It's my life, you're just along for the ride!

You know Adobe, right?

This is the company that makes extremely complex software for professionals. This is the company whose flagship product, Photoshop, has more than 500 menu commands. This is the company that earned the world’s fury when it decided to stop selling its software — and offer it only as a monthly subscription. This is also the company behind the handy, but potentially dangerous, PDF format for documents.

So what does Adobe go and do this morning? It releases one of the simplest, most creative, most joyous apps ever written — and gives it away free.

It’s called Adobe Voice. It’s for the iPad only right now; click here to get it. Adobe says it will bring it to other gadgets if the app is successful. And it will be.

Trying to describe Adobe Voice is tricky, both for Adobe and for me, because there’s never been anything quite like it. You truly don’t get it until you try it.

via Adobe Voice: A Happy App for Making Explainer Videos.

The United States is lagging behind most of the world when it comes to credit card technology, but luckily it’s about to catch up. In the next 18 months, the US is gearing up to transition debit and credit cards away from the magnetic stripe to chip-and-PIN technology, which is already widely used in Europe, Asia and beyond. Who can you thank for the long-overdue upgrade? Target, whose data security breach earlier this year highlighted the security flaws in the magnetic stripe system. It’s a 50-year-old technology, after all, and it’s much easier to counterfeit than the computer chip in your next Visa card.

In addition to adding a chip to each of the 1.2 billion credit and debit cards circulating in the US, the rehaul requires upgrading card readers at retail locations, and there’s plenty of incentive for businesses to hop on board with the change. If your local WalMart doesn’t adopt chip and PIN readers, it will be held accountable for any fraudulent face-to-face transactions. Point-of-sale systems used by smaller businesses, such as Square and PayPal here, will need to reissue card scanners as well.

According to research firm Javelin, the upgrade could take about three years, with international and premium cards getting the switch to chip and PIN first. For the record, there are already several cards with the new tech available to Americans, from American Express and JPMorgan Chase among other institutions

via United States credit card system begins complete overhaul in the next 18 months.

Vitamin D researcher Dr. John Cannell is all over this one, so I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here.  I’ll hit the highlights and link his articles for the full discussion.  His 2007 article thank you, Jamie, still commenting and sending amazing articles and links from a disaster zone! may be familiar to some of you from the vitamin D council website, but he printed an updated article available on pubmed central in August of 2010 reviewing all the new research between 2007 and now.  Hooray!

via Evolutionary Psychiatry: Autism and Vitamin D.

Thanks for the link Karen!

Doritos love the “#bold” hashtag applied non-ironically to people who regularly eat Doritos are a ridiculous product just taken at face value. But when you learn that they were born in a Disneyland dumpster, they become an absurdist allegory of the American consumer condition.Shortly after Disneyland opened in 1955, the founder of Frito-Lay got permission from Walt Disney to open a restaurant in Frontierland with a Mexican-ish theme. “Casa de Fritos” was, unsurprisingly, all about the Fritos. Customers got free Fritos, and Fritos were incorporated into many of the dishes. Fritos were dispensed by an animatronic vending machine that featured the terrifying “Frito Kid” asking his assistant “Klondike” to bring the bag up from a mineshaft. I guess the conceit is that Fritos were mined by Forty-Niners?

via The Doritos origin story: Repurposed garbage from Disneyland | Death and Taxes.

Inkjet cartridges are comprised of 95 percent water, but what’s inside the other 5 percent? We break apart the compact containers to find out what’s inside the mostly liquid assets.

via WATCH: What’s Inside an Inkjet Cartridge?.