In an interview with 60 Minutes, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates reflected on competing with Steve Jobs and visiting the Apple founder near the end of his life. Gates was uncharacteristically emotional, saying, “He and I, in a sense, grew up together.” Gates also shared a great story about Jobs bailing on a party due to illness, telling Gates’s secretary, “If he wants to know why, tell him I’m an a**hole.”

When we think of old communications technology, many of us picture 10Base-2 coax connectors or maybe 2400 baud modems. But what about wax-covered cardboard discs? The Smithsonian discovered and digitized such a disc containing the voice of Alexander Graham Bell saying, "Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." Now you can hear what the inventor of the telephone sounded like on 15 April 1885.

Jason Snell likes to read comics on his iPad and has the credit card bill to prove it! His piece in Macworld is an outstanding survey of the digital comic landscape, describing how traditional print comics correspond to digital offerings, comparing several methods for acquiring comics, and discussing which mobile devices work best for comics.

Over at Macworld, Lex Friedman covers the strange saga of the Starfish smartwatch, which purports to mirror your iOS device's screen on your wrist. At Macworld/iWorld, Starfish first didn't show up at all, then appeared without the watch, then showed a mostly nonfunctional prototype briefly on the last day, with the company's non-technical CEO flitting in and out.

The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski explains the amusingly awful bug in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that causes most Mac apps to crash when you type the string file:/// (you have to capitalize one of the letters in the word “file,” which we didn’t to avoid inadvertent crashes). The bug turns out to be in Apple’s Data Detectors code, and affects only apps that use NSTextFields. So the Finder, Safari, Messages, and TextEdit all crash, as does the Mac’s error reporter, but BBEdit and Firefox do not.

Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman, two scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute, have worked out a system to encode text, audio, and other data in DNA. Teaming up with Aligent Technologies, the two encoded all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, an audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, and a photograph into a synthesized DNA sample. Though Aligent did the DNA synthesizing work for free, the cost of the DNA synthesis is estimated to have been roughly $12,400 per megabyte. Luckily, prices for DNA synthesis are dropping, and it is estimated that 50 billion megabytes of text, roughly equivalent to everything ever written by humans, could be encoded into a sample that would weigh less than “a granola bar.” This takes the idea of cloning your data to an entirely new level.

3D designer and illustrator Peter Zigich has posted a number of beautifully rendered mockups of what a future Mac Pro could look like, were it to use significantly more efficient CPUs. It is, of course, highly likely that Peter’s designs will bear no resemblance to what Apple is reportedly planning for this year’s Mac Pro refresh, but it’s still fun to ponder whether or not his designs could work.

On 6 October 1997, Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Inc., when asked how he would fix the then-struggling Apple Computer, told an audience at the Gartner Symposium that, were he in charge at Apple, he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Today, Bloomberg reports that Dell is said to be in buyout talks with private equity firms. Meanwhile, the once-beleaguered Apple has something in the neighborhood of $123 billion in cash and securities on hand, according to its last financial statement.