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ExtraBITS for 24 May 2010

Alas, the “Get a Mac” ad campaign is no more, but you can still watch all the ads online. If you’re looking for more, listen to Rich Mogull on Science Friday, check out the video of connecting an Alphasmart Neo to an iPad, the New York Times’s info-graphic about Facebook’s overwhelming privacy options, the Final Cut Pro rumors that Apple is taking pains to dispel, and an amusing way of venting some frustration after an application crash.

Rich Mogull Appears on NPR’s Science Friday — Kudos to our own Rich Mogull, whose TidBITS article about protecting your privacy from Facebook landed him a guest spot on the NPR radio show Science Friday with Ira Flatow (himself a TidBITS reader at one point). You can either listen to the audio of the show or read the transcript on NPR’s Web site.

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“Get a Mac” Ad Campaign Officially Over — After 4 years and 66 ads, Apple’s “Get a Mac” series of ads is no more. The last ads were produced in October 2009, and a comment by Justin “I’m a Mac” Long hinted that the campaign was done in an April 2010 interview. The URL to Apple’s archive of the ads now redirects to the general “Why You’ll Love a Mac” page. But if you’re missing Long and costar John “I’m a PC” Hodgman, you can still watch all the ads at Adfreak.

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New York Times Info-Graphic on Facebook Privacy Options — The brouhaha surrounding privacy on Facebook continues to expand, with the New York Times producing a fascinating info-graphic that shows just how complex Facebook has made the topic, with 50 settings containing over 170 options. And the Facebook privacy policy? It’s longer than the U.S. Constitution.

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Venting in Photoshop CS4 Crash Reports — You know how many applications, when they crash, ask you for more information what you were doing at the time of the crash? Well, Garrett Murray spends a lot of time in Photoshop, and when it crashes, he sometimes feels the need to tell Adobe just what’s on his mind at the time. The result is a hilarious collection of crash reports that make for great reading – one only hopes that the Photoshop engineers have enjoyed them as well.

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Apple Denies Final Cut Pro Refocus Rumors — It’s not often that Apple officially denies a rumor, but when one is both completely wrong and stands to confuse customers, they’ll speak out. An AppleInsider report claimed that Final Cut Pro was to be refocused on more mainstream users, but Apple took pains to tell CNET (and us) that it’s not true and that Final Cut Pro will continue to target professional video editors.

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Old Meets New: Alphasmart Neo as iPad Keyboard — Who’d have guessed? It turns out that you can use the iPad Camera Connection Kit to connect the rugged Alphasmart Neo – a dedicated word processor with a keyboard, six-line LCD screen, and lineage dating to 1993 – to the iPad via USB and use it as a keyboard. Thanks to Eolake Stobblehouse for this video.

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