blog.mignault.net

Kevin Kelly — The Technium: “As Clay Shirky puts it: here comes everybody! “

Yeah, he’s something, that James JoyceClay Shirky.

(Via no via.)

Technorati Tags:
libraries, web, writing, literachoor, james+joyce

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall | The Ticking Time Bomb: ”
The six men could be executed if they are convicted, and if a Bush administration official approves their trial as a death-penalty case.”

Shouldn’t that sentence be written:

“The six men will be executed when they are convicted, and after a Bush administration official approves their trial as a death-penalty case.”

I mean, do we really think the legal process has any bearing on this case?

(Via Miami Herald via TPM.)

Technorati Tags:
politics, gwot, bush

Starbucks Ditches T-Mobile and Brings in AT&T as Exclusive Wi-Fi Provider | Epicenter from Wired.com:

If you’re an iPhone owner and are wondering how the new deal affects you, apparently the answer is not at all. In September Apple announced a new partnership with Starbucks and T-Mobile to let iPhone and iPod touch users to access T-Mobile’s HotSpots for free in order to download and listen to music via the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. That iTunes Wi-Fi Store partnership is still in effect, but will contiue under under AT&T’s Wi-Fi service.
Other than that, iPhone owners shouldn’t expect any other preferential treatment or special access at Starbucks in the near term.
‘This offer is for AT&T broadband customers who can access Wi-Fi in the stores over a Wi-Fi-enabled device. [iPhone users] who are not broadband subscribers can’t access for free at this time,’ AT&T spokesperson Brad Mays told Ars Technica.

Well, that bites. At least this was finally a clear explanation - I’ve seen several posts claiming that iPhone users would get free service at Starbucks as a result of this deal. Didn’t make sense. The iTunes store was the only thing I ever checked at Starbucks anyway.

(Via Wired News.)

Technorati Tags:
iphone, starbucks, apple

WNYC is running a pledge drive this week. I have 2 comments:

1. We still haven’t received the Springsteen CD they promised us for pledging back in November sometime.

2. The way they handled the Macbook Air giveaway was less than ideal. I heard about this driving in to work on Thursday. I several times heard that I could enter either by calling or via their website. I got to work, looked all over the website, and couldn’t find an online entry form. Forgot about it, heard them talking about it again yesterday, found the page, and discovered that I’d missed the Sunday deadline for entering the contest.

Anyone surprised that I’m not pledging anything this time? FMU gets all my public radio dough from now on.

Technorati Tags:
public+radio, wfmu, wnyc

SimpleBits ~ SimpleQuiz › Part VIII › Titles:

“Q: When marking up a book title or publication, which of the following is the best choice?

<br /> A. <p>My upcoming book, <em>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</em>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>B. <p>My upcoming book, <i>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</i>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>C. <p>My upcoming book, <cite>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</cite>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>

Interesting issues, discussed in the comments to the post. Some are saying C, since it’s a title. That seems wrong to me. Some are saying B, since it’d be typeset that way, which also seems wrong (presentation vs semantic.) Choosing A wouldn’t seem to be any different from B, except that <em> is supposed to mean emphasis; it’s only a synonym for <i> because most browsers have chosen to render it that way. Very interesting discussion in any case; well worth reading the whole thing.

(Via mph.)

Technorati Tags:
geek, web, markup, semantic+web

Levy: Rip This Book? Not Yet. | Newsweek Voices - Steven Levy | Newsweek.com:

“Then I tested a BookSnap for myself. Short verdict: not a revolution. More a thud than a snap, the device—an ominous three-foot high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade—looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold the pages down during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (about $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly. Supposedly, once you get started you can digitize 500 pages per hour, much faster and at higher quality than with flatbed scanners (which are much cheaper but not optimized for book scanning). I never got that far, but I imagine such a feat would require considerable caffeination.”

It’s almost impossible to sell self-digitization to the iPod generation, because - as Levy points out here - it’s so much more labor-intensive than ripping a CD. Even ripping vinyl albums to MP3 is much easier and can also be started and then run mostly unattended. Scanning a book is a tedious process and you can’t really do anything else (well, maybe rip CDs) while you’re doing it. Atiz is commendably trying to get to an appliance model for book scanners, but the BookSnap isn’t it. You’d really need something along the lines of the Kirtas technology for that.

(Via Digitization 101.)

Technorati Tags:
libraries, digitization, e-books

Ariana Page Russell has a skin disease which enables her to write and draw on her own skin:

My own skin frequently blushes and swells. I have dermatographia, a condition in which one’s immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph.

It’s simultaneously creepy and beautiful at once.

(Via Kirsty Hall.)

Technorati Tags:
art, writing

Reading the NYPL monthly newsletter this morning, I saw what looked like a great new service: MyLibraryDV. From the newsletter:

Download classic films, Hollywood hits, lifestyle programs, and more — for free! All you need is your NYPL library card, high-speed Internet access, and MyLibraryDV to access more than 1,000 movies and TV series, including favorites like Antiques Roadshow and America’s Test Kitchen.

Well, that, and a Windows machine, or an Intel-equipped Mac with BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion:

Can I use a Mac with the service?

The Download Manager for MyLibraryDV is a Windows .exe file that can only be installed on computers running Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2, which enables you to run Windows Media Player. You can use a Mac to operate the Download Manager and view videos if you have an Intel processor and Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2 operating system installed and running. Macs without this capability will not be able to install and use the Download Manager.

So the answer here is “not really,” though of course you can make the case that a Mac running Windows does it better and more stably than a PC. (Ask me sometime about the epic struggle it was to burn 3 Word docs to a CD on a Windows laptop yesterday. Why people put up with this stuff is beyond my comprehension. Well, besides “they have to.”) But anybody with a G* is out of luck. NYPL, you’re better than this. Really.

Technorati Tags:
libraries, mac, nypl

this is a test post, please ignore.

Sadly, Sheldon Brown has died from a massive heart attack at the age of 63. He had been diagnosed with MS recently, and it had greatly limited his biking. The words “encyclopedic” (though he was indeed the Encyclopedia Brown of bicycling) or “comprehensive” to describe the enormous amount of cycling wisdom Sheldon Brown put into his website are wholly inadequate. I never met the man nor corresponded with him, but I learned so much from his site and his presence on mailing lists. My deepest sympathies go out to his family, and the cycling/human-powered vehicles/whatever you want to call it community has suffered a truly enormous loss. I am very sad.