Cloudiness » Found

American Censorship Day: Nov 16, 2011

Art — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:54:49 +0000

“Today, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system. [...] The government can order service providers to block websites for infringing links posted by any users. It becomes a felony with a potential 5 year sentence to stream a copyrighted work that would cost more than $2,500 to license, even if you are a totally noncommercial user, e.g. singing a pop song on Facebook. Thousands of sites that are legal under the DMCA would face new legal threats. People trying to keep the internet more secure wouldn’t be able to rely on the integrity of the DNS system.”

The improbability of persecuting trivial crimes is not the point. The opportunity to provide any mechanism for third parties to summarily censor and sentence others is the definition of vigilante law, and it is bad.

How did WordPress win?

Art — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:26:53 +0000

An extended post by a former product manager for Movable Type, comparing the fortunes of Six Apart and WordPress. Some interesting business insights, for example, in how WP made gains in the corporate blogging world, a realm that usually doesn’t seem relevant to the livelihood of blogging software companies. Turns out it is.

Bonus: In a footnote, there’s an interesting bit of gossip about the Huffington Post and Movable Type.

U.S. to Host World Press Freedom Day in 2011

Art — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:19:06 +0000

The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

Except when inconvenient to oneself.

Get Automator working again in iTunes 10

Art — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:25:49 +0000

Macs have a wonderful system-wide scripting tool with a GUI interface called Automator. Many people use Automator to take care of repetitive tasks involving iTunes.

iTunes 10, the latest version, breaks Automator for a trivial reason: Automator checks to make sure that iTunes is new enough to be compatible. So it looks for version 4.6 or later. iTunes is at version 10. Even though the number 10 is larger than the number 4.6, some part of Automator is treating “10″ and “4.6″ as text. Since when treated as text, “10″ comes before “4.6″ for the same reason “ant” is before “bee”; the leftmost characters are compared; if they are equivalent, then the second-leftmost are compared, and so on; “1″ is before “4″, so the comparison algorithm halts there. Automator considers the latest version of iTunes too old.

Anyway, the title links to an article about how to fix the problem. It involves hacking some XML files. If you’re not comfortable with that, you should probably wait for Apple to issue a system update. And you should probably notice that this indicates how few people within Apple can be arsed to use Automator unless required to.

There is a Horse in the Apple Store

Art — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 01:18:08 +0000

Around these parts, there are always ponies in Apple Stores. I don’t know about where you live. Sure, I’m jaded but every so often I snap out of it and, hey, yeah. Wow.

Jailbreak Responsibly

Art — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 03:23:37 +0000

A neatly concise, even-handed summary about jailbreaking an iPhone, covering both the advantages and disadvantages, free of axegrinding. This would be the tl;dr version of anything I could say on the matter, if I were to jailbreak my iPhone, which I probably won’t. [via Tom Boutell]

RIP Harvey Pekar

Art — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:02:12 +0000

Pekar was, as the cliche goes, a complex man of contradictions. Famed for his self-portrait as a cranky, anonymous everyman. Widely-respected as a legitimizer of comics and pioneer in autobiographical comics, all of which he made in collaboration with a variety of artists. Pekar was one of the standard-bearers of the blue-collar intelligentsia, which has a long low-key tradition in America and especially in the Rust Belt where he spent his life. Fans of his comics are probably not aware of the many essays and reviews he’d written about music, politics, and literature, while his literary readers probably considered his comics a quirky attention-getting sideline, at best. He’s missed already.

Smokescreen

Art — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:44:33 +0000

Interprets Flash files entirely in Javascript. Not only a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, but also because it’s primarily one person’s work. One of a couple similar projects I’m aware of, but this one seems to have the most traction.

It’s also interesting to speculate why Adobe isn’t attempting anything like this, or why they’re so closed-lipped about it if they are.

Windows Phone 7 Series

Art — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:08:08 +0000

Very pretty and pleasing to look at, but why can’t it show me today’s date entirely? Aggressive styling becomes a low-grade irritation when routine information is obfuscated, even where the full message is easy to guess.

(Update: Luke Wroblewski considers this in more detail, via Daring Fireball)

IPhone frenzy in the mini-sausages…

Art — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:18:41 +0000

The iPhone’s touch screen works by conducting a small electronic charge through your fingertip; most gloves that are effective insulators from the cold are also pretty good at electrical isolation, so you have to take your glove off and your hand gets cold.

South Koreans have solved the cold-weather iPhone problem: Buy a particular brand of mini sausage that’s approximately the same shape and conductivity of a human finger.

Clusterflock has a concise summary of the iPhone sausage finger. The Google-translated article leaves us with this thought: “Maekseubong tagitcheung and this just fits the iPhone user base, while the poisonous celebrity, Max is on the stick.”