Andrew Currie

I’ve just finished reading No Safe Harbor, an excellent collection of essays by the United States Pirate Party. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was a United States Pirate Party until I found out about this book.

Available for free in a variety of electronic formats, or as a physical volume from Amazon.com, No Safe Harbor features essays from the likes of Cory Doctorow, Rick Falvinge, Lawrence Lessig and some outfit that calls itself The United Nations. My personal favourite is Falkvinge’s piece on the history of copyright — I now know it made its unlikely debut in the 16th century at the behest of Queen Mary I of England, for the express purpose of quashing criticism of the Catholic Church:

She devised a monopoly where the London printing guild would get a complete monopoly on all printing in England, in exchange for her censors determining what was fit to print beforehand. It was a very lucrative monopoly for the guild, who would be working hard to maintain the monopoly and the favor of the Queen’s censors. This merger of corporate and governmental powers turned out to be effective in suppressing free speech and political-religious dissent.
The monopoly was awarded to the London Company of Stationers on May 4, 1557. It was called copyright.

If this doesn’t float your boat there are nineteen other chapters, on topics ranging from self-publishing for authors (like me) to the forward-thinking idea of fluid democracy.

Last week plans for No Safe Harbor 2 were announced, for release later this year. This time around they’re seeking submissions from Pirate Party members around the world. If you’re a member, keep an eye on the book’s companion blog; more details to come!

[left to right: Jonathan Zittrain, Scott Rosenberg, Tim Wu, Evgenie Morozov, some yutz...]

So the bad news is that my publishing schedule here — previously every weekday, currently every week — is going to be disrupted once again. The good news is that I’m writing a book!

My new year’s resolution for 2012 is to try my hand at long-form writing. Considering that a book inspired this blog in the first place it kind of makes sense. My Phone Book is the working title for my first tome; as you might expect I’m writing it out in the open on a WordPress blog, and will offer it for free as an .epub file when it’s all edited and done.

As of this writing I’m already three chapters in, and I’m starting to find that with the podcast I do and the comedy troupe I direct, well… something has to give, at least for the moment. Let’s not call it the end, just a hiatus. I’ll still be posting relevant links to this site’s Identi.ca and Twitter accounts; if you’re not following me on either of those networks now would be a great time to do that.

WordPress has made a nice visual summary of Oa data for 2011; you can see it here. Some thanks are definitely in order to Ghabuntu, Jade Bryan Jardinico and Kevin Neely for their many and thoughtful comments. Thanks too, to Dennis Bournique of WAP Review; along with his comments he helped me get the mobile version of my site sorted out early on. I’m also quite thrilled that Kevin, along with Anthony Marco and Leo, wrote guest posts here. You should definitely check those out if you haven’t already.

And thanks, of course, to all my readers — ok, this is really starting to sound like a goodbye and it’s not, necessarily. I just need to focus on something else for a bit. I’m hoping that by removing any self-imposed posting schedule I’ll be free to write here whenever I please.

This particular endeavour was never about money for me. I’m proud to say that I’ve never had advertising on this site, only some Amazon Affiliate links for books and a Flattr button. My goal with Open attitude was to be taken more seriously as a blogger, and thanks to your feedback both here and around the web I’m satisfied that I’ve accomplished that.

And like I said I might well be back, I’m just not entirely sure when. So until my next post here (to borrow a phrase from The Linux Outlaws) stay free and stay open…

I’ll not mince words here; Evgenie Morozov has fundamentally changed how I see great swaths of the Internet. You might find that his scholarly text The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom belabours the same few arguments (I did), but they’re fairly compelling ones that you’ll not soon forget.

I came away from The Net Delusion in agreement on three major points:

1. Twibbons aren’t enough.

Right out of the gate Morozov sets to work on debunking Twitter’s overstated role in the Iranian protests of 2009. Long story short, while social media is a fantastic tool for organizing people around a cause, it’s whether or not those same people are willing to step away from their screens and actually do something that makes the difference.

As it was not so long ago I can remember the irrational exuberance with which Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location to Tehran. But last time I checked, that particular country was in the same sorry state as it was before Twitter made it a cause célèbre.

2. Social media is not the great liberator.

Here in the west we cry foul every time we hear about social media censorship in some far away place — not just oppressive regimes like Iran but also India and Thailand. Thing is, we see Facebook and Twitter as tools of democracy; they see it, perhaps more clearly, as a commercial service with a decidedly U.S. agenda.

We cyber-utopians, as Morozov dubs us, need to understand and appreciate that (1) other countries have their own domestic social networks that do quite well, thanks very much, and (2) that cultures around the world are just plain different. An example of the latter that maybe hits closer to home is something I remember from Adam Cohen’s The Perfect Store — specifically, eBay’s troubles when they started up in the U.K.; more stringent defamation laws there made user feedback a real problem for the company.

3. The Internet is not a dumb pipe; it’s a loaded weapon.

Before you raise your fist in the air and yell “right on!”, hear me out. What Morozov contends, and what I’m coming to grips with, is that the Internet is not a neutral space — but rather, like a cocked pistol, it’s as dangerous as the person with their finger on the trigger.

Consider that blogs and social media can be tools for propaganda and protest alike. In the same way that television makes everybody famous — giving equal time to Hollywood celebrities and  serial killers — truth, lies, even hate speech propagate the web with no discernible difference, at least on the surface. Thus dissenting voices under oppressive regimes can not only be effectively squelched; through clever manipulation of online content the conversation can be fundamentally changed.

And if all else fails the Internet can just be shut off altogether, as it was in Egypt this time last year.

Now don’t get me wrong — I still believe that our Internet, dangerous as it may be, is a wondrous thing. But Morozov has effectively shown me its limitations as a herald of western-style democracy. It can provide those in the west with a precious, candid peek at the plight of others. But it’s going to take more than a Twibbon to actually help them.

Today I’m reposting something from reddit in its entirety. You’ll see why soon enough. Like any good reddit thread there’s a lot of high-level discussion by some very smart and passionate people, so I urge you to check in on the original post after you’ve read this…

—

As a film student in early 2001, I was a juggernaut. I was making a lot of short films that were garnering moderate acclaim, and I was always pushing ahead, making bigger and bigger projects. For my senior thesis, I wanted to base it on a short story by Isaac Asimov, which was part of the compilation that made up the book “I, Robot”. Isaac had died a few years previous, but after a lot of badgering to the publishers, I was finally awarded with the home phone number of his wife, Janet.

I figured that the number I was given was just another publishing associate, so I dialed with thinly veiled skepticism. To my surprise, the voice that answered was a feeble, elderly woman. I struggled through my initial shock to explain that I was a student; I wanted to use her husband’s story as a basis for my project, and could I get her permission. She said that it sounded like fun, and gave me the number of the estate attorney, so I could get a written form that gave me the go-ahead. I called, I got permission, and they faxed the form to my professor’s office.

It’s important to note that the film was based on one of Asimov’s short stories, “Reason”, but was not a direct interpretation. It was not titled “I, Robot”, and barring the inclusion of the laws of robotics, was almost wholly original.

2 weeks later, 30 people showed up to help build sets, sew costumes, and make a little bit of history. Sadly, I let them all down.

In our last week of shooting, 3 months after I received written consent to use the short story, one of the crew brought in a copy of Variety, which mentioned that a major studio purchased the book rights to I, Robot, and planned to make a film. Initially, I thought, “Awesome – free promotion!” Alas, that’s not what was looming on the horizon.

Part of the project was to make posters, trailers, and a website for the film. We even went so far as to create our own production company, as to look professional. Somehow the legal team from the studio found out about a student project, in a small private college in the Midwest, with no budget, being shot in a warehouse basement, and decided to issue a cease and desist order. Basically, what that means, is that the studio’s lawyers said to us, “You’re using our property. Stop, or we’ll sue you into the stone age.” I responded by sending them the consent form from the Asimov estate, and explained that it was a student project, not a commercial venture worth litigating. I turned over our script, our shooting notes, our shot list, copies of our tapes and even the concept art drawings.

Instead of the letter recognizing our valiant efforts as students that I expected, I found myself on the tail end of a phone call that changed my life. I was contacted directly by the lead of the studio’s legal team, who explained my situation to me very clearly. He told me that I was technically in my legal right to use Isaac Asimov’s material. However, if I chose to proceed, they would file multiple lawsuits totaling over 2 million dollars against me. In the end, I might win, but it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to fight it, but would cost them nothing more than the salaries they already pay their lawyers. It would be 10 years before any type of verdict could be levied, and by then it wouldn’t matter what the outcome was, since their film would be long since released.

I was 22. I was working 2 jobs, making about $9 an hour, in addition to attending school. I had taken out every student loan I could get to finance my film, which totaled about $10,000 in debt. I had spent my last dollar to buy breakfast for the crew on the last day of shooting. I was properly fucked. I caved.

In the end, my professors had sympathy on me. They had visited the set, seen the dailies, and recognized my talent and dedication. I graduated with honors, without ever turning in a senior thesis project. I guess that they assumed I had learned the most valuable of all life lessons.

Looking back, I can recognize that the lawyers were only doing their job; I was only worth a couple of hours of an intern’s time, and a 10 minute phone call. To me, they completely pulled the rug out from underneath the career that I’d been trying to carve out for myself. Without a thesis project, I wasn’t equipped to apply to grad schools, and by the time I’d recuperated from the costs I’d incurred, I’d already been forced to accept a different career path, and rearranged my life to fit. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a fairly successful career designing web sites for major entities, and I make a decent living. I was willing to pick up and start over, but I can’t help but harbor resentment for having my wings clipped so early, and so unjustly.

It’s been ten years since this all went down, and even though I want to share my film, show my work and risk the consequences, I cannot. As my wife reminded me, we have a home, careers and our livelihoods. I’m not just putting myself in harm’s way, but her as well, and that’s not a fair sacrifice regardless of the honest intentions. Please note that I don’t condone any illegal activity of any sort.

My story is not unique, nor is it very interesting. I’m one of many that have had a short end of the stick handed to them by a big faceless monster, and I feel that it’s my right and responsibility to take that short bit and fight back – one download at a time.

I’m forced to watch the studios systematically destroy the art of film. One download at a time.

I defy the system in my own petty way. One download at a time.

I want to watch it burn. One download at a time.

Some of you saw a portion of the film clip, and I want to thank everyone for their kind sentiments. However, by posting it, I might have been in violation of the original cessation order, so I had to unfortunately take it down of my own volition. I’m forced to consider that my actions no longer affect only myself, but my family, my company, and my employees, and am no longer in a position to make a stand and risk their futures, as well as my own.

“Those who like it, like it a lot”. That pretty much sums up MIUI, a Far East take on the Android mobile OS by Chinese company Xiaomi. I’ve been fairly faithful to CyanogenMod myself, but with the news of MIUI going open-source I figured I should give it a try.

As an added incentive the MIUI ROM for the Nexus S is based on the latest and greatest Android 4.0 — and unlike the (still very usable) alpha of CyanogenMod 9, MIUI ICS is a release product.

Critics of MIUI tend to write it off as a cheap iPhone clone — probably because, like Apple’s iOS, there’s no app drawer; instead, icons are strewn across however many homescreens it takes to hold them.

Fortunately, just like iOS, you can minimize the mess by organizing apps into folders — just drag one icon onto another. Note that I discovered this quite by accident.

Fans of MIUI will surely hold dear the extensive theming that can be done with a device running it. It’s much more than wallpapers and lockscreens; fonts, menus and even app icons can be customized as well. And while the number of available themes is certainly impressive, it’s how good so many of them look that impresses me. I’m pretty sure this is where MIUI gets its name. If you must bastardize the Chinese pronunciation (MI=”me”), think of it as “my UI”.

Keeping MIUI’s Chinese audience in mind. you might find yourself facing some Chinese characters here and there — like on the dialpad, for example. There are apparently more English-centric themes available on the XDA-Dev forums; I’ll have to put that on my to-do list.

MIUI also sidesteps Android 4.0′s MTP problem by allowing its file manager to act as an FTP server. Just turn on the WiFi, then point your FTP client (or web browser, even) to the IP address indicated on your phone’s screen.

I really like MIUI and I’m going to keep it on my Nexus, at least until official release of CM9 comes out. Xenophobes will whisper in your ear that MIUI is actually a secret plot by the Chinese government to track mobile phone users in the west. This from people who use a phone with software made by Google. Talk about glass houses…

Finally, a bit of sanity. Headline after headline this year has claimed that the Apple iPad is eating into netbook and notebook sales because iPad sales are up while netbook sales growth is slowing. You could also make the case that ice cream is eating into netbook sales, because as the summer dragged on, ice cream sales rose while notebook sales growth chilled, but I don’t remember reading that headline anywhere. Thing is, just because two things are true doesn’t happen to mean they’re related — you need stronger evidence to back up correlation and/or causation.

Now researchers at NPD have put out a study that actually attempts to find out what kind of niche the iPad is filling for the people who are buying them. And you know what? Only 13 percent of iPad users say they bought the Apple tablet instead of buying a PC. Nearly twice that number said they decided to pick one up instead of a dedicated eBook reader though. So if you’re going to make a claim, it might be more fair to say that the iPad is killing the Kindle and other eBook readers… except it’s not. Th ey’re still selling pretty well too.

The study also showed that iPad owners are more likely to own Apple products than the general public, which is hardly surprising. Researchers also found that the most popular iPad activities include web surfing, reading and replying to email, and playing games. While you could make the case that these are exactly the activities people use netbooks for, a Windows or Linux powered netbook also makes it easier to edit documents and perform other activities that are easiest with a physical keyboard, so I don’t think PC makers have too much to worry about — especially since the numbers seem to show that iPads are not responsible for any significant change in the netbook and notebook space right now.

Oh yeah, and while netbook sales growth may have slowed, netbook and notebook shipment numbers are still going up for the most part.

via MacRumors

NPD: The iPad isn’t killing the laptop is a post from: Liliputing

I still don’t think much of Facebook itself, but the friends I’ve made there are fairly awesome. Why? I asked them to “like” my entry for the contest above and upwards of 200 did so, no questions asked.

I thought I had a pretty strong chance of making the shortlist, at the very least. But I woke up yesterday morning to this:

After the considerable task of reviewing the applications, the four Quality Hunters have now been selected. We regret to inform you that you have not been chosen for the role.

What was especially disheartening was going through the logs for my personal website, where at least 20 links from the CV I sent Finnair pointed to. The only record I have of any visitors from Finland is a single session Wednesday afternoon that lasted all of 70 seconds. Ouch.

That CV may well have been my undoing — because the links to my blogs, photos and videos didn’t have explicit URLs spelled out they might not have been seen as links at all when the document was printed up and passed around. It’s equally possible that I don’t fit their demographic, whatever that is.

Anyway, the lucky four winners are being flown out to Finland this weekend for a press conference Monday morning. And to my Facebook friends I’ve made an announcement of my own:

Despite what it looks like, I’m not in tears over this… Just bummed.

And while I still think Facebook is fairly evil, because of the awesome folks who have friended me there I won’t be giving it up anytime soon. Thanks again to everyone who helped me out.

I heard Nicholas Negroponte speak at Mobilize today.  It was a zinger of a talk. He started by saying that since its founding in 2001, One Laptop per Child's goal has been to deliver enabling technology in and only in areas where market forces couldn't or wouldn't.

Although he started with laptops, Negroponte now believes that tablets are the best, most cost effective tool  for enhancing learning everywhere in the world.

Negroponte's described his ideal tablet as:

• Unbreakable
• Needs no external power, charged by shaking.
• Has cheap connectivity but useful without it, The Cloud isn't essential. Negroponte gave the example of distributing 100 tablets with 100 books preloaded on each in a village. Even disconnected they instantly give the village 10,000 books, more than the average school library in the US.
• Uses a portrait rather than landscape display
• Transflective display, it's the only display technology that works well with every level of ambient light
• Uses haptics for input feedback

He stressed the importance of design. We need designs that facilitate creating content. People learn best by doing, and creating rather than just reading. Calling Apple's business model, "making peripherals for iTunes", he said his is creating tools to unleash creativity in China, in Africa and everywhere.

I like Negroponte's tablet concept; inexpensive, transflective screen, uses available connectivity but useful without it, favors creation over consumption.  I also think the concept shares a lot with the way mobile phones are evolving. The OLPC tablet is a lot like a large but basic touch screen phone with a  lean and efficient  operating system. Whether or not it includes a cellular radio it could be built using a lot of mass produced mobile phone hardware and software, which thanks to volume, would help OLPC meet its low price goals.

The question is, who will build it. Negroponte was vague about if or when his tablet would be available. A prototype exists but he seemed wary of being a hardware vendor again and now sees his role as creating designs for others to build.

 Wapreview.com Some rights reserved.

Users are scanning both 1D and 2D codes equally, showing that people are less concerned with format and more interested in getting information quickly. People are scanning a wide variety of product UPC codes, not only from the consumer electronics category.

Read full article.

Many thanks to James Whatley for sending this my way; he likely understands this much better than I do but I’m going to attempt my own description and cross my fingers that I get it somewhat right.

You might be interested in social object theory if (1) you’re building a social network, (2) you’re building a community within an existing network or (3) you’re trying to figure out what makes successful social networks tick. I’m posting this for that third reason…

Social object theory has been around since 2005 when Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku, first wrote about it in this blog post. The basic idea is that social objects are what successful social networks use as their currency:

• with Delicious it’s links;
• with Flickr it’s photos;
• with YouTube it’s videos;

And so on…

Though Facebook and Twitter aren’t limited to any one type of social object, each has their own unique means of sharing them — #hashtags for Twitter and the near-ubiquitous “like” button for Facebook.

That’s my understanding of it — here’s more on social object theory straight from the source:

Note that from Slide #41 onwards it’s basically a pitch for Jaiku — and we all know what happened to Jaiku.

Still, social object theory is an interesting way to quantify how social networks work. And if it helps James and the rest of the WOMWorld Nokia team come up with evermore amazing opportunities for bloggers — like the two tours they’ve sent me on — then I’m obviously all for it.

And if you wanted to know more about Jyri and his work he’ll be a guest on Heather Gold’s Tummelvision tonight at 8pm Eastern. I plan to be there in the chat…

Transcript of Live Chat.

Show Notes:

Dystractions

From Andrew:

• Facebook Places coming to Canada.
• PlayBook, aka BlackBerry’s new tablet.
• Web 1.5 is dead, whatever that was…

From Anthony:

• 3D Wookiez.
• James Cameron Strikes Oilsands.
• Judge decriminalizes prostitution in Ontario.
• Maryland Police confiscate motorcycle driver’s helmet cam and laptop when he keeps recording some questionable police tactics.
• TechCrunch-ed?
• The best Segway story ever has legs… Or wheels, at least.

From You!

• OpenOffice becomes LibreOffice
• There’s a Bieber doll now…?

Full Dysclosure

Mike interviews Shane Birley.

Andrew talks social object theory (but really wants you to help him win this contest).

Anth broaches the subject of intelligent life in the universe.

Shout-outs

Big thanks to Campbell & Brown’s T-Shirt Town for making us some fabulous t-shirts to giveaway. (They’re based in Portland, Oregon – which is pretty much the closest city America has to Canada…in terms of awesomeness.)

Listen and learn…or just read here how you can get a mention. Leave a comment, mention us in a tweet, etc, etc. Then you get a shout-out. Yes, it’s that simple. All the cool kids are doing it!

Howdy to our Twitter pals, a #FollowFriday will be yours again this week.

And as always, much love to our chat room participants.

Music

Transit, with his track: “Not For Clubs” — we took out the intrusive ad off the top. Sorry.

Before we can feel any sorrow over the death of Web 1.5, I guess we need to understand exactly what it was in the first place.

It’s obviously not Web 2.0, defined by Wikipedia as:

… Web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

So what was it, exactly? The only definition I could find dates back to 2008:

Web 1.5 is where the information is conveyed differently by the industry practitioner, but the industry practitioner doesn’t understand that .5 of the “added value” comes from the commenter who disagrees with the post or adds more info than the post itself conveys.

Ouch.

Perhaps we can better define Web 1.5 by the aforementioned services that are going away…

Bloglines

Before Google Reader there was Bloglines, and it was fairly awesome. I was definitely a fan, particularly of the mobile client; I still think it offers a better user experience than Google Reader. And I’m not alone on this.

But the tacked-on social aspect of Bloglines never really took, and when feed updates became interminably slow that was pretty much it.

BlogRolling

I vaguely remember this as the service that pre-dated RSS. Therein lies our answer, I suppose.

Xmarks

As an active user of Xmarks I’m most bummed about this, though I understand its features have largely  been supplanted by built-in equivalents for Mozilla and Google browsers.

Xmarks does have a social aspect of sorts to it, but it hasn’t exactly been embraced by its users.

I don’t know about you, but I’m still a bit foggy on what Web 1.5 is/was supposed to be. You could say the demise of Bloglines came about in part due to the Web 2.0 share-y goodness of Google Reader but honestly, I stopped using Bloglines for purely technical reasons.

Nonetheless, let us all take a moment and bow our heads in remembrance of Web 1.5 — whatever it was…

• Tivo
• Best Buy
• D-Link
• Verizon
• Cisco
• Skype
• Samsung 1.2
• Broadcom
• VMWare

An interview with Royan Lee, a teacher who's not afraid of technology.

Search Engine #60 by Jesse Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

Mozilla is building bookmark, password, and preference synchronization for Firefox into a product called Firefox Sync. You can use it to keep your browser  work, home, and other computers in sync. Opera has allowed users to synchronize their data for years, and the Google Chrome browser now has similar features baked in. But the grandaddy of all bookmark synchronization services is Xmarks (formerly known as Foxmarks). Sadly, Xmarks co-founder Todd Agulnick has announced that the service will close in about 90 days.

I’ve been using Xmarks for years. It’s great for office workers who have to sync their home and work computer bookmarks and passwords. It’s even better for users with multiple computers around the house. And it’s ideal for computer reviewers, who are constantly testing out new laptops and don’t feel like spending a lot of time customizing them before kicking the tires, writing reviews, and ultimately returning them to their manufacturers.

While many other browsers are building bookmark synchronization technology into their products, Xmarks is one of the only tools that let users synchronize data between browsers. Want to make sure Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome all have the same site passwords and bookmarks? Xmarks can do that.

But building one of the best free services around wasn’t apparently enough of a business model, because after 4 years Agulnick says the company had 2 million users synching data across 5 million computers… and very little revenue. The company tried taking anonymous user data to build a search engine or to improve Google Search results, with little practical effect. Xmarks could start charging for service, but with browser makers building their own synchronization services, it’s likely that only a small percentage of users would pay.

So after failing to find a buyer for the company, Xmarks will close up shop in a few months and I’ll have to decide whether to rely on a browser synchronization tool that only works with Firefox, or Chrome, or another browser, or whether to look for a different third party solution and hope that it too doesn’t close up shop.

I have to admit, since I started using LastPass, a web-based password manager I haven’t needed Xmarks quite as much. But LastPass is intended to generate and keep passwords secure, not to serve as a bookmark manager. And while LastPass provides a freemium service, in light of Xmarks’ passing, I have to ask myself whether LastPass will be around in 4 years.

Xmarks to close up shop, end bookmark syncing service is a post from: Liliputing

You may be a Photoshop (or GIMP) wizard, but if you’ve a Flickr account (or Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Picasa…) you might want to connect it to Picnik, the online photo editor.

I’m not entirely sure when this happened, but Picnik have set up some really cool and useful “pro” effects for their users, whether they’re paying for the premium features or freeloading like me.

Here are four of my favourites — I’ve used the default settings for each, and transcribed Picnik’s description for the corresponding effect. As you can imagine, more optimal results can be achieved by playing around/mixing & matching, etc…

Default Photo

Here’s Andrea James Lui in a press photo for Asiansploitation, a local comedy troupe I direct.

Lomo-ish

Imitates the look of the popular Lomo toy camera.

Holga-ish

Plastic cam quality without the plastic cam! Holga-ish mimics the wondrous Holga camera when using the sublime combination of black and white film and a red filter.

HDR-ish

Emulate the uber-popular HDR look with HDR-ish [...] Try it with shots of city lights or landscapes with clouds.

Orton-ish

Use our Orton-ish effect to mimic the usually-way-more-complicated effect named for Michael Orton. Unlike his method, though, this one requires no in-focus over-exposed-by-two-stops overlayed with an out-of-focus-overexposed-by-one-stop technical mumbo-jumbo. Just a pretty, nicely saturated glowy look to your pictures.

… Now here’s something you probably didn’t know: When you use Picnik (on Flickr at least) your photo is saved with layers and history intact. This means that you can go back and re-edit your photo at any time or undo edits you’ve already made.

That’s fairly awesome.

The only thing I can think of that would make Picnik even better would be if pro-level Flickr users could get the premium features included at no extra cost. Even as-is, though, Picnik has some fantastic photo-editing features that rival plug-ins you’d probably have to buy for Photoshop.

Or, put another  way, Photoshop ain’t no Picnik…

Last year The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. Tomorrow the appeal of the trial will start, but unlike last time there is is an awkward silence in the media, blogs and even on The Pirate Bay. Is this the proverbial calm before the storm, or perhaps a change of course?

Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest last year. Many had hoped that the court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker was no offense and that the defendants would walk free.

That didn’t happen.

On April 17th 2009, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The Court sentenced the four to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000 each. Within days, this verdict was appealed by the defendants.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, continued to operate as if nothing had happened and the “Pirate Bay Four” picked up their lives and continued to work on non-Pirate Bay projects. In the background, however, both the defense and prosecution teams were preparing for the appeal which will start tomorrow.

During the initial trial there was a flood of media attention, ignited by some of the defendants themselves who dubbed it the ‘Spectrial.’ On The Pirate Bay website a trial blog was started and The Pirate Bay’s founding group Piratbyrån organized a joint press conference at the Museum of Technology in Stockholm one day before it started.

The first day of the trial was a true spectacle, as predicted and called for. Dozens of Pirate Bay supporters gathered around the Court waving skull-and-crossbone flags as both parties entered the court house. Free candy was handed out to passers by in the streets, and online the hash tag #spectrial was the most searched term on Twitter.

Those expecting a similar show around the appeal will be disappointed. There’s nothing but silence coming out of the defendant’s camp. Piratbyrån, the group that coordinated most events surrounding the trial last year, has been disbanded, and no rallies or support gatherings have been announced thus far.

Content-wise there won’t be much news either. There are 8 trial days scheduled between September 28 and October 15 and most of these hearings will be based on recordings from last year’s proceedings. Even though some of the defendants would have preferred to have their say in the appeal, this was denied by the Appeal Court.

“I was denied [to talk] even though I demanded to talk. It’s pretty crazy and totally incomprehensible,” former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde said.

There is no doubt that the appeal will be less ‘provoking’ than the initial trial, but we will nonetheless follow all developments closely on TorrentFreak. After all, this is a landmark case involving three of the key figures to which BitTorrent owes much of its popularity. The story is far from over yet, and it has to be told.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Last week Stephen Elop began his new job as the CEO of Nokia. He’s the first non-Finnish CEO in the company’s over 140 year history. When The New York Times went digging to find out why Nokia stumbled just a few short years after the start of this century, and what he can do to fix the problem, three former employees stepped up to complain that the management structure is shockingly terrible. The past formulas for success that propelled the relatively unknown company to great heights in the 90s were left unchanged and in today’s era of smartphones, software, and services, they’re not only beginning to show their age, but have made Nokia a bit of a laughing stock in the mobile industry.

First there’s Ari Hakkarainen, who was a manager responsible for marketing the development capabilities for what was then called Series S60 (today people just call it Symbian^1, Symbian^2, etc.). He says that as early as 2004 the company had a prototype with a large touch screen and full internet connectivity. “It was very early days, and no one really knew anything about the touch screen’s potential, and it was an expensive device to produce, so there was more risk involved for Nokia. So management did the usual. They killed it.” Later Ari added that during the same year there was also a demo of an online store that had a catalogue of applications similar to Apple’s App Store of today.

Then there’s Kai Nyman, Nokia’s former chief architect for enterprise domain strategy, who says: “There were plenty of years to make Symbian better, we could have rewritten the whole code several times over. We had the resources and the people. But we didn’t do it.”

And finally Juhani Risku, a manager who worked on user interface designs for Symbian from 2001 to 2009, who says that he and his team submitted 500 user interface improvements for Symbian, but not one of them went through. He left Nokia because he was so incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy, calling it “Soviet-style”. He now designs buildings.

All these are things I’ve been saying for quite some time, but people in the comments have been accusing me of simply being bitter about leaving Nokia. The only thing that I’m bitter about at Nokia is seeing so many projects, people, and prototypes, each with the potential to change the world, never making it out to market because the guys in charge did nothing all day but count fractions of pennies and chased margins.

That’s infuriating. With Stephen at the helm I need to polish up my C.V. again.

[Via: The Nokia Blog]

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This kind of apple is not from Cupertino, though it might as well be…

I’m a big fan of Fuji apples — together with Royal Galas they are, in my opinion, the sweetest apples for eating that you can get. But there’s another apple that’s in season right now, called the Honeycrisp. I did a bit of Googling and found that their taste compared favourably with my preferred eating apples of choice, so I ordered some from my online grocer.

That was before I found this:

Horticulturalists developed the honeycrisp at University of Minnesota. It is illegal to propagate or sell the honeycrisp trees without the permission of the Minnesota Department of Horticultural Science.

So for the next week this Mac refugee will be eating proprietary apples. Sigh.

Because of the licensing the Honeycrisps I bought are more expensive than Fuji apples, though with Fujis I often find myself getting the organic ones which are imported from New Zealand and therefore more expensive anyway. And aside from the fact that Honeycrisps are ridiculously huge and extremely messy juicy, they actually don’t taste too bad.

Except for the bitter aftertaste of proprietary licensing, of course…

UPDATE: At least a couple of users on reddit.com have informed me that the patent on Honeycrisps has, in fact, expired. If you’re so inclined you can follow this link; there are lots of interesting comments being posted — just like the ones here.

Coke or Pepsi. PC or Mac. Israel or Palestine. Some questions seem like they’ll never have definitive answers that will satisfy everyone. But if there’s one thing internet commentators seem to agree on, it’s that there may not be room for netbooks and tablets. They’re wrong, of course, but whatever.

Anyway, Chippy from UMPC Portal and CarryPad decided to carry out a highly scientific test to determine which product category will reign supreme. And he enlisted the help of his son Nicklas. You can see the results below.

Mini-laptops v Tablets: Smackdown is a post from: Liliputing

So what do you do if you’re an airline that wants to draw more people to your site? If you’re Finnair, you hold a contest and choose four lucky winners to travel the world and generate content for it.

The key, of course, is finding the right people. Which is why I’m entering. I’ve embedded my travel CV and a sample video below to intimidate inspire you and keep you away get you started on your own entry:

The contest closes on September 26th, which I’m taking as 23:59 EEST. I’ll be uploading my entry over the weekend, in the company of some 3,500-plus other hopefuls. And counting.

And why didn’t I tell you about this sooner? Because my chances are slim enough as it is, that’s why!

UPDATE: My entry has been posted — you can find it here. If you’re on Facebook and “like” what you see don’t forget to click the appropriate button!

Download Ogg – Download Mp3

Another Rathole Radio is upon us and firstly I must apologise for the lateness in posting the podcast. Somehow I only realised 5 days after broadcasting the show that it hadn’t been released. I must try harder! Nevertheless I hope you’ll enjoy it, we have an eclectic range of music by some artists you might not expect to hear under Creative Commons. There’s no live track unfortunately as my voice was stolen by a bad cold. Enjoy the show and don’t forget to send me your thoughts in comments, emails, messages in bottles or whatever else you fancy.

• 00:00 – Jimmy Hoffer Band – Asshole Rocket – CC BY-NC-SA Licensed

Quite a few tracks this week are taken from the Wired Creative Commons CD, featuring big name artists releasing tracks for remixing.

• 06:56 – Beastie Boys – Now Get Busy – CC NC Sampling Plus
• 09:20 – Juanitos – Hola Hola Bossa Nova – CC BY Licensed

• 15:20 – junior85 – raymodscott – CC BY-NC-SA Licensed
• 18:33 – Absent Feet – It’s Just One Thing – CC BY-NC-ND Licensed

• 25:31 – Le Tigre – Fake French – CC Sampling Plus Licensed
• 28:22 – Cornelius – Wataridori 2 – CC Sampling Plus Licensed

• 39:08 – Danger Mouse & Jemini – What U Sittin’ On? (starring Cee Lo and Tha Alkaholiks) – CC Sampling Plus Licensed

• 44:00 – Mindless Self Indulgence – Written In Cold Blood – Copyright to the band

• 50:59 – Spoon – Revenge! – CC Sampling Plus Licensed

Massive thanks to Evgeny Kuznetsov for supporting the show with another kind donation. The Paypal button is on the right of the site there folks… just saying

Get In Touch: Please send me your thoughts and feedback on the music I play or any other aspect of the show. If you make music or you know people who make music and you think they should be on the show, send me suggestions and demos by all means. I’m always pleased to find new music and share it with people. Most of that is down to you, the wonderful listeners and your wisdom.

Send all feedback and suggestions to – show AT ratholeradio.org

You can also find me on Twitter and Identi.ca

Next show: Sunday 3rd September 2010 at 9pm UK time

Thanks for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks also to everyone who turned up in our IRC channel at irc.freenode.net the channel name is #ratholeradio. I don’t expect much to happen there in the weeks between shows, I probably won’t be around much, but if people want to hang around in there and chat you’re more than welcome. Don’t forget you can access the channel from a web browser by going to webchat.freenode.net and entering #ratholeradio in the channel text box. Take care till next time folks.

Subscribe to the show and get it delivered to your virtual door for free: Mp3 feed – Ogg Feed – iTunes

Support the show: if you’d like to leave a tip and help pay for the cost of making the show please use the Paypal button in the sidebar of the site.

Music Sources and Licensing: A few of the tracks in this show are from the artists own personal websites and don’t contain licensing information. That’s why they are listed as unknown. The individual licenses are listed next to each track, where known. If there is no license listed you must assume all rights are reserved on that song. The rest come from the following sources:

Jamendo.com

Rathole Radio by Dan Lynch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Proud Member of The Association Of Music Podcasting – visit musicpodcasting.org for more details.