Blog Posts

sharing freely as an investment

Shaun Inman just retweeted a very concise and insightful description by Lauren Isaacson, on why she shares stuff:

it gets better

More awesomeness at the It Gets Better Project

Aperture's Browser view fails with tiny thumbnails

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:

iPhone camera request

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.

four chords

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 :-)

ride a bike

On the purpose of reform movements

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:

San Francisco after the fire

After being mesmerized by the film shot from a streetcar along Market Street in San Francisco before The Big One, here’s some footage shot shortly after the earthquake and fire that devastated the city. Via Jason Kottke, who Viad devour.

stopping splogs - the nuclear option

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.

no ridiculous car trips

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…

Google's creepy invasion

From Google’s CEO: ‘The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists’ - Derek Thompson - Technology - The Atlantic:

>“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.
>
>At the same time, Schmidt envisions a future where we embrace a larger role for machines and technology. “With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches,” he said. “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less now what you’re thinking about.”

journalism in the age of data

via a tweet from Clarence Fisher, this interesting documentary on data visualization and journalism. I’m wondering how the concepts translate into other fields…