If Thesis 2.0 has got you scratching your head on where to start and how to proceed with developing your own Thesis-driven site and making full-use of all the new features, you could do worse than reading Matthew Horne’s excellent, easy-to-understand, step-by-step tutorials.

I’m going through each article on that site as I write this, and using the knowledge gained to build up Trading & Investing Notes.

Apple Support:

Starting September 19, all new iCloud accounts now include an optional @icloud.com email address. This article answers common questions you may have.

I’d wondered about the new iCloud email address that popped up in my devices, but it was surprising that not a single blog I was following covered this. Thankfully, this tweet did:

iCloud accounts now include an iCloud email address. thx @amdeeb90 @theflyinglampiesupport.apple.com/kb/HT5441

— Apple Spotlight  (@applespotlight) September 27, 2012

More than 99% of the code for Sublime Text 2 is written in C++.

A bit of Objective-C is thrown in for interfacing with Cocoa on OS X.

Python is used for the plugins.

Eightlimb Films:

We were driving past the Adelaide Botanic Gardens on a perfect afternoon so decided to pop in and shoot a test on the iPhone 5.

Blown away by the results I took it into final cut did a quick chop and 20 minute color grade. This is what excites me about the future of video cameras. A minor amount of stabilization was added to the opening shot but the original footage looks very similar.

I think the movie clip was really well-made. Editing was done in Final Cut Pro.

Filmed on the New iPhone 5 from Eightlimb Films on Vimeo.

To my eye, the iPhone 5 photos are the best of the bunch, with HTC One X doing pretty well to deserve second place.

The pictures from the S3 on the other hand, are truly subpar.

Austin Mann, reporting from Iceland:

The era in which people specify “shot on iPhone” is coming to end. It doesn’t matter any more… you can no longer say “look what I did with this crippled device!”… because, well, it’s no longer crippled. In fact, it does things your big fancy SLR can’t. Apple hasn’t let us down with the capabilities of the 5 and I can’t wait to see the images you all create on this thing this next year.

Thanks to Paul Graham, I now understand what startups are all about, and the appeal it has for both the venture capitalists (VCs) and startup owners in terms of financial risk and reward.

The smart app banner feature was introduced in iOS 6. This is where you get to show a banner that promotes your app when somebody visits your website.

Clicking on that banner will take your visitor directly to your app in the App Store.

David Smith’s instructions should be clear enough for you to implement this feature on your own.

Some nice photos of the new iPhone 5 next to other Apple gadgets.

When compared to the iPhone 5, that is.

Instructive. And funny as heck.

Watts Martin:

This is why trade dress battles are so important to Apple. Try introducing a soda in a container that’s easily mistaken for a Coke bottle and see how far “har har har, you can’t patent curved glass!” gets you as a defense. If somebody makes a product that can be easily mistaken for an Apple device, then Apple is going to do whatever they can to get that product either off the market or changed.

The best, and most comprehensive iOS 6 review out there.

All in one place.

(Photo credit: minima-list // mnl.st)

Daniel Eran Dilger:

Rather than trying to take on Apple, Android makers will take aim at competing with Samsung, the new lower hanging fruit. Google has already attempted to push its “pure Android” Nexus products (some made by Samsung) as better alternatives to “Android+” devices like Samsung’s own TouchWiz layer (which tries to look more like iOS).

Google hasn’t been tremendously successful with Nexus, but it has up until now been forced to compete against both Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s counterfeit iPhone. Google and its licensees, along with RIM and Microsoft/Nokia, now only have one iPhone to compete against, making their jobs all that much easier.

These official, full-resolution photos are the best I’ve seen from a compact camera.

The sample video clip seems pretty high-quality too.

Read DPReview’s hands-on preview of the Nikon P7700.

Lim Cheng Soon, on reducing his time spent online:

It felt incredible. My focus and productivity improved. I enjoyed my work more. I slept better. More importantly, I enjoyed every single one of those activities way more than the internet.

Now, whenever I feel bored (which rarely happens), the first thing I do is to close the lid of my laptop and get out. Even when I wasn’t doing anything, I was content with just a cup of tea, sitting and looking at the sea, and not wondering about what’s on the Hacker News front page.

Constantly surfing the internet and staying connected online via the computer or a mobile device is going down my priority list too.

Re-connecting with the physical world, whether it’s having long walks or performing bodyweight exercises in the park, visiting a brick-and-mortar bookstore or reading a good book that I can actually hold in my hands, having extended conversations with friends or enjoying more outings with the family, has never felt more fulfilling.

Although small in size, the stunning pictures are a testament to Dan’s talented eye for capturing the right moments.

Dan’s setup consisted of the iPhone 4, Canon binoculars, Schneider iPro fisheye and wide-angle lenses and the Snapseed iOS app.

Matthew Manning gives 10 ideas to the question “How can I overcome envy of people who are my age but are far more successful than I am?”

Ben Brooks:

I don’t like when people charge too little to make a living and then complain about charging too little.

Jeff Atwood spills the beans on how he managed to purchase three 27-inch (2560×1440) IPS LCD monitors for less than $1000.

Matt Gemmell:

People like to throw around figures about Android’s handset penetration. Yes, Android is on a lot of devices. That’s lovely. But the real question is: as a developer, can you make money from it?

If you’re not in the mobile apps business to make money, then great – congratulations. This is your bus stop. Off you go. Have a nice life. I, however, am in business to make money. I write code because I like doing that, but the business part is about making money. Otherwise I’d be a hobbyist, and I’d be doing something else during the day. I’m thrilled to be able to do something I enjoy as a business, and I’m doubly thrilled to do it from the comfort of my own home.

[…]

Android is designed to be difficult to make money from, and the core issue is that it’s open – with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness.

So many great points in this article on why “[o]pen is broken as a money-making platform model, unless you’re making the OS or the handsets.”

A couple of good solutions in this discussion, many of which I’d not heard of before.

An interesting and useful Yahoo Pipes solution that queries for the equivalent music videos on YouTube of top-downloaded iTunes songs.

Michael Wolfe:

No, shut up. Most of the world doesn’t sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is Internet Explorer 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade. Browsers suck for these kinds of things. Their stuff is already in folders. They just want a folder. That syncs.

That is what it does.

So glad I switched to VMWare Fusion a year ago.

The related Parallels forum discussion doesn’t inspire confidence in their product either.

Looking at Dan Frommer’s pretty charts is the ticket.

Sharp analysis by Daniel Eran Dilger, who argues that just because Gartner have been dead wrong in the past, it doesn’t automatically mean that Gartner can’t get it right at all today.

The simple reason is that the analyst that got it wrong isn’t the same person who has just written up a critical report on potential Windows 8 user interface issues as a desktop in the enterprise where mouse input, and not touch, is the norm.

I think this is the only app that is able to “predict the comings and goings of … intermittent thunderstorms”.

Too bad it’s only available in the United States, for now.

Michael Mulvey of Daily Exhaust:

The thing is, Microsoft has never been a consumer-focused company to begin with. Windows was designed for businesses, not people. Microsoft got in good early in the enterprise market in the 80′s and 90′s and that trickled down to peoples’ home computers. “I have Windows at the office, I might as well get it for home.” That left Apple out in the cold until Steve Jobs came back in 1998.

Computer component miniaturization made huge strides since the first Macintosh went on the market in 1984. So while the first iMac was a smash hit when it debuted, portable computing was Apple’s Trojan horse to reclaim dominance. First the iPod. Then the iPhone. Then the iPad. Windows PC spread from the office to the home. In the past 10 years we’ve seen the opposite: Apple products are going from the home to the office.

That was a nice follow-on piece to MG Siegler’s take on Microsoft’s first-ever quarterly loss:

I think what we’re seeing in Microsoft’s numbers right now is the full-on shift of the company towards enterprise. To be clear, I think the company will remain alive and probably even thrive in that regard for a long time. I just think the time of their consumer dominance is already over. And within the next decade, it will be completely over.

I think at that point, Microsoft will be an enterprise software and services company with a strange, but successful gaming sub-division that will probably be spun off by then.

[via Daily Exhaust]

A superbly-produced short video on the EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) procedure for Curiosity, NASA’s Mars Rover, that is right up there with great science fiction spacecraft landing sequences.

Marco Arment inspires:

A writer’s reputation can’t be easily jettisoned and started fresh. Writing is extremely important to me, and I never want to compromise it. Any given sponsor is temporary, but credibility is for life.

Yoni Heisler on the earliest known photos (in black-and-white) of an Apple iPad prototype:

Well before the iPhone, and going back all the way to the early 2000s, Apple had been working on tablet prototypes that would eventually form the groundwork for the original iPad.

This supports what Steve Jobs said to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the 2010 All Things D conference, paraphrased below:

I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our people about it. And six months later, they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI folks. A few weeks later, he called me back and had the rubber band inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my God, we can build a phone out of this.’ So we put the tablet on the shelf, and we went to work on the iPhone.

See color photos of the same, posted by Matt Buchanan.

Interesting also, is Anand Shimpi’s related tweet:

The first iPad prototype used a Pentium M

The ins and outs of teaching English in China:

A surging demand for learning the English language in China has turned the export-intensive country into an importer of American teachers, creating thousands of potential jobs for recent graduates.

[…]

English teachers make between 6,000 and 16,000 yuan a month, or between $938 and $2,500, with the highest salaries going to those with prior teaching experience who work in major cities, …

Albert Einstein said it well:

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Try parsing all of that.

TheMacAdvocate on a Samsung ad showing the Galaxy S III streaming content to a HDTV:

All that’s required is WiFi? Actually, no. You also need to have a Smart TV – like say one of the ones Samsung sells. Curiously, I don’t see that mentioned in the disclaimer. Might be kind of important for people whose companies haven’t bought a Samsung TV in the last 2 years — which is to say 99% of all companies. People who actually want the features of Samsung’s “AllAirPlay” now can plunk down $99 for an AppleTV and use the iOS devices they already own. But don’t let a minor detail like “having to purchase a new $1,500 TV” bog down your clever ads, Sammy. Everyone already knows that truth-telling isn’t in your DNA.

Apple’s AirPlay works with any TV that can be connected to an Apple TV.

The AllShare Play solution only works with compatible Samsung-branded Smart TV sets.

Ouya is its name:

Julie Uhrman isn’t asking the world for a million bucks. No, she’s asking for just under it to produce a new $99 Android-based video game console called Ouya (“ooh-yuh”) that will challenge the way Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have been bringing games to you on your television for years.

“We don’t think the console-makers are dead,” Uhrman said in an interview with Kotaku. “We just think it’s time to rethink how they do their business. We don’t like it when people pay $60 for a game and feel cheated. We don’t like it when developers can’t work on a platform because it’s too expensive.”

Looks like there’s a huge, pent-up demand for such a console. Their Kickstarter campaign raised $3.8 million in just three days.

The public alpha of Tweetbot for Mac is finally here, and the download page has a delightful egg graphic that animates every few seconds.

For a complete review with a ton of screenshots, visit MacStories.

I already prefer this version over the official Mac Twitter client. For one, Tweetbot allows links to be sent to Instapaper — all that’s required is to enter your login credentials in Preferences > Account > Read Later.

Brett Kelly:

I don’t believe that every person in this world is destined for satisfaction in their profession. That’s fine, I think. I’ll never begrudge anybody the sacrifice of personal satisfaction in the name of providing for the ones they love.

But.

I do believe that those of us who have the opportunity—the luxury, even—to pursue what is true and beautiful and profitable both for us and the world around us have a duty to do it.

I’ve had great “professional satisfaction” ever since I quit my job at Oracle Malaysia in 2005 and started doing my online thing.

Although it remains a constant challenge to earn enough for my family’s needs, I continue to push ahead with various projects and try not to dwell too much on past hiccups.

With my wonderful wife’s support, and not forgetting to keep an eye on what’s important in life, the future ahead does indeed look bright.

Paul Graham, on Bronnie Ware’s Regrets of the Dying:

I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands

Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list.

Brandon Pearce:

Recently, American Family Insurance conducted a survey to determine if the American Dream is still alive. They discovered that 90% of Americans still believe in the American Dream, but only 14% feel like they’re living it. It’s no surprise. The most common dreams chosen by respondents were having money and owning a nice car. And the icon used for “living the dream” was a man laying in hammock in between two palm trees, sipping a cocktail. If money, nice cars, and leisure time in tropical destinations define the American Dream, it’s true that few are living it.

Math and Physics can be mightily funny.

[via Daring Fireball]

It’s really nice to be able to take a peek inside Apple HQ, and to hear stories from actual employees who worked on various products.

Nice piece by Macworld on three ways scientists are using the iPad.

Steve Bloom was the photographer of the “aerial view of zebras in the Okavango Delta, Botswana”:

Steve shot this photograph on film, using a Canon EOS 1N and a Canon 70-200mm F2.8 lens

Archival prints of the Okavango Zebras are available for purchase.