The UK gives you a brand-new way to infringe copyright with pictures
Harry Marks on his website Curious Rat:
From Amateur Photographer:
Photographers who compose a picture in a similar way to an existing image risk copyright infringement, lawyers have warned following the first court ruling of its kind. UK souvenir maker Temple Island Collection Ltd has won a ruling against New English Teas which it had accused of breaching copyright by using a photo of a London bus on its packaging.
Stupid and terrifying.
This opens up a whole new dimension of ways for businesses to hamper each other, for crooks and copyright trolls to make money and a world of pain for the courts.
Mac OS X is weird sometimes
Over the last two days a bug in OS X Lion has been driving me crazy:
My 2011 Mac mini simply wouldn’t go to sleep.
I tried everything: Pressing the power button on its back, clicking the sleep item on the -menu and pressing ⌘+⌥+⏏. Nothing worked.
Then I hit the internet and started searching for solutions, this is what I tried:
- Is some kind of sharing function was switched on? — No.
- Where any apps preventing it it from sleeping? — Not that I could see.
- Any weird events in the system log? — Nope.
- Does one of my USB drives malfunction and keep it awake? — No, again.
- Are there any network connections open that might stop it from sleeping? — No.
- Bluetooth issues? — Nope.
I even performed a PMU and a SMC reset, with no effect.
Essentially I didn’t know what was going on and I decided to call the Apple’s support hotline: After answering all the questions by the very nice representative I was still left with no solution.
I gave the internet one last try, stumbling on the pmset -g terminal command, which prints out a log of settings for hibernation and errors if any occurred. Nothing.
Then I remembered that earlier that day I had read that someone turned screen sharing on and off again to find out if it had any effect.
I turned on screen sharing in the sharing preference pane and hit ⌘+⌥+⏏, eyes closed… The Mac mini went to sleep immediately.
I turned it off again and the mini still went to sleep as ordered.
This is one weird bug, where not having any kind of sharing functionality turned on causes the Mac to not go to sleep. Oh boy.
I wrote a few posts for Macgasm.net
… and I hope there will be many more :)
Here’s the link to my author profile on the site.
I don’t want booth babes.
There’s a nice and very sensible post on The Loop regarding booth babes at trade shows (like CES and IAA). Peter Cohen quotes a Gizmodo piece by Mat Honan regarding the complaints about booth babes directed at the organiser of CES. Read it here.
A comment by a guest named ‘Coward Anonim’ rubbed me the wrong way, though:
If companies want to pay them and they want to get the job, then what is a problem?
Can’t adults (18+ years) make decisions for themselves? How the h… they are eligible to vote in a public election, then? Is not election more important???
(Let’s leave the elephant in the room — the degradation of women to sex objects — standing there for a minute. Let’s also make a distinction between normally clothed female sales staff and booth babes.)
When I go to a trade show I go there for the products. If companies need scantly clad women to get my attention, I immediately suspect that their product isn’t good enough to impress me on its own.
I like women as much as the next guy, but I find the practice of putting scantly clad women on display at such shows insulting. — Why?
Because what the people hiring them are telling me, is that I’m so controlled by primal urges to serve every female in sight, that I’ll flock to every booth with booth babes.
Good products don’t need booth babes to be sold. Modern men don’t need booth babes to find those products.
This is what bugs me: These monitors demonstrate that Samsung has some incredible designers.
Why do they still resort to blatantly copying Apple?
John Welch on the 'no comments on my blog' brouhaha
He hits the nail square on the head and actually makes a point I haven’t thought about: Search Engine Optimisation.
It’s a good and honest post, with a healthy amount of profanity mixed-in.
My take is that sometimes it doesn’t make sense to add comments to a blog, but many bloggers, developers and journalists who used to have comments on their site, are simply being dishonest about the way the removal of comments influences a potential discussion.
If you want a discussion on the topic you wrote about, allow comments or give people a way to make their opinions heard/read not only by yourself.
If you don’t want a discussion, or simply don’t want to be disagreed with on your own site, you don’t allow comments.
Other explanations, like this one from MG Siegler;
Earn your voice.
are just excuses so you don’t have to tell people the truth:
“I don’t care for your opinion as long as you’re not popular.” — which brings us back to what John Welch was saying. Go ahead, read his article.
When and how I attibute
Stephen Hackett had a nice post up on his site about how and when to attribute content or links to other people.
Proper attribution is important and sometimes not that easy.
Yesterday he posted a simple attribution rule that Chris Martucci lives by:
My criteria for via links are simple: If someone points me to an article I did not find on my own (either through my RSS reader or at its original source), I’ll include a via. Likewise, if an article I found on my own links to a second article, which I then post to my weblog, I’ll link to the original source.
The only thing I do differently, is to also mention the site I found a link on by my own, if the author of the second article added even the slightest bit of value to the original post.
Curious Rat - An Observation
A quote from the post:
You can preach all you want about rooting your phone and hacking your tablet to do inane things, like control your refrigerator light, but my family was actually getting things done within 30 minutes of opening and activating their new computers - yes, computers.
Ease of use and seamlessness are some of the things that convince many people of Apple’s products in my opinion.
I had a similar experience with my parents lately: I gave them my MacBook Pro, pre-loaded with OS X Lion, MS Office, the current iLife apps and a few other nifty things that I knew they’re going to use.
After about an hour of showing them around the OS and a few apps, my mother was hooked. Guess by which features?
Mission control and full screen apps, gestures and auto saving.
As long as the innards of OS X are somehow accessible to those who want or need to work with them, Apple can iOS-ify the system as much as they want, if it makes full-blown computers easier to use for normal people.
The Mother of all Hot Wheels Tracks — 512 Pixels
Click through to Stephen’s site for the link to this video, you won’t regret it. My thought during the first 30 seconds of the video was: “Meh, I’ve built more complicated things back in the day with my Darda tracks, but then at checked the time code and length of the video. My second though was: “I want to believe!”
Post-PC era, indeed – Wind on a Leaf
David Chartier recounting a story that happened during a recent Christmas dinner with his larger family.
It describes the way a high school student interacts and productively uses her iPad in school.
I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy, which might be the reason why it took me so long to realise how greatly a device like this would benefit me. If I had know this, I’d have bought the first iPad a few months dafter its release. It’s hard to count the number of ways it makes my life as a university student easier and my spare time more enjoyable.
What the Original iPhone Teaches About a 4G-Equipped iPhone — 512 Pixels
Great article by Stephen Hackett on why Apple would be stupid to put 4G chipsets into iPhones anytime soon.
Not only are actual 4G networks still very rare in the U.S., Europe and large parts of Asia, the technology on the handset side if very much in its infancy.
I wonder how long it would take for a human to go insane if she or he could perceive even 5% more of both spectrums.
(via Abstruse Goose » The Sliver of Perception)
You need to watch this, now: The first trailer for the Hobbit
Seriously, it’s awesome and I want it to be next December already.
This just arrived.
It’s a USB 3.0 flash drive made by ADATA (Model S102 Pro).
This is the second S102 I bought; my previous one was annexed by my girlfriend.
I only use it with USB 2.0, but it actually delivers the advertised write speeds of 20 MB/s, which is more than good enough. The build quality is great and it’s also fairly compact.
A wholehearted recommendation if one needs a fast and dependable flash drive.
How many times have you been to a product website and seen big bold letters proclaiming that you can CONNECT and ENGAGE and DISCOVER? Every time I see that, I hit the back button, and I bet you do too.
It’s because it’s vague. It’s supposed to sound exciting, but it’s not. It doesn’t say anything about what you can really do with the app.
Nobody wants to connect or discover.
Brent Simmons on Twitter’s new nomenclature. Spot-on.
I absolutely agree with Brent Simmons’s statement. Having read the articles by Cody Fink and John Gruber, I believe that—at least for me—Twitter’s apps (including the web app) have finally jumped the shark.
The new Twitter iPhone app seems to be aimed at new users and “casual users”. Now, why did I use this word, almost devoid of meaning, “casual users”?
I don’t think “casual users” are those who sometimes check Twitter to see what’s up; from personal experience those users are more likely to interact with a small amount of friends/other users, meaning that the most important features of Twitter are the timeline, conversations and direct messages. DMs, for one, are hidden in the last tab of the app. From Gruber’s article:
“Me”. Oh boy. Stashed into this tab are your profile, your direct messages, your Twitter Lists, and the interface for switching to other Twitter accounts. This tab is the conceptual carpet under which Twitter swept everything that didn’t fit under “Home”, “Connect”, or “Discover”.
And that’s exactly what happened.
As I see it, Twitter is trying to hone-in on new users and what it thinks are “casual users”; users who sometimes check Twitter to stay up to date on the latest happenings, trends and product offers and interact publicly with their friends and acquaintances.
Again, Gruber:
Presumably, this Discover tab is the successor to the late and unlamented dickbar — where sponsors will be able to pay Twitter to promote products and services.
Yup. Combine that with what Fink found out about this tab:
Discover is supposed to get better over time. Depending on where you’re located, who you follow, or what topics you find interest in, Discover aims to offer suggestions around those things.
Until now Twitter’s applications allowed the users to make use of the service according to his/her needs, even the web app. Now Twitter is trying to steer users in a direction.
For me this direction is called “We finally need a way to monetize this service.”, which Twitter perfectly entitled to do.
Unfortunately that means many users will now (have to) steer clear of Twitter’s applications. Thankfully there are alternatives; Twitterrific and Twittelator Neue cater to what I think are causal users; as they integrate DMs and @-replys and photos nicely into the timeline and create a seamless experience.
On the other end of the spectrum there’s Echofon and Tweetbot; two clients help the user make the most of almost everything Twitter has to offer and give him/her quick access to almost any kind of information.
I have found what I was looking for in Tweetbot. Tweetie and Tweetie 2.0 even more so, were the evolution of Twitter on the iPhone; the first clients that were more powerful than the website. Everything Twitter did to it after buying it, was adding features and altering it. Tweetbot has everything I loved in Tweetie 2.0, but with even more useful features, all packaged in a design that makes everything very accessible and a pleasure to use.
