A great article by David Wong, thinking through some of the implications of digital distribution and copyright. Published in that champion of futurism and deep thinking: Cracked.com
> If you want to know what the future looks like, there it is. The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free. > > Some of you think I’m about to talk about file sharing and DRM and the evil record labels. But that’s just a teaser of what’s coming. The world has changed. All the rules we were trained to believe about society from birth until now are about to go out the window.
Aperture’s pretty handy at managing a bunch of photos into projects etc… I just merged a few projects into a new überproject with sub-albums, and thought I’d broken something. For a minute, I was afraid all of the photo metadata was gone:
GAH! Version N…Oh NOES!
Turns out, I’d just cranked the thumbnail size way down, and the labelling code kind of barfs on that, displaying the first few characters of the redundant “Version Name:” label before each actual version name. Here’s the same view with embiggened thumbnails:
The iPhone camera is good, and especially so in the latest iPhone4 incarnation.
But, the software shutter button sucks. A lot. It works well enough when you’re staring into the LCD, but many of the shots I take are without looking at the screen. Meaning it’s difficult to hit the shutter button without messing up composition.
In a perfect world, I’d be able to use one of the hardware buttons as a shutter release. Failing that, a larger click target would be nice. I regularly accidentally flip into video mode, or switch to the front camera, or open the photo library, when fumbling to hit the button. The handy (and free) GorillaCam app handles this nicely (and offers some other great features, too), but the native camera app should be a bit more friendly to actually taking pictures in the field.
I mentioned on Twitter that I still suck pretty badly at playing my guitar. Scott suggested that I only need to know 2 chords. 2? hah! I know 4! So, Alan pointed out that all you NEED is 4 chords.
If the 4 chords I know are the right 4 chords, I may be ready to start touring. Except for the rest of the whole I-still-suck-at-playing thing. But at least I’m having fun :-)
I’m reading The Whale and the Reactor, from the Beyond McLuhan reading list. Some really interesting stuff (including coincidentally reading the passage describing Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog at the exact moment that Brian Lamb was listening to him speak in person).
Part 2 of the book delves into reform and revolution, primarily describing movements in the 1960s and 70s. It got me thinking about parallels to contemporary educational reform movements, specifically about the purpose of the reform movements themselves. Perhaps more on that later, but for now, this gem by Langdon Winner:
I’ve been battling sploggers on UCalgaryBlogs continually. I just finished marking about 50 users/blogs as spam - that’s since yesterday afternoon. I could easily stop the problem outright by requiring people to use an @ucalgary.ca email address to create a site, but that goes against the possibility of anonymity, and many (most!) students don’t use their campus email addresses.
I currently run Bad Behavior, as well as ReCaptcha. They stop the automated splog creation scripts, but there seem to be a LOT of people employed around the world to manually enter forms in order to get around captcha and anti-spam/splog techniques.
I’m guilty of a few of these ridiculous car trips - driving the 1.5km to the local grocery store when I don’t feel like schlepping there on the bike. I’m going to try cutting that down a bit…
