Linked List: December 14, 2013

Saturday, 14 December 2013

Last Call on These New DF T-Shirts ★

We were going to stop taking orders on these a few days ago, but we managed to get some more time before we hit the printer. So you’ve got one last chance, if you order tonight, Saturday 14 December.

Thanks again to Jon Contino for the terrific new designs.

Update: That’s all, folks. Thanks to everyone who placed an order; we’ll get them printed and shipped as fast as we can.

MacUpdate’s Winter Bundle ★

My thanks to MacUpdate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their Winter Bundle of great Mac apps and services. It’s a limited time collection that is available for just $39.99 — a 90 percent discount.

The bundle includes: 6-months of Anonymizer’s private VPN service ($49.99) for covering your tracks online; 6 months of Backblaze ($30.00), the best cloud backup solution for Mac users; ExpanDrive ($39.99) and Paragon’s NTFS-for-Mac ($29.90); iStopMotion ($49.99), an amazing stop-animation movie making tool; and several other great titles. The whole bundle pays for itself for just one of these great apps.

Google Buys Robotics Maker ★

John Markoff, reporting for the NYT:

Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that walk with an uncanny sense of balance and even — cheetahlike — run faster than the fastest humans.

This, from the company whose chairman is spooked by Amazon’s drone-delivery proposal.

How to Take Good Photos for Under $1,000 ★

Stu Maschwitz:

Christmas is coming. Here’s how to take some good photos.

In a nut: buy a low-end DSLR body and a $100 fast 50mm prime lens. That’s been good advice for anyone with an interest in photography for decades (minus the D in DSLR).