Ever have that situation at school where a teacher who doesn’t seem to like you gives you a bizarrely good end-of-year grade?

That seems to be the case with Apple’s court-appointed monitor Michael Bromwich, who describes the company as being off to a “promising start” with its antitrust compliance program, after being last year found liable for conspiring to raise e-book prices.

Apple’s relationship with Bromwich appeared strained from the very start — with Apple objecting to Bromwich’s “unprecedented” first legal bill ($138,432 for his first two weeks’ work), along with his requests to access top Apple executives.

Oh man. It looks like “fairly well designed photo-storage and viewing services” are the new black. Or something. Now Amazon is back in the game with an updated version of Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, an app with a name only a Microsoft worker drone could love.

What’s new? Nothing less than the return of enjoyment.

Effect Stack is an OS X image editor that costs just $10 and weighs in at 3.9MB. It’ll process any image your throw at it, including RAW files, and its gimmick is that you can stack effects (hence the name) and shift the layers of this stack to switch things up.

It’s not bad.

You know how when you pull that rank-looking piece of meat from the fridge, you don’t really know whether it’ll fill you or kill you? Is that chunk of chicken still fresh? Should you grill that fish or toss it?

Now (or soon anyway), you can use the Peres to answer those questions. It’s an electronic nose that sniffs your meat and tells you whether it’s still good to eat.

In the olden days, format snobbery was a little bigger. Real photographers used medium format cameras, stuffed with big rolls of 120 or 220 film, and they laughed at folks who struggled by with little toy “full-frame” 35mm cameras.

These medium format cameras were also distinctly old school, without much automatic control.

Back then, the Pentax 645 was an odd camera, an affordable medium format camera with auto-everything. Well, not everything, but way more than you’d get in the Mamiyas and Hasselblads at the time.

Which is all to introduce the Pentax 645Z, Ricoh’s new 51.5 megapixel body with a price tag of $8,500, not much more than a top-of-the-line full frame SLR body.

Let’s face it, touchscreen controls just aren’t the same as old fashioned, plastic buttons. Free emulators on the iPhone make it easy to play classic games, but the D-pad doesn’t translate very well to a touchscreen.

If you’re feeling particularly nostalgic for the days of the Game Boy, an iPhone accessory called the G-pad hopes to give you the best of both worlds.

Revelations of the catastrophic Heartbleed bug shook the Internet last week with news that over two-thirds of web servers were vulnerable to the security hole, but it turns out end-users are also susceptible to the bug, including millions of Android smartphones.

Most Apple fans would undoubtedly love to have CarPlay in their vehicles. But unless you shell out for a brand new whip from the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes, you’re out of luck.

Well, at least for now.

A new report claims that Apple and Alpine Electronics are working on an aftermarket version of CarPlay that will go on sale this fall.

David Fincher, who was previously rumored to direct Sony’s movie about Steve Jobs, is now out of the picture. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fincher and Sony have parted ways due to disagreements over “compensation and control.”

And if Fincher is out, that means his top pick to play Jobs, Christian Bale, will probably not be involved with the project either.

If busting out your iPhone to catalog your #outfitoftheday is just too tedious, meet the mirror that will take your selfie game to the next level.

S.E.L.F.I.E (Self Enhancing Live Feed Image Engine) looks like your average mirror, but behind the shiny glass facade is a Mac Mini-powered selfie machine that features facial recognition tech so all you have to do is smile snap your picture.

Here’s how it works:

The Samsung Galaxy SII might not be the hottest phone on the market right now, but it still has a 1.2 GHz Dual Core processor, crisp 4.52″ screen, and dual cameras packed into an elegant design.

And you can get the entire package – a best-selling smartphone primed with unlimited talk, text, 500MB of 4G/3G data every month, and FreedomPop Premier for six months – for only $199 courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals.

My biggest qualm with the stock Messages app is its lack of a quick reply feature.

A new jailbreak tweak called Auki was released yesterday at JailbreakCon, and it works like the Messages app Apple should have made in iOS 7. In terms of elegance and simplicity, Auki leapfrogs tweaks like biteSMS that came before. It’s quick reply done right, then some.

The idea of aliens invading earth is a theory that has been created and expanded upon for many years. In the app Captain Bubblenaut the invasion comes to life as players help guide an alien as he obliterates Erf and all erflings standing in his way. Drag your finger across the screen to help guide Captain Bubblenaut to victory. How many erflings do you think you can destroy for a spot on top of the high-score charts?

Take a look at the video and see what you think.

When you’re using OS X, you can search the web for any term you can right click on. You simply do so and then choose “Search Google for [highlighted word].”

In iOS, there doesn’t appear to be any way to do the same thing.

There is, however, a work around.

According to Apple, its App Nap advanced technology feature in Mavericks helps you save power when you’re working with more than one app at a time. The system knows when a certain app is in the background, completely hidden by other apps’ windows. When that app isn’t doing anything, then, OS X will slow the app down, keeping it from using up CPU cycles, and thus battery power.

It’s a great feature, and one of the reasons why your Macbook may seem to have more battery life than it used to, thanks to Mavericks.

When switching to a napping app, it can seem to take a couple of seconds for OS X to get that app back up to speed. If you want to reduce the start up time of a napped app, you can disable App Nap for it.

Spring is here, and–holy crap, do you see that bird? No, the other bird. It’s over by the tree. No, the tree by the shrub. Yeah. That bird there. Do we have those here, or is it some kind of bird-stranger?

Local Birds will help keep inane, interminable thought processes like that one from happening. You tell it your location, and it shows you birds in order of commonality to your region. So when I told people the other day that I saw a Western Scrub Jay, and they were like, “Nuh-uh,” and I was all, “Uh-huh”?

I can totally prove that that was possible now.

Source:Local Birds – Free | Thomas Benner

I have a really random PlayStation 2 game on my shelf called Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color. It came out in North America in 2002, and it was basically a game in which you drew your own Pokémon and then made them fight.

Animal-abuse undertones aside, it was at least an interesting concept, and MonsterCrafter Pro follows in that same proud, if morally gray, tradition. But instead of drawing your murder-pets, you build them out of Minecraft blocks.

It’s a weird game for sure, but it has its charms.

Let’s cut to the chase: if you’re not using RescueTime then you’re not being as productive as you could be. After all, RescueTime users typically see at least a 10% improvement in productivity.

Aside from the fact that RescueTime has been used by more than 800,000 people worldwide, it has been featured in a slew of publications. RescueTime is also incredibly easy to use and you can get one year of RescueTime Premium available from Cult of Mac Deals for $39 during this limited time offer.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Back when I worked exclusively on my iPad, writing posts for Cult of Mac and everything related to that, I had a hell of a time getting some things done. It seemed like every tiny step needed to be researched before I could get anything done.

In the end, I quit and went back to a split iPad/iMac setup, but not for the reasons you might think.

What do you get when you combine several hundred serious geeks, two large rooms, five decades’ worth of vintage computers, and a weekend in New Jersey? The Vintage Computer Festival East, of course!

The ninth running of the VCF East was held April 4-7 at the InfoAge Science Center in Wall Township, New Jersey. Hosted by MARCH, the MidAtlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists group, the 2014 show saw the largest number of exhibitors and attendees for a VCF East yet, with exhibit halls expanded from one to two rooms and three days of lectures and seminars available for attendees. The show featured a wide range of computing history, from a seminal, room-size UNIVAC computer, through the DEC, Prime and HP minicomputer era, to the workstations and home computers of the 1970s and ’80s.

MagBak made a name for itself last year as the maker of the world’s thinnest iPad mount. Consisting of a wall holder (called the MagStick) and a strong, yet thin magnetic grip which adheres to the back of the tablet, the project was a huge success on Kickstarter.

Now the team behind MagBak have returned with their latest product iteration: a MagBak designed for the iPad Air and iPad mini. With around three days to go, the Kickstarter campaign has already raised close to twice its $15,000 funding goal.

Everyone knows Apple is incredibly profitable, but did you know that the top-earning tech company brings in more money than Hewlett-Packard, Google, Intel and Cisco combined?

That’s according to the San Jose Mercury News’ newly published Silicon Valley 150 list, which ranks 75 tech companies using data from Bloomberg and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Cups is an amazing proposition, and it’s going to be fascinating to see if it works. The app/service gives you unlimited coffee in NYC, from $45 per month. Yup, subscription coffee, just like Netflix or Spotify.

New leaked images purportedly taken inside a Foxconn plant show the iPhone 6 chassis and a handful of manufacturing molds for Apple’s upcoming smartphone.

The photos, posted on Chinese microblogging website Weibo over the weekend, appear to confirm that Apple will increase the size of the iPhone.

This is the Gallery Waist Pack. It’s the answer to the question, “What if we made a fanny pack for the iPad?”

That’s not quite as simple as it would seem. After all, the fanny pack is the preferred bag of the middle-aged and style-free. It’s the bag for somebody who values practicality over everything else.

And while the iPad is not completely the opposite of this, it is at least opposed to the beige pleated-pants crowd.

Mixing the two is like crossing the streams.