring every stray dollar, deutsche mark, and kopek in the world into his pocket. Gates doesn’t give a damn how people interact with their computers as long as they pay up. Jobs gives a damn. He wants to tell the world how to compute, to set the style of computing.

Bill Gates has no style; Steve Jobs has nothing but style.

A friend once suggested that Gates switch to Armani suits from his regular plaid shirt and Levis Dockers look. “I can’t do that,” Bill replied. “Steve Jobs wears Armani suits.”

Think of Bill Gates as the emir of Kuwait and Steve Jobs as Saddam Hussein.

Like the emir, Gates wants to run his particular subculture with an iron hand, dispensing flawed justice as he sees fit and generally keeping the bucks flowing in, not out. Jobs wants to control the world. He doesn’t care about mantaining a strategic advantage; he wants to attack, to bring death to the infidels. We’re talking rivers of blood here. We’re talking martyrs. Jobs doesn’t care if there are a dozen companies or a hundred companies opposing him. He doesn’t care what the odds are against success. Like Saddam, he doesn’t even care how much his losses are. Nor does he even have to win, if, by losing the mother of all battles he can maintain his peculiar form of conviction, still stand before an adoring crowd of nerds, symbolically firing his 9mm automatic into the air, telling the victors that they are still full of shit.

You guessed it. By the usual standards of Silicon Valley CEOs, where job satisfaction is measured in dollars, and an opulent retirement by age 40 is the goal, Steve Jobs is crazy.

[tip] How to Narrow Down Exact Duplicated Music Files in iTunes … ‘To see all Exact Duplicates in iTunes, Click File from the iTunes menu and then hold down the Option key. Display Duplicates should now change to Display Exact Duplicates, which should result in a shorter list of duplicates.’

[ipad] Switch is a Smart Multi-User Browser for iPads … ‘The iPad is a device destined to be handed over to friends and passed among family members, but there are no user accounts or variable browser settings. Enter Switch, a clever browser that allows user accounts and anonymous guest browsing.’

[iphone] How to Enable and Use Find My iPhone for Free on iPhone 3GS and Other Pre-2010 Devices … useful money saving tip from Lifehacker … ‘All you need to get free Find My iPhone access from pre-2010 devices is access to one of the supported devices.’

[iphones] 10 Unlikely iPhone Insurance Claims … ‘Juice from a defrosting piece of meat leaked into it ‘

[tech] On Tablets …some thoughts on iPads, magazines and tablets computers from Lee Maguire … ‘That was my first thought: This seems ideal for my technophobic mother. She refuses, point blank, to touch keyboards. When, as a kid, I got my first computer she asked me if I knew what all the buttons did. “That’s not an answerable question,” I told her, “the function of the keys is contextually dependant. Any key can potentially do anything.” Whoops, turns out that sort of revelation is not an effective way to cure the older generation’s fear of computers.’

[apple] The Mozzarella Cheese Head of Steve Jobs … file this under things John Gruber will probably never blog … ‘Love mozzarella cheese? Love Steve Jobs? Then you’ll love this.’ [thanks Andy]

[comics] How The Flash looks on Android and iPhone … is this why DC Comics doesn’t have an iPhone/iPad app yet?

[iphone] Victor Keegan: My First iPhone App … a retiring Guardian tech writer on the thinking behind his first iPhone app …‘This month I finally left the Guardian after nearly 47 years. At the end of last week I had my 70th birthday and today my first iPhone app came out.’ [via Meg]

[woz] Steve Wozniak is on Twitter: ‘Rare massage (for me), then dance practice. No pain, no gain. Awkward but fun, this dancing. I still can’t do Macarena.’ [link]

[apple] Hacking the Apple TV … how-to from the Register … ‘Apple continues to describe its Apple TV set-top box as a “hobby” project: it’ll continue to develop the platform, but it’s not making any money out of it yet. The gadget’s a hobby project for a lot of other folk too. They want to gain access to this closed but surprisingly powerful system to make it more useful. We’ve had an Apple TV unit for a while now, and we decided it was time to dig a little deeper into its foundations…’

[mp3] Get Better Genius Recommendations in iTunes … ‘Don’t customize genres. You may think Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy belongs in a genre like “Avant Garde” or “Techno,” but the iTunes Store database (which Genius queries) insists it’s “Dance/Electronica.” Change your genres to conflict with iTunes and your recommendations will suffer.’

[ipod] The iPod Death Clock … ‘When will my iPod Croak? Depending on how you use (or abuse) it, we can take a guess at how long your little friend has left in this world.’

[apple] Fake Steve on Scotland’s First Apple Store: ‘All joking aside: Scots, I know you’re a restless and angry people at heart, but let’s try to keep it peaceful, bokay? It’s what our brand is about. We’re all about peace and love and staying Zen. Negative people upset us. But if you can get in a few kicks on some filthy bastard Microsoft fans, and nobody sees you, well, no harm no foul as they say, and you will, in fact, be restoring a sense of childlike wonder to my life.’

[macs] Mac Buyer’s Guide: Know When to Buy Your Mac — useful guide – in summary: don’t buy full-size iPod’s or Nano’s because there maybe new versions real soon.

[macs] Running the BBC’s iPlayer on a Mac using Parallels … ‘After finding out the BBC’s iPlayer only worked on Windows XP I wondered if you could run it on a Mac using Parallels or perhaps under Windows Vista (which iPlayer also doesn’t support) using VMware or some other virtualization product…’

[iphone] Wait in Line like Everyone Else, you Traitorous Bastard — Fake Steve Jobs on Steve Wozniak … ‘He lifts my brand name and calls his book iWoz. Then he comes sniffing around looking for a free iPhone. Forget it, Captain Segway. Look. You did some nice work — back in the seventies. To put it another way, the last time you did any real work, Styx was still selling out arenas. Bokay?’

[iphone] 29 June 2007: The Day the World Changed — Fake Steve Jobs rallies the troops … ‘To those of you who serve under me at Apple, I say this: Yes, I have berated you, and insulted you, and exasperated you. Yes, I’ve fired your friends for no reason, and made you work harder than you ever thought you could work. Yes, I’ve taken you away from your spouses, your children, your transgendered domestic partners. In some cases your devotion to me has cost you your marriages. You’ve sacrificed a great deal for this. But has it not been worth it? For the rest of your life, you’ll be able to say that you were working at Apple when the iPhone was introduced. You were here on the day when the course of human history was changed forever. Plus, you’ll get a free 4-gigabyte iPhone, at $500 value. Not bad, right?’

[blogs] Real interview with Fake Steve Jobs … ‘You know this one time when I was at Reed and really experimenting with acid, we did some 4-way acid but we didn’t realize it was 4-way so we each took a whole hit — which turned out to be a quadruple dose. And I swear during that trip I imagined the iPod for the first time. This was the early 70s. Actually I imagined a little teeny tiny record player that you could carry with you. But that’s basically what a hard disk is. I think.’

[apple] Top 10 Apple Products which Flopped … ‘One of the main reasons of Lisa’s failure was its astonishing price of $9,995 dollars ($21,500 in Feb 2007 dollars).’

[mac] Unboxing a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh — watch as a Mac collector unboxes a never opened Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh he bought on eBay for a large sum of money … ‘When the auction ended, I was the proud owner of a brand new TAM for my exact maximum bid. I had outbid another boxed TAM pursuer by £0.01.I went out that night and got drunk, partly out of elation but mainly because I was so dazed at sending so much on an eight year old computer, no matter how gorgeous. With the aid of alcohol, I convinced myself that it was a bargain because I hadn’t paid the $7500 asking price from 1997.’

[apple] Create your own Apple Rumor … ‘An Anonymous tipster has advised us to expect a Flash based iMac or Wifi Enabled iPod Nano in the NAB 2007′ [via Blah Blah Flowers]

[24] Whatever It Takes — interesting look at the politics behind 24 and of it’s creator Joel Surnow … ‘The “24” producers told the military and law-enforcement experts that they were careful not to glamorize torture; they noted that Bauer never enjoys inflicting pain, and that it had clearly exacted a psychological toll on the character. (As Gordon put it to me, “Jack is basically damned.”) Finnegan and the others disagreed, pointing out that Bauer remains coolly rational after committing barbarous acts, including the decapitation of a state’s witness with a hacksaw. Joe Navarro, one of the F.B.I.’s top experts in questioning techniques, attended the meeting; he told me, “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don’t want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.” [via Blah Blah Flowers]

[apple] Are you a Mark or a Jez? — some photoshopping of Apple’s Peep Show Adverts … ‘Let’s be honest – I’m a bit of a twat. Guess which computer I am?’ [via linkbunnies.org]

[apple] Charlie Brooker: I Hate Macs … ‘So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign. I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.’

[iphone] 30 Things the iPhone Could Do That You Haven’t Thought of Yet … ’17. Bring you to tears when it falls and skids face-down across a parking lot.’

[mp3] Use iTunes to add embedded album art — another useful iTunes tip from Lifehacker.

[itunes] iTunes Power Tips — some useful ideas from Lifehacker … ‘Want to separate your speed metal collection from your spouse’s Broadway tunes fetish? How about your, ahem, grownup movies from your regular collection? Used to be that you had to maintain separate playlists, or log onto the same machine under different usernames to do so. But with iTunes 7, just hold down the Shift key (Option on the Mac) when you launch iTunes to create or choose a separate iTunes library.’

[simpsons] When iPods take over the Earth — screengrabs from a new episode of the Simpsons showing what happens after the iPods become self-aware.

[ipod] The Perfect Thing — another article about the creation of the iPod this time from Steven Levy … ‘In August, the team finally got one of the physical prototypes to play a song. A group of people working late at night took turns listening on a set of headphones from someone’s old Sony Walkman. That first song, by the way, was Spiller’s “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)”…’

[apple] Straight Dope on the IPod’s Birth — Leander Kahney on the creation of the iPod … ‘The iPod name came from an earlier Apple project to build an internet kiosk, which never saw the light of day. On July 24, 2000, Apple registered the iPod name for “a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment,” according to the filing. “The name ‘iPod’ makes much more sense for an internet kiosk, which is a pod for a human, than a music player,” said Athol Foden, a naming expert and president of Brighter Naming of Mountain View, California. But Foden said the name is a stroke of genius: It is simple, memorable and, crucially, it doesn’t describe the device, so it can still be used as the technology evolves, even if the device’s function changes.’

[apple] YouTube: Steve Jobs likes to says “Boom!” alot. [via Blah Blah Flowers]

[tech] Robert X. Cringely on Apple’s iTV Strategy: ‘Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier once told me, “you can have enough money and you can have enough power, but you can never have enough EXPERIENCE.” Jobs understands this better than almost anyone else and the pieces he’s put together are all aimed at giving us an experience and allowing us to share that experience with others in a large and grand way.’

[music] The iPod’s Achilles Heel? It’s er… Reader’s Digest — Orlowski on Zune and iPods. ‘…in business terms, the iTunes Store is a deceptive chimera. Pakman has a joke he likes to illustrate it. “The iTunes Music Store buyer buys 25 songs in the first year, 15 in the second year, and in the third year, the battery has died, so you have to go out and buy a new iPod,” he says.’

[apple] Why the iPod is losing its cool … ‘[iPod] Sales are declining at an unprecedented rate. Industry experts talk of a ‘backlash’ and of the iPod ‘wilting away before our eyes’. Most disastrously, Apple’s signature pocket device with white earphones may simply have become too common to be cool.’

[apple] The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2 … ‘Dude, I invented the friggin iPod, okay? Have you heard of it?’ [thanks Phil]

[apple] Steve Jobs’ Best Quotes Ever … ‘It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.’

[macs] Mainly Neat Stuff — web site covering vintage Apple Computers and curios like a second-hand Mac IIfx belonging to Douglas Adams … ‘I started up MacWrite Pro and noticed that it was registered to “Douglas Adams, Serious Productions Ltd”.’

[apple] Video iPod UK Launch at the BBC? — according to Radio 6: ‘Apple is set to unveil a new video iPod at the BBC Television Centre in London on October the 12th…’

[ipod] The Guardian asks: Is it OK to have more than one iPod? … ‘Apple has to avoid giving the impression that its products are built to obsolesce, that anything you buy now, however pretty and functional it seems, will be superseded. (Consider Apple’s “clamshell” laptops, praised when released, but comical now. Even 2003′s iPod Mini seems like yesterday’s toy.) This is why reports that the Nano scratches easily are a potential PR disaster – especially for Apple, whose designs target an especially anally retentive, perfectionistic personality strain, exemplified by founder Steve Jobs.’

[apple] Stevie’s Little Wonder — Time Profiles Apple’s iPod Nano. ‘…it’s clear Jobs is just happy to be here. To paraphrase Lou Reed, his company was saved by rock ‘n’ roll. “What’s really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple’s incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don’t have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling,” Jobs says. “And look at what’s happened. That same innovation, that same engineering, that same talent applied where we don’t run up against the fact that Microsoft got this monopoly, and boom! We have 75% market share.”‘ [via Technovia]