Apple

If you have iPod envy but no Mac to match it, SONICblue's new RioRiot digital music player might be what you're waiting for. Although slightly bigger and less elegant than Apple's svelte digital music player, the $399 RioRiot holds four times as much as the original iPod. SonicBlue says the device's 20-gigabyte hard drive holds 400 albums worth of music, a figure I can't dispute - after spending hours pouring 474 of my favorite songs into it, I still had 17.5 gigabytes of space to spare.

Shannon Esposito, a biomedical sciences lead teacher at Bel Air High School, is the winner of the 2013 Annual Golden Apple Plus Education $1,000 Award, Freedom Federal Credit Union announced. The annual competition drew 58 entries this year from all over the county from teachers and other support personnel in the education community. Each entry sought to explain how their idea would benefit their own education, their class, students, school and/or the community. The entries were reviewed by a team of judges, made up of members of Freedom's senior management and board, along with business partners in the community, to determine how well the entry was presented, including how creative and well written.

Apple has gone on a very public tax strike. Months after reporting the second-highest quarterly profits in U.S. history, America's favorite company is refusing to bring home more than $60 billion of offshore funds in protest of the taxes it would have to pay. Apple paints its predicament as unfair. Yet Apple's funds did not build up offshore because its iPhones, iPads and Macs are so much more popular overseas than they are at home. Though more than two-thirds of its retail stores are in the United States and Apple sells more products in the U.S. than in any other nation, it reports to shareholders that it made 24 cents in pre-tax profit for every dollar of sales in the United States, compared to 36 cents profit on every dollar of sales abroad.

Allow me to roll the Apple of Discord into the meeting.  David Skinner, whose The Story of Ain't ( reviewed here ) described the godawful hullabaloo over Webster's Third International , has written a preview about the long-awaited Merriam-Webster's New Unabridged Dictionary . In his sampling of the new online edition, her checked out the entry for comprise  and discovered (wait for it) that the whole comprise/compose  distinction insisted on in stylebooks and journalism classes is much more complicated and much less straightforward than you have been led to believe.

Apple today announced what many were expecting, given its huge war chest of around $100 billion in cash: future stock dividends and a stock repurchasing program. The company released the news in a conference call early Monday. It's amassed a huge pile of cash in recent years thanks to the runaway successes of its iPhone and iPad, a smartphone and a tablet, respectively, that are dominant in their categories. Apple said it plans a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share sometime in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012, which begins in July.

You would be able to play games, read electronic books, listen to music, watch movies and choose from nearly 140,000 smart-phone applications - all while on the go with Apple Inc.'s new iPad. The question is whether you would want or need such a device, and be willing to pay $499 or more for it. After months of hype that culminated in days of water-cooler speculation, Apple unveiled Wednesday the highly anticipated iPad, essentially a personal computer contained in a portable flat-panel touch screen.

It's looking like this Wednesday, Sept. 12, is the day that Apple will likely unveil its fifth iteration of its blockbuster iPhone mobile device. I've been largely tuned out from all the buzz in recent weeks because, really, you don't really know what Apple is going to debut. But I dipped my toes in the rumor waters today, to get up to speed, and here's what I pulled up from the depths: * The iPhone 5 will supposedly have a mini-dock connector -- not that wide port we're all used to, according to SlashGear . That could mean all of us will need to go and buy new speakers and other accessories that are compatible with our new iPhones.

SAN FRANCISCO - As Apple Inc.'s iPhone faces stiffer competition in the lucrative market for smart phones, the company is going after one of its main rivals with patent lawsuits claiming theft of touch screen technology and other features. The complaints cover a slew of models made by Taiwanese phone maker HTC Corp., including the Nexus One, G1 and myTouch 3G - all using the free, rival Android mobile operating software from Google Inc. Non-Android phones include HTC's Touch series. Patent cases can take months or years to resolve.

From the BalthTech blog: Big news for fans of Verizon's wireless network: It'll be getting the Apple iPad starting Oct. 28. You'll be able to buy the iPad at 2,000 Verizon Wireless stores nationwide. (Is this the precursor to Verizon getting the iPhone next year, as recent reports suggest?) Interestingly, consumers won't have access to the iPad 3G. Instead, if you want one from Verizon, you could buy an iPad Wi-Fi version plus a Verizon MiFi mobile hotspot. The hotspot uses Verizon's 3G network and generates a Wi-Fi hotspot that you can then use the iPad with.

At Apple's big news conference to introduce the iPad Mini , the company also showed off changes to its iBooks app. The new version, available as a free download, will allow continuous scrolling of books, as an alternative to page-turning -- a computer-age shift in the reading experience. Standard page-turning was somehow comforting, as though deep inside the computer a book lived. So I'm not sure how much I'll like the scrolling feature. Will it seem too much like the reading I do at work?

Lisa Schlossnagle is accustomed to giving her time to Fulton Elementary School. As a parent and volunteer, she spends time aiding teachers in her daughters' classrooms, representing the school as its PTA delegate, and attending countywide meetings report on issues facing the school system. She has taken roles at the classroom level, including as a tutor for the A-OK (Assist Our Kids) program, and at the systemwide level as a representative on the committee that worked on redistricting proposals last year.

Humorist Dave Barry, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are among those taking part in the 2013-2014 Baltimore Speakers Series. The seven-speaker series, sponsored by Stevenson University, kicks off Sept. 30 with author and humorist Bill Bryson, whose books include "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and "At Home: A Short History of Private Life. " Other speakers scheduled for 2013 are George Papandreou, prime minister of Greece from 2009 to 2011 (Oct.

Cory McCray, whose children, ages 3 and 5, are too young to attend middle school, still spends many hours in the halls and classrooms of Northeast Middle School in Baltimore, where he volunteers. Recently, he helped the school start a student government and, before the elections, visited each classroom to give students advice on how to campaign. Among his suggestions to candidates was creating a brand identity by choosing one or two colors to dominate their campaign materials. On Jan. 28, McCray was recognized for his volunteering efforts at the middle school and elsewhere with the Golden Apple Award from Comptroller Peter Franchot.

You know the beverage industry is running scared when it feels driven to mount an all-out campaign against a New York City law passed last year banning the sale of super-size sodas and sugary drinks. But it's beyond shameless when that effort includes arm-twisting support for its cause from a group representing the very people who would benefit most from the law. Yet that's what played out in a New York courtroom last week, when the city's NAACP branch took the industry's side by arguing that the ban on sugary drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces, which was strongly endorsed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, would unfairly hurt residents in African-American communities.

Mary Ann Fulford, a member of Heritage Baptist Church in Annapolis, helped launch a local version of the Backpack Buddies program at the church after she heard about it about four years ago. The national program provides weekend meals to needy children, and Fulford saw a need in her own community. The church started by providing food to 15 students at Georgetown East Elementary School in the spring of 2009. Today, the church provides meals to more than 60 children, at Georgetown East and at a second school, Mills-Parole Elementary in Annapolis.

Victoria Gastro Pub Executive Chef Joe Krywucki reflects: Seasonal cooking is always best, especially when you have access to high quality ingredients. We use an all-natural Duroc pork, which has a superior flavor and tenderness, and local Baugher's Farm Honey Crisp apples. Pork Tenderloin 1.    Season the pork tenderloin with salt and pepper. 2.    Pan sear the pork in clarified butter until golden brown. 3.    Roast in oven at 350 degrees F until desired temperature.

After months of marketing hype that had fans grabbing their wallets this weekend, Apple announced Monday that it sold more than 300,000 of its new tablet computers on Saturday - a one-day total that topped the 2007 debut sales tallies for the original iPhone. Analysts predicted shoppers would snap up more than 4 million units by the end of the year. The Cupertino, Calif.,-based company also said that, as of 12:01 a.m. Sunday, consumers users had downloaded more than 1 million applications - the small programs users can add to their devices - and nearly 250,000 ebooks from the company's iBookstore online marketplace.

C ertain shiny little things make me weak in the knees and the wallet. I am helpless in the face of that perfectly designed something that performs beyond its weight class. Tiny diamonds that sparkle big. My previous car, a little silver Miata with a big, throaty throttle. Sliders. Which is why Steve Jobs should have had me at, "So, let me show it to you now," when he unveiled Apple's newest sleek sliver of desire, the iPad. But all I could think of during Wednesday's rollout was: iCan't.

A nutritionist from the University of Maryland Medical Center regularly provides a guest post. This week, Mindy Athas weighs in on apples. Finding fresh, local and tasty ripe apples in the fall is easy. May some apple wisdom fall upon your head. Apple Appeal: Part of the rose family and related to plums, peaches and almonds, apples are one of the oldest and most widely cultivated tree fruits. Originating in Asia and later in Europe, apple trees were brought to North America by colonists in the 17th century (the only native versions are crab apples)

At Apple's big news conference to introduce the iPad Mini , the company also showed off changes to its iBooks app. The new version, available as a free download, will allow continuous scrolling of books, as an alternative to page-turning -- a computer-age shift in the reading experience. Standard page-turning was somehow comforting, as though deep inside the computer a book lived. So I'm not sure how much I'll like the scrolling feature. Will it seem too much like the reading I do at work?