Dan Moren of Macworld, faced with a failing SSD in his MacBook Air, took up his screwdriver and fixed his own laptop without need of the Genius Bar. Better yet, he saved some cash and got comfortable doing repairs in the process. The article has lots of good links to tools and guides you’ll need to get the job done. Really, working on the innards of your Mac or PC isn’t all that scary, and while Apple’s guts are largely proprietary, removing the rear case is to get to components is a lot simpler than it used to be.

I’ve had my fair share of drives die, and I can vouch for SuperDuper being one of the most invaluable pieces of software on my Mac. While you’re waiting for your new SSD for your MacBook Air to come in, you can just boot up off an external drive and keep working like nothing happened — provided your SuperDuper backup is up-to-date of course.

Alyssa Bereznak of Yahoo Tech writes has a report on Jason Belmonte, a professional bowler who recorded himself bowling a perfect game during competition using Google Glass. He’s an advocate of the technology, and has been using it to showcase his skills and give fans a new perspective.

Though Google’s PR team has been promoting “stories” that tout Glass’ technical capabilities for firefighters and DJs alike, the typical Explorer’s experience tends to be less mind-blowing than you might think. As Belmonte is neither a developer nor a darling of the Glass PR team, his capabilities in the bowling alley are essentially limited to recording his firsthand experience. Even live-streaming on TV, which is something he’s hoping to start doing during competitions, isn’t at the HD resolution he’d prefer.

Instead, he’s begun uploading his post-game footage for networks to splice in with recaps of the game. On a recent bowling program, ESPN cut straight to Belmonte’s Google Glass perspective — something he’s nicknamed Belmo Vision — during a game.

Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s Dead Air Space:

PolyFauna is an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song Bloom.

It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious.

In some ways, PolyFauna reminds me of Proteus. The app is free to download in the App Store.

[Hat tip: Macgasm]

Calzy

Calzy, one of my favorite iOS calculators, has been updated to version 2.0, which brings several new features and design changes over the old version. I reviewed Calzy in May 2013, shortly after the app had been released on the App Store, and I appreciated its clean design and gesture-driven interactions:

I use Calzy because it blends powerful features with delightful gestures and animations. For instance, the app comes with full undo/redo support: to activate this, you can swipe right or left, respectively. If you want to clear an entire expression quickly, you can tap & hold the backspace button. And – my favorite feature – if you need to edit, not just view, single items in the current expression, you can tap & hold on the display to bring up the expression editor (with another sweet animated transition). From the editor, you can swipe to delete numbers or use a button in the top left to achieve the same functionality.

Calzy 2.0 is a free update that brings a new design for iOS 7, which isn’t dramatically different as it makes numbers thinner, brings some lightweight blurring in certain parts of the UI, and introduces themes – which I like (especially the Dark + Gold setting, pictured above). The expression editor has been revamped so you can easily reorder values in the expression, and the app has currency rounding available by tapping a button below the number pad. My favorite addition, though, is the ability to bookmark calculations with a note: tap & hold the equal sign, type a note, and a bookmark will be added (with a nice animation) and saved. Bookmarks have their own section in the History view, and I find this particularly handy to save how much I’ve spent while grocery shopping and access previous notes at any time.

Calzy 2.0 is a nice update that adds new functionality without compromising the app’s simple approach. Calzy is $0.99 on the App Store.