January 22, 2014
Written by Dave Mark
Where do the ethical obligations of journalism kick in? If you are a blogger, does that make you a journalist? Do you have an obligation to double-check your sources to verify the accuracy of everything you post?
Julie Strietelmeier, a self-professed “tech geek writer” got an email from a reader, telling a story that started when a friend wore his Google Glass into a movie theater (they were prescription lenses) and detailed his detainment by homeland security. Follow the headline link and read the story. It’s worth it.
The details of the story aside (it really is a chilling read), there are two things that really jumped out me.
As this post already asked, what obligations did the writer have before posting the story online? Lots of bloggers ran with it before Julie felt pressed to verify the details. In a sense, she was coerced into behaving like a journalist. I’m in a similar boat. I don’t have the resources to ferret out news stories. I read a lot, and post stories I find compelling, thought provoking, or just fun. When I can, I do some basic fact checking to make sure what I post passes my own internal truth detector, but I am more of a scientist than a journalist. My own sense of journalistic integrity comes from wanting to do a good job, wanting to get it right, not from any sort of official journalism-school training.
The second thing that stood out was the fact of wearing Google Glass into a movie theater. Some people might say, this is an obvious no-no. Google Glass can record video, and wearing it into a theater is asking for trouble. True. But get used to it. In some small number of years, the ability to record will be so incorporated into our clothing and our bodies, movie theaters will either have to close, or the movie industry will have to accept a certain level of piracy as a given.
January 21, 2014
Written by Shawn King
Gizmodo:
Can you spot the fakes? Hundreds of amazing images wash over our greedy eyeballs each and every day, clogging our Twitter timelines and Facebook feeds. Many of them are fakes, lies, or both. Like these!
I’m seeing more and more of these being passed around Twitter. Even worse, being passed around by people who should know better.
Written by Dave Mark
Backup service Backblaze answers the question, “Which hard drive should I buy?”
Imagine all the effort it took to create these instruments, to get them tuned just so. Bravo!
Written by Dave Mark
Pretty cool little story.
On February 4, 1968, Lizzie Bravo was quite possibly the most surprised human being on earth. It seemed like another routine “waiting to see the Beatles” day, when all of a sudden Paul McCartney emerged and walked toward the group of thrilled young ladies. Paul asked the assembled female fans if any of them could hold a high note.
Lizzie, and another groupie named Gayleen Pease, quickly volunteered. As the other girls watched in disbelief, Lizzie and Gayleen were taken inside Abbey Road studios. The girls’ fantasy of fantasies was about to come true- they were not only going to see and meet the Beatles, they were going to sing on a Beatles song!
I love a good ad. This one is all about the car chase. Obviously scripted, a cracking good spot nonetheless.
I just spent the last three days in New York. Walking in mid-town, I encountered something that really threw me for a loop. I saw an actual, real-life Toynbee Tile.
From the Toynbee Tile Wikipedia page:
The Toynbee tiles (also called Toynbee plaques) are messages of unknown origin found embedded in asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American capitals.[1][2] Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They are generally about the size of an American license plate (roughly 30 cm by 15 cm), but sometimes considerably larger. They contain some variation on the following inscription:
TOYNBEE IDEA
IN MOViE `2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER
Some of the more elaborate tiles also feature cryptic political statements or exhort readers to create and install similar tiles of their own. The material used for making the tiles was long a mystery, but evidence has emerged that they may be primarily made of layers of linoleum and asphalt crack-filling compound.
The tiles appear overnight and no one knows who puts them in the street. They are a true mystery. Here’s a picture of the one I found:
As you can see in the picture (click on it for an embiggered version), the tiles are actually embedded in the asphalt. Astonishing. There’s actually a documentary on the Toynbee Tiles, called Resurrect Dead. The trailer for it is below. I want to believe!
Written by Dave Mark
This infographic traces the road less traveled, threading together the hidden internet, the TOR browser, and BitCoin.
January 20, 2014
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Matt Gemmell:
So I’m going to try this. Maybe it’s foolish, and from a commercial point of view it certainly looks that way, but I must try. As of this moment, I’m no longer developing software, either for myself or for others. I’m writing full-time.
Matt is one of the few writers on the Internet that I truly enjoy reading. I’m really looking forward to reading more.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
I agree with most of what Kendra Gaines has to say about navigation bars. I don’t mind some controlled navigation1, whether in the sidebar or on the top of a site. I don’t believe that we’ve gone too minimal overall, because I think we’re giving users what they want—or maybe that’s what readers want access to—that’s the content. If you make readers jump through hoops to read your Web site, you’ve failed, regardless of the design element you’re talking about.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Nest CEO Tony Fadell:
“The data we collect is all about our products and improving them,” Fadell said, reiterating a statement he issued about the company’s smart thermostat and smart smoke detector following the announcement of the acquisition. “If there were ever any changes whatsoever, we will be sure to be transparent about it, number one, and number two, for you to opt in to it.”
I’m not convinced. Google’s recent changes to Google+ show they are an opt-out company and couldn’t care less about their users.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Great article from Harry McCracken detailing some of the people that said “Apple must…” do this or that.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Rene Ritchie wrote a great article on Google, and all large companies for that matter. I agree with everything he said, until this:
I value my privacy. I’m deeply concerned about who collects my data and how they use it. But I’m no more concerned about Google owning Nest than I am Nest existing in the first place.
The problem that I have is that Nest sold a product—we bought that product, used it and we’re satisfied with that transaction. With Google, the transaction is Google mining my data looking for information so they can show me the best advertisement.
With Google, I am the product.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
When the CEOs of Apple and Samsung, accompanied by several in-house lawyers, meet for their (court-requested) settlement negotiations on or before February 19, there will probably be flexibility on both sides relating to the billions of dollars in license fees that may change hands, but if Samsung wants a deal, it will have to accept, as HTC did before it, an anti-cloning provision that would allow Apple to still bring lawsuits if Samsung’s products resembled Apple’s offerings too closely in ways that could actually be avoided by means of designarounds.
Good. There is no sense in going through all of this only to have Samsung copy the next thing Apple comes out with.
I saw this on Huffington Post. It is truly incredible how powerful our devices are these days.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Good article from Alicia Katz Pollock—it might be one of those articles you bookmark just in case.
This is a nice ad, I wonder where they came up with the idea…
Oh yeah, here it is.
A few days ago, I posted about two students at Yale (Harry Yu and Peter Xu) who built a student course selection web site that was far superior to any of the official tools offered by Yale. Yale shut them down.
On Friday, Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College, posted an official response to the controversy.
This past week, students in Yale College lost access to YBB+ because its developers, although acting with good intentions, used university resources without permission and violated the acceptable use policy that applies to all members of the Yale community. The timing for its users could not have been worse: over 1,000 of them had uploaded worksheets during the course selection period and relied on those worksheets to design their course schedules. And the means for shutting down the site immediately — by blocking it — led to charges that the university was suppressing free speech.
Free speech defines Yale’s community; the people who belong to it understand that they are entitled to share their views just as they must tolerate the views of others, no matter how offensive. The right to free speech, however, does not entitle anyone to appropriate university resources. In the case of YBB+, developers were unaware that they were not only violating the appropriate use policy but also breaching the trust the faculty had put in the college to act as stewards of their teaching evaluations. Those evaluations, whose primary purpose is to inform instructors how to improve their teaching, became available to students only in recent years and with the understanding that the information they made available to students would appear only as it currently appears on Yale’s sites — in its entirety.
Members of the YCDO and the University Registrar met this week with the developers, and to good end: the developers learned more about the underlying problems with using data without permission, the importance of communicating in advance with the university on projects that require approval and cooperation, and some of the existing mechanisms for collaborating with the university, among them the Yale College Council. Administrators, for their part, heard more about the demand for better tools and guidelines for the growing number of student developers, the need for a better approach to students who violate the acceptable use policy — in most cases unwittingly — and the value students place on information contained in teaching evaluations. All parties agreed to work toward a positive outcome, and they remain in conversation with each other to that end.
We have not yet seen a public response to this post from Xu and Yu. What has emerged, however, is a surprising response from another Yale student, Sean Haufler. (H/T to Clay Andres)
Sean built a Chrome extension called Banned Bluebook to replace the banned functionality. From Sean’s blog post:
I built a Chrome Extension called Banned Bluebook. It modifies the Chrome browser to add CourseTable’s functionality to Yale’s official course selection website, showing the course’s average rating and workload next to each search result. It also allows students to sort these courses by rating and workload. This is the original site, and this is the site with Banned Bluebook enabled (this demo uses randomly generated rating values).
Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don’t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale’s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It’s 100% kosher.
It is well worth reading Sean’s post to follow his logic. I hope Dean Miller takes the same reasoned tack with Sean as she did with Harry Yu and Peter Xu. This can still end well for all parties. Seems to me there’s a great combination of lessons learned by all and, most importantly, a better course evaluation and selection process for Yale students.
January 18, 2014
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Peter Cohen:
The Mac mini is overdue for a major refresh. It’s been well more than a year, and it’s been several years since the Mac mini had any significant work done to it. That’s got me thinking about what Apple could do it and probably should do to it.
It will certainly be interesting to see what Apple does with the Mac mini. Clearly, Apple’s interest has been with the iPhone and iPad, as well as the MacBooks and Mac Pro in recent years.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
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Written by Jim Dalrymple
Sam Rijver:
I’m using quite a few iHealth products to measure a few things regarding my health. I have measurements of my blood pressure, blood-oxigen levels, weight, activity and sleep patterns and more. I do this because it’s useful information I can use to monitor my own health. More importantly I can (choose to) provide this information to my physician during my yearly check-up. I have yearly check-ups due to heart disease running in the family and with the iHealth products I can provide a great amount of data points for about 80% of the tests they run on such a check. It’s great. It’s useful. It’s also scaring the crap out of me that Google might go out and buy the company for an insane amount of money. I just can’t shake the feeling that if that happens I would feel worried about the implications of Google getting their hands on that kind of data.
For me, all of this commentary comes back to simple point: people don’t trust Google. Eventually that has to come back and bite them in the ass.
Written by Dave Mark
Not perfect. I struggled to get some features to work. But I definitely had myself a fond walk down memory lane. Enjoy!
Back in September, 1975, Pink Floyd released the album Wish You Were Here. My brother and I have always loved that album and it often comes up in our musical conversations.
Yesterday, my brother sent me a photo of Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of the band who supposedly suffered from a crippling mental illness combined with drug addiction. After penning some of the bands earliest successes, Syd left the band in April 1968. He meant a tremendous amount to the band and they missed him. He was their primary voice and they had to reinvent themselves after he left.
Wish You Were Here was an emotional reaching out to Barrett. This video tells the story of the creation of the album. About 53 minutes in, you’ll hear the story of Barrett’s return. If you don’t have the bandwidth to watch the whole video, jump there and watch for about 5 minutes and you’ll see the picture that Stu sent me.
If you are a fan of Pink Floyd, I think you’ll really enjoy this.
January 17, 2014
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Everyone has their favorite DAW to work in, and most people are very attached to their workstation of choice, but eventually there comes a time when it becomes necessary to transfer the individual elements of a project to a different program.
Transferring projects has always been problematic, but there’s some good tips here.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
I kind of like the default look of Logic Pro Pro X, but if you want a different look, the modding community has been hard at work.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
That’s quite a headline from Consumer Reports. And the FTC goes after Apple.
