crackblur by corey menscher

Knight News Challenge: Water Canary

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:58:27 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

To provide with the world a crowd-sourced first alert system for identifying unsafe water conditions in real-time.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

No appropriate sensors exist for measuring…

Findings Blog: How We Will Read: Steven Johnson

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:00:05 -0500

Findings Blog: How We Will Read: Steven Johnson:

fndgs:

Reading. It’s a simple act. You’re doing it right now. You probably read something off of billboards, screens, and packages hundreds of times throughout the course of a single day. Can something so fundamental really be changing?

Here at Findings, we believe it is. We engage in conversations with…

Findings Blog: You can now enter book quotes manually!

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:59:26 -0500

Findings Blog: You can now enter book quotes manually!:

fndgs:

As part of our effort to bridge the physical and digital print worlds, we are proud to announce our newest and most-requested feature…manual clip entry for printed books!

When you go to your Findings page (click the “Findings” link at the top when you’re logged in), you’ll now see a button next…

curiositycounts: Central Park (Listen to the Light) – ingenious...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:37:14 -0500

curiositycounts:

Central Park (Listen to the Light) – ingenious new location-aware app-slash-album by BLUEBRAIN

test

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:01:05 -0500

test

Photo

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:15:53 -0500

"At its core, Findings is a service that allows you to capture, store, search, and share small..."

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:44:00 -0400

“At its core, Findings is a service that allows you to capture, store, search, and share small snippets of text from eBooks and web pages. It integrates Kindle highlights and web clippings (with more input options to come.) And it gives you the ability to share those quotes with your peers, as well as follow other people’s quotes through your timeline.”

- stevenberlinjohnson.com: Introducing Findings (via Findings.com)

"early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into..."

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:56:28 -0400

“early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.”

- The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton (via Findings.com)

"A message had seemed to be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed..."

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:24:18 -0400

“A message had seemed to be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed consciously to divorce their conception of the message from the paper on which it was written. Scientists, Harper’s explained, will say that the electric current “carries a message,” but one must not imagine that anything—any thing—is transported. There is only “the action and reaction of an imponderable force,”

- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (via Findings.com)

Apple's Three Laws of Developers

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 22:53:11 -0400

yourhead:

A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.

A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

— I. Developer

iwdrm: “On the other side of the screen, it all looks so...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:57:22 -0400

iwdrm:

“On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.”

Tron (1982)

"Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they..."

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:13:40 -0400

“Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they carry your heart with them. The exact phrase was, “It’s your heart running around outside your body.” That’s a Steve Jobs quote. He had a level of perception about feelings and emotions that was far beyond anything I’ve met in my entire life. His legacy will last for many years, through people he’s trained and people he’s influenced. But what death means is you can’t call—you can’t call him. It’s a loss. I’ll miss talking to him.”

- Eric Schmidt on Steve Jobs - BusinessWeek (via Findings.com)

"Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the..."

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:08:25 -0400

“Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!”

- Ghost Busters (1984) - Memorable quotes (via Findings.com)

Occupy Wall Street - Analysis by Felipe Ribeiro

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:47:51 -0400

ITP Alum and all around smart guy Felipe Ribeiro wrote this interesting analysis and observation of the Occcupy Wall Street protests…

My impression of occupy wall street, having hung out there for the first time tonight, from about 6:15pm to about 9:30pm:

Anyone who is interested in emergent/meta anything (software development, feedback systems of any kind, consciousness, system theory), democracy/open source/ transparency or good governance in any sense would do well to spend time down there and see how things happen. I especially urge you to check out the General Assembly, I caught the one at 7pm tonight and was impressed by what I saw. There was an overt concern to represent “marginalized” voices, preferences were explicitly given to those who hadn’t spoken previously, and those who pertained to groups historically excluded from public discourse. To get around not having permits for amplified sound, they employed a system whereby the crowd repeated what was originally said, thereby allowing for an inclusive conversation with between 100-150 people, *without amplification*. This was extremely impressive, especially since this system was one that has been used in similar people’s councils in Spain and Greece (if a random dude near me is to be believed, haha). In essence, *ANYONE*, and I mean anyone, could speak, and many did. Being that they’ve been set up for over two weeks, they’ve got a system down for weeding stuff that didn’t fit the particular topic for that moment. I heard lucid and not so lucid commentary, but what surprised me the most was the willingness of people to sit outside on the concrete floor and abide by these rules in order to legitimate the outcome of what was discussed, and that everyone who wanted to speak got their turn. It’s democracy, figuring itself out in real time. Pretty rad.

To wrap - If you care about politics or otherwise think the system, writ large is, *at best*, suspect; meaning just about everything coming from both democrats and republicans is merely political theatre and will *never* truly challenge a system that is largely about the conservation and consolidation of power, then head down there and check out what is happening, in person if possible. Site with calendar, etc:

www.occupywallst.org

Otherwise, live stream:

http://globalrevolution.tv/

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

Interesting tidbit:

I found out why they are allowed to hang out in a park in the financial district of Manhattan, where, without a permit (which they do not have, nor would they be granted one, given the city’s stance towards rowdy folk taking over public space) they would be immediately forcibly removed: Zuccotti Park (aka “Liberty Plaza”) is a private park, owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a major commercial real estate holding company. Why Brookfield is allowing them to stay is anyone’s guess, I have my money on the fact that the original Occupy Wall Street battle cry came from AdBusters, based out of Toronto, the same city Brookfield has their HQ. So I think there’s a relationship there. But that is strictly conjecture. Wikipedia says this on their entry (the veracity of which I have not looked into): “On Earth Day (April 22) 2010, BLJC was listed as one of Canada’s “The Green 30” Organizations Based On Eco-Friendly Programs and Practices [1] based on an employee poll.” So whether they sympathize independently or there is an Adbusters connection, the OWS movement exists in its current form only because the owners of that park allow them to remain. The fact is, if Brookfield changes their mind, NYPD can kick them out under penalty of arrest immediately. Ironic, that if it were a public park, they would be forced to fight their arrests in the courts on the basis of the first amendment (after the fact), while being a private park owned by a mega-powerful corporation, they are allowed to stay, presumably on a whim, but without having to encounter force. Did Brookfield lose money to Wall street financial firms in some way, and they love the negative attention this movement is generating towards Wall Street? I’d be curious to know exactly why Brookfield is allowing this event to exist on their property.

That’s my rambling analysis for now, tomorrow there may be more.

felipe

"A library is many things. It’s a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It’s a place to go if you..."

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:22:34 -0400

“A library is many things. It’s a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It’s a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books… A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your questions answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.”

- 26 years ago today, the world lost E. B. White – remember him with his poetic letter to children on the love of libraries

(via curiositycounts)

"And let’s remind ourselves why web applications are amazing things. They work cross browser because..."

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:11:00 -0400

“And let’s remind ourselves why web applications are amazing things. They work cross browser because they’re based on standards. You don’t need to update them. As a developer, you never need to worry about old versions that people won’t upgrade. They’re searchable and their content shows up in search engines, which do a far better job of figuring out what people mean than any app store hierarchy. Practically anyone can write them. And best of all, you can plug in multiple third party advertising, analytics, social connector, mashup, affiliate, etc. into your application trivially. While it’s true today that you need to wrap your Sencha Touch application in a native shell (such as PhoneGap) in order to get access to camera or accelerometer. But with the current industry trends, we don’t think this will be the case for too long.”

- Introducing Sencha Touch: HTML5 Framework for Mobile - Sencha - Blog

Infographic by The Big Picture

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:55:29 -0400

Infographic by The Big Picture

The Pre, one week on...

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 22:37:00 -0400

So, it’s been a week since I got the Palm Pre, and I promised some people I’d write about my impressions at this point. So here are some things that I’ve observed about the Pre and WebOS. Unlike last week, I’m gonna start with the annoyances this time:

1. Sluggish/Laggy - I wouldn’t exactly call the phone “snappy”. It sometimes gets hung up on scrolling through lists, and there have also been times while playing games that the phone would just freeze. (Mojo SDK games only…not the fancy OpenGL games with the new PDK.) This happens most when I’m on the subway, so I think it may be related to the phone finding and attempting to join a weak Verizon signal while moving underground. Perhaps that’s a testament to Verizon’s network, but it’s kind of annoying. A homebrew OS patch (more on that later) was recently released that will overclock the CPU…and supposed this helps a bit. It’s certainly something that can be overcome with future OS updates. (From what I understand, the phone’s GPU isn’t being used to render the OS, which puts a lot more burden on the CPU.)

2. Tiny screen - Tiny. Did I mention that it’s tiny? It has the same resolution as my iPhone, but damn is it noticeably smaller. I have decent eyesight, and there are times it’s just painful. How the webkit browser doesn’t have a menu option to adjust the font size is beyond me. Considering the hardware, I think it’s unconscionable that EVERY app doesn’t have the ability to adjust font size! (Tweed does, as does the fantastic ebook app pReader.)

3. No scrollbars. Anywhere. - I understand how this adds a minute amount of screen real estate, but it’s a bit odd to not know where you are on a page in an app. It’s no dealbreaker, it just feels kinda weird.

4. Contact suggestions - Contact searching is a bit unwieldy. I wish the phone were more aware of the type of contact details I want in an app so that I won’t get IM contact data in, say, the email app when it’s popping up suggestions.

But there are some good things as well…

1. Verizon - Oh my God. 3G everywhere. No dropped calls. 5 bars in places I used to never get a single bar. Case in point: we went to the Natural History Museum today to meet some friends. If you don’t know, the AMNH is crazy on the weekends, so finding people can be difficult. My wife was doing all the coordinating with our friends, but once we got inside her iPhone was useless. No signal at all. Fortunately for us I had five full bars on my Pre. We called our friends and found them in no time. And this relates to what I’ve found about the Pre overall…as a communication device, it blows the iPhone out of the water. And I don’t just mean call signal and quality. (Although my wife has told me that I don’t sound nearly “as far away” as I used to on calls.) It’s a bunch of things. WebOS allows you to add contacts directly to the launcher…which means you can access a page of your most-used contacts and initiate a call/email/sms from anywhere. The messaging app is great…I’m actually using IM on my phone! I’ve NEVER used it on my phone…but it’s just so easy. The email client, as I mentioned before, is pretty nice too. The unified inbox works well, but I really like the email notifications in the notification tray. I can see the basics about new email messages without having to open the mail client (or even unlocking the phone). In terms of communicating, WebOS just gets out of my way far better than the iPhone ever did. It tried, but feebly. App notifications were too obtrusive, and don’t get me started on the icon badges. (Hey there’s a “3” on the email icon! Uhh…I guess that means I have 3 unread emails in my “primary” account. What about my other, equally important, accounts?)

2. Battery Life - So far the battery life has about the same as iPhone. I bought a higher capacity battery online, and the first day I had issues where it seemed to be dropping 1% per minute, but after a few charges the battery is performing admirably. Now, I can’t say I’m terribly happy that the battery life is the same as my iPhone because I was never really able to get through an entire day (8 hrs) without having to recharge. The plus side, however, is that now I have TWO batteries, and I can keep a spare in my bag. Advantage: Pre.

3. Media sharing - I can finally upload photos and videos directly to YouTube & Facebook without having to launch their apps. I don’t know if this is possible with an iPhone 3GS, but it’s new to me! Also, the camera has a flash. That’s handy.

4. Homebrew apps - OK this is a biggie. There is a pretty vibrant homebrew app community, which is nice. Many of the official apps via the Palm app channel started as homebrew. From what I understand, Palm is actually OK with the homebrew community! I only wish there was a working commandline Terminal. (There’s one, but it’s been broken since the last OS update). In addition to applications, the homebrew community provides a series of OS patches that essentially let you make changes to core OS features. I’ve installed 18 patches, giving me features such as adding more apps per-page, adding the date to the time in the OS title bar, changing the carrier text (“Verizon Wireles”) to the current wifi SSID if connected, a bunch of browser tweaks (no auto-refresh, fullscreen, etc.), a character counting bubble in the messaging, and many more. In all there are more than 260 available patches. To get anywhere near this kind of configurability on the iPhone you’d have to jailbreak it.

5. Ease of development - Along the lines of homebrew, I’ve found that developing apps for the phone is really easy. I haven’t created a full-fledged app yet, but I will. What’s great about it is that unlike the iPhone SDK, there’s no annoying-as-hell certificate system that takes 10 yrs to figure out and can keep you from testing on actual hardware. You also don’t have to pay $99 a year for the privilege to do so. (OpenSource app devs will always be free, Palm is waiving the $99 fee for the foreseeable future to spur development.) Additionally, as a developer you can give your beta app to as many users as are willing to install and test it, which is huge…and again you don’t have to go through Palm to do this if you don’t want. Of all the mobile OSes, Palm seems to be the most adult about the whole thing…they realize that users who are willing to get apps from outside the official channel know the risks and are perfectly capable of making the decision whether to install an app on their own damn phone.

At this point I’m still leaning towards keeping the phone. If anything, I’ve learned that picking a phone is all about priorities and tradeoffs. With the iPhone, I sacrificed a good telecom network and communicator experience for a large app library and tight OSX integration. With the Pre it seems I’ll be sacrificing the huge app ecosystem for a better communications experience.

Jumping Ship

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:37:00 -0400

I’ve been getting a lot of heat about my decision to switch from an iPhone to a “dead” platform in Palm’s WebOS and the Pre Plus on Verizon. I looked at it as a leap of faith. I’m fully aware Palm has its back to the ropes, and that the prevailing wisdom is that while WebOS is a nice product, Palm didn’t execute properly and is therefore dead in the water. Regardless of all the prognostication, I was so intrigued by WebOS I felt compelled to at least give Palm a chance. 24 hours into the switch, I’m so far glad I did. This isn’t cognitive dissonance talking…there are some concrete benefits I’m downright giddy about. Here are some of my observations from one day of WebOS use:

1. Multiple App “Cards” - Now that browser tabs are ubiquitous, it seems inconceivable for most people to live without them. Yet somehow we consider an equally constricting environment as “the best” in the iPhone. With the Pre I can launch an app and quickly switch back to something else while I wait for it to load…or to simply let it just hang out. Wow. What a complete shift from the imprisoning iPhone system of one-app-at-a-time. I quickly got used to the ability to launch an app, leave it running, and launch another. Leaving apps running gives me the ability to get notifications from them, but also to switch around at will. For example, we went to the museum today with some friends and I left the Camera app up but not active. When I wanted to take a shot, I unlocked the phone and just switched to the open Camera app. As Steve Jobs would say…Boom! Picture taken. On my iPhone that process would have taken at least three times as long. This type of interaction is so smooth and obvious that when I went back to using my iPhone for a bit I found myself primed to switch to another running app…but then remembered that this was an iPhone was dealing with!

2. The notification tray - Leaving apps up lets them give me notifications and alerts in the WebOS notification tray…which is always present. If I leave Tweed running (a really nice Twitter client on WebOS), I can get unobtrusive notifications when I have new tweets (in my home feed, mentions, or direct messages…or any combination of all three). On my iPhone I had to either let a Twitter client send me popup notifications (assuming there are iPhone Twitter apps that will do this), or I could let Twitter send me an SMS when a Tweet was sent. Either way was considerably more obtrusive since iPhone notifications completely obscure a large portion of the screen. (Don’t get me started on the inability to hang up a call until you close one or more SMS popups on the iPhone.)

3. Unified Inbox - One nice thing about GMail and Mail.app on OSX is the ability to view all of your incoming email messages within a single inbox. The iPhone, however, forces you to check each inbox individually. What’s worse, navigating between inboxes requires no less than four clicks…and that’s not including the disruption of having to quit your current app to launch the Mail app to begin with. The Pre, however, gives you an “All Inboxes” list, just like GMail and Mail.app. Ahhhhh.

4. The physical keyboard - Yes, the Pre’s keyboard is tiny. It’s no Blackberry. But I’m already faster and more accurate on it than my iPhone, and I don’t have to worry about the message “We’ll meet you at the corner of Waverly and University.” being sent as “We’ll Meer you at the circle of Eagerly and University.”

5. Touchstone charger - I’ve had an iPod since Apple incorporated a Firewire jack for charging and syncing. Ever since they switched to the dock connector, I’ve hated virtually every iPod dock I’ve owned. Not a single one was usable without looking at it or feeling around for the right position. I have an iPhone dock next to my bed for the times when I read in the dark and want to charge it overnight and I have never been able to just reach over and place it in the dock without considerable finagling. The contactless Touchstone charger, by contrast, is a freakin’ DREAM. It’s so elegant…the phone just snaps into place on the surface via magnets. (It’s like Apple’s MagSafe power cord on macbooks, but better.) And Palm even let’s you keep the display up while it’s charging so you have a clock and notifications. My iPhone was never really able to do that without an app that kept the phone from sleeping. (Which was dangerous if you WEREN’T charging!) It’s even smart enough to go ahead and pick up a ringing call when you gently lift it off the charger. You can also charge it in portrait OR landscape orientation so you can read/watch videos while charging. Smooooooth.

OK, so all isn’t perfect in la-la land. The app store, while not paltry, is clearly filled with crappy applications. There’s no Instapaper clone, which is gonna hurt. And I’ve run into a couple of “Can’t do that right now” errors when I try to view app details…which required a second or third attempt to go through. There are some definite app gems, though. (I very much like the Twitter client Tweed, and I actually like the Foursquare app better than the iPhone one.) Still, I find myself wishing for more…

1. Small screen - the Pre’s screen is quite vibrant, and is the same resolution as the iPhone 3G. Yet it’s smaller by a couple of tenths of an inch. This is not insignificant. The result is harder-to-read text. It’s not illegible, but it’s definitely noticeable. You can compensate in some apps by increasing the font size, but this has the effect of reducing the available resolution, which isn’t good. Additionally, the notification tray can take a chunk of space from the bottom, reducing usable space even more.

2. No compass - the Pre Plus uses virtually the same hardware as a 16gb iPhone 3GS, with one exception. It has no compass. This certainly isn’t a dealbreaker, but some of the cooler/cutting edge a applications use the compass for “Augmented Reality”…which is not an option on the Palm Pre. Additionally, I would LOVE to have an app like Android’s Google Sky Map. This application uses the GPS, accelerometer, and compass to determine your location and the phone’s orientation to display an annotated map of the sky as you hold it over your head. To me, it’s close to magic…but I’ll have to forego having such a luxury until at least my next phone.

So that’s it so far. I could also give honorable mention to WebOS’s music player (which is way better than Android’s but not quite the iPod) and the ability to selectively toggle bluetooth and wifi from the title bar (both are buried in the separate “Settings” app on the iPhone). I’m anticipating getting to know the phone better so I can accurately speak about battery life, other hardware issues (micro-usb?), and syncing calendars and contacts.

The pale blue fuzz of readership > Robin Sloan

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:04:17 -0500

The pale blue fuzz of readership > Robin Sloan:

Although reading has been moving away from paper for several years, the only real advantage digital technology has had is over distribution of content.

But things get exciting when people utilize the processors of digital devices to change and measure the experience of reading. Robin Sloan has posted a fascinating visualization of how readers scroll through his short story The Truth About the East Wind over time. I don’t know that this type of metric provides much utility in terms of marketing content, but Robin’s observation how each line in the graph is a story unto itself really grabbed me.