Technology

Thinkspace, where we just moved our offices, upgraded their internet connection. But we were plugged into the wrong wall socket.

Just switched the wires. Way better.

Update: I did bring my camera! See?

I am definitely bringing my real camera to Gnomedex tomorrow.

The morning kicked off with an awesome presentation on photography from Kris Krug, a Vancouver fashion photographer, who gave some good suggestions about basic photography, among them:

• Separate your subjects from your background
• Follow the rule of thirds (don’t just center your image)
• Set your white balance manually, or shoot RAW so you can adjust it later
• Learn how to set your aperture and ISO, and what it means when you change them

After that, while not directly connected to photography, Beth Kanter’s presentation was about using social media for good causes, and culminated in a ridiculously successful donation drive.

And then later in the day, Amanda Koster’s presentation focused heavily on photography. She’s heading up SalaamGarage, which is a really cool initiative that connects travelers with NGOs.

Social good and photography are awesome themes for Gnomedex. I’m glad to see these sessions happening.

Also, I think that Kris now technically owes me a photoshoot at Gnomedex. This is in the category of social good because you will all no longer have to see ugly profile pictures of me ;)

Come find me if you want. That photo is POV from where I’m sitting. (Why not, right?)

When the iPhone app store first hit the streets, I downloaded and reviewed both the NYT and the AP mobile news app on Eat Sleep Publish (no link because I don’t know how to do that from the wordpress iPhone app yet).

The one very important thing about the NYT app that I missed in my review is that it downloads and caches stories when you open the app, which means that you can then read the articles where you don’t have service, like on a plane.

This is completely awesome.

Since getting my iPhone I’ve been looking forward to getting a good newsreading experience in my pocket. This is undoubtedly it.

I just finished reading about YouTube’s new advertising arrangements with some Hollywood studios while waiting for my friends to show up at Moe Bar in Capitol Hill. Not bad.

Holy. Crap.

This video, ganked from TechCrunch, shows off some of the most amazing graphics tech I’ve ever seen, assuming that it is what it claims to be, which is a server-side graphics engine running “in the cloud.”

While there are a number of online games that offer impressive graphics (though none of this caliber), the real potential behind LivePlace and the OTOY engine is the cloud-based rendering engine, which allows games on almost any computer to play without needing a powerful graphics card.

Is this for real?? That’s in-freaking-sane!!

Kind of amusing when Google screws up - here’s today’s weather widget on my Google homepage:

I remember signing up for a once-a-week free e-book to promote the launch of Tor.com a while back because I wanted to snag the sweet stories they were sending out.

And then I forgot about it completely.

But I belatedly noted my good friend Ethan’s post about Tor.com being up and immediately went to check it out. It looks cool, I’m signing up.

I don’t know what’s in store, but this strikes me as the ideal place to host some online book clubs. I hope their community supports that (and if it doesn’t, it should!).

I don’t remember if I actually made a blog post about it or just thought about it (can’t find the post), but a few years ago I wondered if computer makers were likely to start selling computers on a cell-phone plan model.

In other words, a company like HP should partner with a company like AT&T, subsidize a computer (say, a compute for $150) and make the end user sign a contract for $60/month for a built in always-on high-speed connection to the internet.

Looks like they’re doing it now.

I look all squished on SeattleTimes.com’s home page:

And once that’s no longer on the home page, you can see the picture here:

Picture

They should really have permalinks for the state of the home page, like Techmeme does, shouldn’t they?

Just for the record, I did not buy a new iPhone.

I wonder if a certain amount of problems is actually good for business. It seems like Apple still can’t keep the iTunes server up for iPhone activations.

I was at the University Village Apple store this morning when it opened, and the first batch (they could help 11 people at a time) stayed in the store for a full 40 minutes, trying to activate their new phones. Eventually they started just letting people wander off (read: without in-store activation) after the phones failed to activate on the third try.

I think that if Apple had actually wanted to, they could probably have spent a little bit of time making sure the iTunes server would stay up today. But I guess it’s better PR to be able to say “so many people bought the phone that our system crashed, and most of them couldn’t use their phones at all for a while after they bought them!”

Update: here’s the word from Gizmodo on what they call the iPocalypse:

So How Did This Happen:
The source of the iTunes crash/slowdown seems not be those buying iPhone 3Gs from Apple/AT&T stores at all but the millions of people updating to the new firmware at home. Firmware 2.0 isn’t like other firmwares in that it needs to update the phone and reauthenticate the service. And in turn, when the servers are slammed and the phone reaches for reauthentication, the server isn’t always there to reactivate the service. This is how some of those newly bricked iPhones are occurring, and a source tells us that even first gen iPhones are susceptible.

Good thing I did my firmware update yesterday ;)

…is for reading PDFs.

This is part of the “lean forward, lean back” dichotomy of reading habits that I’m going to talk about eventually on Eat Sleep Publish. Breaking news, blogs, and web sites are all “lean forward” types of media, and I love my laptop for that.

But I find myself frequently printing out free e-books, reports, and other PDF content that’s scattered around the internet because I want to read them in “lean back” mode.

A Kindle would be great for that.

Of course, I’m a huge fan of what the Kindle is trying to do in the first place. I love that Amazon is establishing a paid platform for digital books, although they may not quite have the model right yet.

They are, however, going to save the book industry if they succeed. Too bad the major publishers can’t see forward far enough to maintain control of their business. They’re ceding it to Amazon because Amazon is going to control (even more of) book distribution going forward.

In any case, /love affair with Kindle. I’ll get one when the price hits $250.

If you’re curious about how the new iPhone is going to work outside the PR bubble of Macworld, now is a good time to check out the reviews from Walt Mossberg and David Pogue, who have both had their hands on the new model long enough to take it for a thorough test spin.

The most disappointing feature is apparently the GPS, which doesn’t really have the pinpoint accuracy people expect from systems like car navigation systems and will often get blocked by something as trivial as skyscrapers.

However, that’s not really the point. Just like the iPhone was mostly a kick ass way to browse the internet (with a few phone-like features attached), the iPhone 3g is a speedier, kick ass way to browse the internet, with a mobile computing platform attached.

I think I’m going to be able to get away with just upgrading my 1st gen iPhone software, using the app store, and calling myself happy. But I gotta tell you, this is damn tempting:

I just finished reading a very thought-provoking (and reasonably lengthy) piece from Nick Carr at the Atlantic Monthly called Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Of course, the article isn’t really about Google, it’s about how the internet in general is rewiring our brains to give us all information ADD. Nick warns:

Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

But like Scott Karp, I’m not convinced that we’re losing the capacity for deep thought as much as we might be changing the way that we come to our conclusions.

What’s the real difference between reading ten chapters of a book and reading thirty shorter articles and studies online if they relate to the same topic. As Scott puts it:

Nick romanticizes the “contemplation” that comes with reading a book. But it’s possible that the output of our old contemplation can now be had in larger measure through a new entirely non-linear process.

Nick’s right that the internet is rewiring our brains. But what that means is that we can’t measure the quality of our thought the same way that we use to. I think we’re starting to draw conclusions less by following a single line of reasoning (a book narrative) and more by finding a series of interconnected nodes, and then finding the middle point where they all intersect.

Here’s the video we put together in the basic video editing session at Podcamp Seattle 2008.