OK Go's New Music Video Reminds Me of My First Computer

OK Go, masters of both slightly quirky power pop and internet promotion, have unleashed their newest video, for "WTF." You know how on older, crappy Windows machines, images or windows would sometimes get stuck and leave trails whenever you moved them? This is pretty much like that. Fun! [Vimeo]

Apple May Have Bought Lala Bought for a Song (Oh God I Am Too Much)

As if you didn't get enough Lala-Apple news today, a new report surfaced that says Apple may have bought the streaming audio company for about 50 cents on the dollar. "But if that's so cheap, how come this story's in Remainders?" you might ask. Well, imaginary commenter, it's in Remainders because of this quick update:

A second source close to the company insists my estimate is "way off" but won't offer up other details.

We'll update on the Apple-Lala situation when we have some more solid info on what this means for us. [All Things D]

Super Mario Cross-Stitch Is Cool Enough to Get Me to Google "Cross-Stitch"

According to Wikipedia, it is "a popular form of counted-thread embroidery in which X-shaped stitches are used to form a picture." This one, to my totally untrained eye, looks really great, an elegant addition to any living room. [A Little Stranger]

Ellen Degeneres Gives Away Pixi, Nokia Booklet and Upside-Down Nook for Christmas

On her talk show, Ellen Degeneres began her annual gift giveaway with an all-tech first day. Included in the roundup: A PowerMat charger, MiFi, Palm Pixi, Nokia Booklet (the audience starts shrieking at "weighs less than three pounds" for that one—how did they guess what it was based on that?), and a B&N Nook, which she proudly holds upside-down. Pretty good roundup, really, but you should check out our Gift Guides to see what we'd have suggested. [Engadget]

Interestingly, the Times says that LaLa went to Apple to be acquired, and what Apple's after is LaLa's engineers, with their cloud service-y brains.

Apple's official response is that they "buy smaller technology companies all the time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans." Hmmm. [NYT]

Previously: NY Times reporter Brad Stone says that Apple has agreed to acquire the streaming music service LaLa as rumored, and the NYT is currently updating their story.

Talks are very advanced, said the sources Friday. One of the sources said that the sides have already agreed on terms and have only to sign a final agreement.

Steve Dowling, Apple's spokesman, said the company doesn't comment on rumors and speculation. A representative from Lala was not immediately available.

An acquisition of Lala, a streaming-music site that has gone through multiple iterations including one as a CD-swapping service, would be the third acquisition deal of a digital-music site in recent months.

MySpace acquired iLike in August and Imeem last month.

Exactly what Apple intends to do with Lala remains unclear, but it would appear that Apple intends to offer some kind of streaming service to iTunes users. Right now, Apple is the largest music store online or offline and Apple has made more money than any other music service by selling music downloads.

But the public has shown an appetite for free music and many people have clamored for a better way to store music. Right now, most music libraries can be found on an owner's computer hard drive, which can malfunction. Lala enables users to store songs on the company's servers and access them from Web-enabled devices.

This story originally appeared on CNET

The suit bears a lot of the stamps of hollow patent trollery, from the outside-the-industry plaintiff company to the oddly late filing. (The iPhone has been out for a couple years now, and it's had a camera the whole time.) But these guys aren't bullshitting: they have a history of winning similar suits against major camera maufacturers, including Sony, which paid them $25m in 2001, and Canon, which paid them $34m in damages in 2003. They've entered into licensing agreements with "many" of the companies they've sued, which include the likes of Samsung, Nokia and Nikon. So, what's their secret? Patents like this:
Digital cameras, have you ever heard of them?

To have a patent as fundamental as this—among others, including a patent on digital shutter buttons, and one for storage and display methods for digital images—awarded in the early 90s and upheld by the courts is nothing to scoff at. When this thing finally kicks off—the scheduling conference isn't until January, so it'll probably be a few months before we see fireworks—it'll be one to watch, since companies who land in court with Apple have a tendency to—one sec—DIE HORRIBLY. There. [LoopinSight, specific patent list here]

You can also add four 2-terabyte hard drives from the factory, for $550 a pop ($350 to upgrade the default drive to 2TB). Unfortunately, this is not an architectural change, just a speed bump. [AppleStore—Thanks Michael Fisher]

This nausea-inducing iPod can be seen at Art Basel Miami Beach, which runs December 3rd to December 6th and shows a selection from more than 250 worldwide galleries. I'm not sure who's responsible for this great riff on the iPod, but I'll be sure to thank them when the room stops spinning. [Thanks, Buster!]

TUAW noticed a not-so-subtle change to the Wolfram Alpha's mobile site, which now prompts stingy iPhone jerks to just download the app already. Luckily you can kill the prompt, but then you're left with an unoptimized version of the search engine, which is a chore to use on a mobile device.

So, Wolfram isn't moving as many copies of their app as they expected (Dozens! You'll see!) and it's totally within their rights to, you know, make money. But instead of taking away the free, slightly-less-capable alternative, why not just make the paid, slightly-more-capable app remotely affordable? What's the problem with that?

Oh. [TUAW]

The Price:

$160

The Verdict:

Expensive, but worth it.

How do we justify a $160 scale when normal scales are $20 at Target? Think about when the last time your parents replaced their bathroom scale. Was it before you were born? Was it never? $160 isn't too much when you spread it out over a lifetime.

But even if you you just look at the features, the Withings scale is worth it. On the "weighing you" side, it reports your weight in pounds, kilos or the weird British stone, plus calculates out your fat mass and BMI.

The top of the scale is made out of, in their words, "tempered glass slab, covered with a layer of metal", which looks and feels classy. The whole thing feels modern—again, the complete opposite of a normal filthy bathroom scale.

After the Withings weighs you, it'll send all three data points online, to their free website, where it charts and graphs it for you. You can even have different users in your family, each with their own separate data graphs. And (this is probably something you won't use) it'll post your weight updates to Twitter, if you want. It's not mandatory.

And here, for example, is a kid being tracked as she gets older—not a person devolving into a serious eating disorder.

And if you have an iPhone/iTouch, you can access your chart via the free app as well, in case you want to show off to your friends how much weight you're losing.

In essence, the Withings makes for the perfect holiday gift. It's pricey enough to not make you look cheap, yet it still conveys the "I think you're fat" message that's inherent in giving someone a scale. [Withings]

Internet connectivity and functionality is impressive for a scale

Works great as a scale

Slightly expensive

THAT'S MY FAVORITE SHOW TOO!! WHY ISN'T IT ON ITUNES??

Sorry for shouting. I won't do that again. I'll try not to spit, either, but I can make no promises there. I mean, I'll most certainly make earnest attempts, but I really don't want to mislead you. My saliva is not something that I can wield with 100% proficiency, and I want this meeting to be built on trust. Mutual trust.

Anyway, my reason for showing at your door. Frankly, I wanted to know what your house smelled like. No, that's not my primary reason for being here. I view it as a sort of side quest that justified a face-to-face meeting rather than a more conventional email. And no, it's not nearly as creepy as your face is implying. My inquiry was a point of academic interest. Everyone's house smells different, an amalgamation of personal scent, furniture, general upkeep, pets and preference for food. And let me just say, I thought it'd smell like this. You know, kind of blue. Yes, I know blue is a color. I guess I mean, fresh, clean, but maybe even a bit sterile. Not in a bad way, mind you. And the hint of tempeh in the air is really quite welcoming.

OK, OK, I realize that I've gone on for a while here, and at any second, Nigel Lythgoe is going to unpause on your DVR and it's going to sound really loud because both our ears have adjusted to the room's noise without a television blaring—no Apple TV, btw? But that's neither here nor there. My pitch is this:

Sell every iPhone with an accompanying Arduino tank. Like this one. Boom.

True, reader Derek cheated a bit using the same photos over and over, but hey, if you think you can do better, go for it. (Click on the picture to embiggen.)

It's $10, but it's an RPG, which supposedly implies more gameplay hours than non-RPGs. Even when you're not actually playing the game, you can level up your guys by listening to the music that's bound to each character, giving you an added bonus to use your iPhone/iTouch more. [iTunes (Full Version) and iTUnes (Lite) via Kotaku]

Using two Linksys routers, he rammed the MacBook's parts, along with the iSight camera and microphone in the joined-up cases, loaded Leopard and after slaving over it in the workshop for a few weeks, he was able to connect it to his monitor successfully.

Sure does beat having several broken routers in the attic like I do. [Phantomdev via Gearfuse]

Each iPhone has been programmed to deliver a different sound when each function is used. The touchscreen, microphone, GPS, compass, wireless sensor and accelerometer have all been tinkered with, so Georg Essl, the lecturer/computer scientist/musician can turn the cacophony into something resembling music. We say "something" very loosely, as you can see from the video here. [Facebook via 9to5Mac]

The idea is to put it in your pocket, and the accelerometer will detect your movements and play the appropriate Mario sound effect. Jump, and it'll make the distinctive Mario jump sound; crouch, and it'll make the "worp worp worp" sound as if you're entering a green pipe. Also included are brick hits and Goomba-stomping, among other noises, tunes and a few choice Mario catchphrases. It's available now (hopefully) for a buck. [iRwego via CNET]

The same, fluid 2.1 setup we've remember from the original Creature speakers are recaptured in the $130 Creature IIIs, though the latest edition features a more compact subwoofer than Creatures of yore. Does the design hold up all these years later? You tell us. [BW via CrunchGear]

Apple didn't approve of the use of a private API in Pointy Heads Software's Knocking Live Video app, which allows iPhone users to stream live video to each other over 3G and Wi-Fi. After pleading to Steve Jobs to reconsider their verdict, Apple got back to developer Brian Meehan the next morning, promising that his request was being taken seriously.

Three hours later, with the order reportedly coming "directly from the top," the Knocking Live Video was available on the App Store, where you can download it for free now. Until Apple sticks a forward-facing camera on the iPhone, it's not ideal for video chat, but as Jesus pointed out in his rant yesterday, Apple's likely biding its time until it can smell the video chat competition.

Meehan's gone public with his story, telling Ars Technica that "Apple told me they are listening, and truly care about their developers and getting it right," giving hope to developers railing against them on the Apple Rejected Me hate-site, and hope for anyone wishing to use a private API in an app. With Apple loosening its grip in this instance, we could be seeing a lot more interesting apps launching soon. [Ars Technica]

Problem is, Interpol has a list of the phone's International Mobile Equipment Identifier (IMEI), which carriers can use to block the devices. We had already warned against grabbing an iPhone in a Belgian back alley…you can add Russia to that list. (I much prefer back alleys in the Netherlands, anyway). [Cult of Mac via PC World]

Previously, the only way to grab location data from Twitter was to scrape through user profiles or to rely on some kind of third-party geodata service, with which Twitter users could upload their current locations as individual Tweets. It worked, sort of, but it was janky and awkward. Now that Twitter lets you embed your location in each tweet without taking up any characters, things are different.

Most new iPhone Twitter clients support the GPS tagging feature, so there's no shortage of location data to play with, and Twitter 360 is one of the first apps to really take advantage of it. You can basically watch your Twitter friends leave a trail of narcissistic word nuggets all over town in real time, rendered on a map or through your iPhone's camera. It's fascinating, if, you know, you're into loose acquaintances' latitudes and longitudes. (Which is an acceptable thing, in this 2009.)

Twitter 360 is $3 and only available for the iPhone 3GS, since a compass is necessary to properly orient the tweets on screen. And the app itself is executed well enough, though its function are fairly narrow—if you can stand to wait, I'm sure free multipurpose AR apps like Layar will get support for Twitter geolocation soon enough. [iTunes]