Andrew Currie

Or Samsung, Apple… you get the idea.

Blood in The Mobile is a documentary by Danish filmmaker Frank Poulsen, which pulls back the curtain on the electronics industry’s dirty little secret — indirectly financing child labour and war through their dependence on conflict minerals in the “Democratic” Republic of Congo.

Tin, tantalum and tungsten join gold as yet another natural resource prized by the developed world and problematic for Africans, to say the very least. Regional instability and corruption in the highest levels of national politics certainly don’t help matters much.

The film has a few problems of its own. Given the scope of an industry-wide problem it’s understandable that the film would choose to focus on one manufacturer (Nokia); but given that the story begins with Poulsen and crew at Mobile World Congress — an industry trade show — there was a missed opportunity here in not pressing other manufacturers for at least an informal statement on the issue.

I wonder too why China’s African presence was never brought up. In my own travels to the continent it seems to me that China sees Africa as a business partner whereas the west looks upon it as a charity case — at least publicly. But I’m certainly no authority on the subject, and it may well be that Congo is so volatile that Chinese companies do their business at arm’s length, just like Nokia and their ilk.

However, Blood In The Mobile is absolutely worth seeing for the simple fact that the crew gain access to the infamous mine at Bisie — and more incredibly, goes deep into a mineshaft to reveal what workers endure there. Words honestly can’t describe it; all I can say is  that I’m not exactly well-rested after watching the film last night.

So what can we do about this?

The film’s companion website has a list of charitable organizations that you can donate to. Fans of Apple’s locked-down iAppliances can sign this petition. And you can always vote with your wallet — this table ranks phone manufacturers on their ethical practices, though the scores are hardly encouraging.

But before anything else I urge you to see the film for yourself, then encourage others to do the same. Once you’ve witnessed the horrific conditions in which these precious minerals are extracted you’ll not soon forget.

When all the tech pundits publish their articles and blog posts about how educators are all “abuzz” over Apple’s announcements regarding the next evolution of e-textbooks on their iDevices via iBooks 2, I feel left out.

After all, I’ve been a high school teacher for fifteen years and a bit of a geek most of my life. I blog, podcast, teach social media to other teachers, and yet for some reason I was not “abuzz”. Instead, I was filled with a sense of dread at what could be a golden opportunity missed to remove the suffix “book” from the equation. The author of Steve Jobs posthumous biography, Walter Isaacson, notes that Jobs “believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.” The problem is that iBooks isn’t so much destroying an industry as propping it up and redistributing the wealth so Apple gets to take an indulgent bite.

I’ve been waiting for the “destruction” of the textbook industry for a decade. Why should we provide eminent domain to publishers to lock information on paper in a digital age? Why should students be restricted to ten pound tomes of desk-thudding grandeur when the same information could be provided in bit-form? The textbook industry generates billions of dollars in revenues every year for a handful of publishers that become de facto gatekeepers of education. Of course schools/boards have the choice to buy or not buy specific titles, but when the choices are Grade 9 survey Science text from Publisher A or Grade 9 survey Science text from Publisher B, the only piece to weigh is quantity discounts and whether a staff member is getting royalties.

The costs of producing a textbook that will weather the realities of evolving knowledge and a student’s backpack are no doubt tangible. The costs can be prohibitive as well. Does the “gold standard” text cost $100/copy? Does that prohibit some schools or classes from purchasing enough copies or force alternate titles to be considered? I would hate to think that equitable access to education for all students is subject to tax rates and potential fundraising. Surely knowledge that is good for one student must be good for all.

I’m not disputing the costs involved in putting a textbook together. Instead I’m questioning the need for textbooks (or e-textbooks) at all. The internet provides a grand resource of knowledge that can be searched, clipped, archived and updated on-the-fly. Educators spend countless hours scouring the web for the best online resources for students and share them with each other. Just as a textbook is curated by a publisher, web resources are curated by educators.

Material for textbooks is curated by teachers, just as material on the web is. The web is, by nature, cross-platform. It does not require an iPad or any other brand specific device. Any tablet, smartphone, netbook, laptop, or PC from $100 to $1000 will be able to provide a comparable web experience for students. What part of the formula is missing to explain the unwillingness to shift from paper to bits?

There is a certain level of authority that has been ingrained into anyone over the age of 30, that for information to have worth it has to have weight. Almost every parent of a school age child learned everything they knew as a student through textbooks. If it worked for them, it must be the only option for their children. There is a shift happening in this level of authority, however, as the demographics for web use are becoming ubiquitous and people can’t help but see the ease and portability of web information.

And let’s get past one over-riding piece of marketing propagation here: tablets (including the iPad) are primarily consumption devices, they are not built for sustained creation, especially at an academic level. They can be interactive and engaging, but most students will never be able to comfortably write their first essay or complete a poster project on a tablet. I’ll also be the first to admit that maybe the essay or poster project is not the best form of evaluation in a wired world. I will maintain, however, that we shouldn’t allow the tools of technology to dictate curriculum as much as mitigate the implementation of it.

The choice to move to e-textbooks could put publishers in a tenuous situation, at least in Canada, until Bill C-11 ensures the illegality of breaking digital locks. Most copyright legislation has fair use or fair dealing exemptions when copyrighted material is used for education. In fact, C-11 would make it legal for Canadian teachers to photocopy excerpts from textbooks under such an education exemption. Such an exemption is nullified when a teacher breaks a digital lock to provide such an excerpt even if it’s for education purposes. Since all e-textbooks will come with digital locks to preserve their proprietary device compliance, any teacher who breaks one will be subject to a $5000 fine.

If a page in a Grade 10 Geography e-text would be a great example for my Civics class, and I found a way to crack and copy that page, fair use would not protect me even though my students would benefit. That said, if I performed a web search, I’d probably find a dozen alternatives online that would be adequate replacements.

The internet is a ready-made, platform-independent, crowd-sourced, authority-curated source of knowledge for K-12 education. It contains boundless rich media and allows for browser-based interactivity. Teachers, all over the world, volunteer to curate information that is not only tied to their respective curricula, but relevant to the local needs of their students.

E-textbooks will not be cheaper than hard copies purchased now because schools will not be purchasing books; they will be purchasing licenses that will last for the duration of the course. At the end of a course now, teachers collect books and redistribute them to the next group of students. E-textbooks will be based on a subscription model that will expire when the course ends.

This model has been drilled into consumers’ heads in the same way that you think you “own” DRM-laden music or video files on your iPod or iPhone that you have to illegally “crack” to transfer to another device. You no longer own a CD or DVD. You don’t even own the mp3. You own a license to play that mp3, on that specific piece of technology, for yourself and no one else. This is model we’re being asked to accept for public education, that our taxes pay for limited access to knowledge for our students.

The evolution of textbooks should be in eliminating “books” from the equation. That Apple is wading into the mix with the appearance of cheaper prices of “$15 or less” shouldn’t fool anyone. Textbook publishing houses have made billions of dollars each year up until now, and you can be sure that any future business models will be set up to make even more. In fact, let’s posit the following scenario:

Over a full school year, I teach 6 sections of Grade 10 advanced science every day. In each class I average 30 students. I have purchased a class set of a science texts for the classroom at $100 a copy. We do most work in class, but if a student wants to sign out a copy of the text to take home and return, they can. Under the new e-textbook system each student must have their own $20 copy as they are non-transferable. The $3000 I paid for a class set, which can be used by all my students will now cost $3600 in licenses without the publisher having to print a physical copy. Beyond this year, where I would normally be able to use the class set of texts for at least another couple of years, instead my costs will be $3600 annually on a perpetual basis. After four years, my school will have paid $14400 in individual student licenses that expire at the end of each course instead of $3000 for a class set of printed texts.

This is the publisher’s model for sustainability. If their lobbyists have their way, not only will you not have any choice about buying such licenses, but the numbers of each student enrolled in the course will be forwarded to them by school boards and billing will occur accordingly. Publishers will eliminate the expense of printing, packing, and shipping while making more money for “renting” ephemeral information to taxpayers.

Being “open” is the answer. Let’s embrace the technology that allows us to access the platform-independent information online.

We don’t need to equip students with $600 iPads so they can download iBooks. Buy them a $300 laptop so they can consume and produce content with ease.

Don’t pay rental licenses on digital information that is freely available online. Instead, give educators the resources to find information that will be customized to the needs for sharing, printing, clipping, archiving.

Don’t buy into the archaic model that pages in a book are intrinsically worth more than a webpage. Not only should we allow teachers to curate information, but it should become an essential skill for digital age students. Fostering such a skill is precluded by having a static package of words issued in paper or digital form.

Finally, let the stakeholders in education be able to build on each other’s work. Let curation build on curation. Let lesson and unit plans be public domain. We should not accept legislation that, in any way, prevents a teacher from using any and all resources at their disposal to enable a learning connection with students. To replace an old textbook model with touchscreen version of the same, or worse, seems antithetical to meeting the needs of students. Instead, Apple and textbook publishers seem to be meeting the needs of their bottom lines on the backs of taxes.

—

Anthony Marco is an educator and podcaster based in Hamilton, Ontario. Check his online activities here and offline credentials here. And hear both of us live every Wednesday night on Dyscultured.

I won’t be participating in today’s SOPA blackout for the simple reason that you and I both get what SOPA is, along with the dangers it represents.

Not even a year has passed since I read Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, but already the author’s stern warnings about the end of the Internet as we know it seem surprisingly close at hand. Ditto for Jonathan Zittrain and the rise of the Internet appliance, usurping the generative freedom of a personal computer with black boxes so locked down that you can’t even remove their batteries.

It’s scary, awful stuff but the sad truth is that so very few people seem to care.

Most online folk are too busy professing love for their favourite brands on Facebook, handing all sorts of personal information over to Google and letting software algorithms rank them on Klout. For them, “the Internet” is a glittering landscape of commercial services — free as in beer, not freedom.

Likewise for the gadgets they use to get online. They don’t mind a locked phone or a carrier contract so long as the hardware is cheap. They’ve no idea what UEFI Secure Boot is; all they need to know is whether or not there’s a shiny Apple logo on the back.

I really do think that this is how most people see technology and the Internet. Most, but not all.

Though proportionally much smaller in number, there are a lot of us who would choose FTP over Facebook, torrent over Twitter. Some of us are pirates who take the law into our own hands; others are members of The Pirate Party, striving to make the Internet a better place from wherever we happen to access it. We see through the smoke and mirrors, we find what’s broken and fix it — or at the very least lay bare the flaws for all the world to see.

The Internet is often a different place for us. We can take steps to anonymize ourselves and online activities if need be. And when it comes time to choose products and services we tend to favour those that respect our privacy and freedom. As in free.

Sure, there’s some overlap, but through these two very different types of users it almost seems as if there’s two Internets — same technology, different philosophy. There’s the bright and shiny stuff, and underneath the platform and packet-agnostic foundation on which it runs. Some of us know this because we are old enough to remember how it all came to be; some of us are simply curious about how it all works. Most of them are blissfully unaware.

We’re trying to let them know. And this SOPA blackout is proof of that.But honestly, I’m not so sure it’s going to work. Facebook itself hasn’t gone dark, and mum’s the word at Apple and Google. Maybe we’re fighting a losing battle here. Maybe it’s inevitable that the days of the free-for-all Internet have come to pass.

Maybe it’s time to start taking care of ourselves.

The first day of the new year saw me in Hong Kong’s Mongkok district — more specifically the Meizu flagship store there, selling its inaugural shipment of the MX Android-powered handset. You can read more in-depth reviews of the MX here and here. What follows is my own impressions of the device, along with the hype surrounding it.

About the hype… because the first MXes in Hong Kong had to be pre-ordered online I don’t think anyone had to camp out beforehand to secure one. But by the time of my midday visit the queue of customers was so long and the store so busy that I wasn’t allowed inside to even look at the device.

I returned to the store for an informal hands-on with a display unit a few days later. The two standout features of the MX seem to be (1) the contextual “soft keys” on either side of the physical home button, and (2) a very aggressive price — the equivalent of about $400 USD for a dual-core Android device.

Other good stuff includes:

• No carrier locks;
• Pentaband 3G service for Canada’s upstart carriers and T-Mobile USA;
• A removable battery;
• An unlockable bootloader, according to a manager at the store.

The only real gotcha is Meizu’s choice to go with a micro-SIM instead of a standard SIM card. I’ve a feeling this was a decision driven expressly by the desire to woo iPhone users.

Now it’s been a few years since a friend in Japan showed me Apple’s Asian character input for touchscreens, but it was apparently quite revolutionary for its time. And not speaking or writing Cantonese myself I can’t tell you how text input on the MX compares; instead, how about I show you and you tell me?

Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to switch the handset I was looking at over to English, but Meizu’s Flyme OS looked a lot like MIUI, another Chinese take on the Android platform. Flyme goes perhaps a step further than MIUI in offering its users an online locker for media and such.

With the Galaxy Nexus priced at more than $700 CAD locally it’s no wonder the Meizu MX is drawing such crowds. It’s fast, well-built and optimized for the local market. Were it not for the micro-SIM I might have brought one back as a souvenir.

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!