Last week, we learned that hackers stole personal information from 70 million to 110 million of Target’s customers. This was much higher than the inital report of 40 million customers. That number represents at least “a third of all American adults.”
It’s been years since I’ve used Microsoft Word for anything other than opening documents that people send me over email. In 1996 and even in 2006, it was simply unthinkable to have a Mac without Microsoft Word. But today, there are so many other tools that do a better much job at specific functions than using only Word.
For writing long manuscripts, I use Scrivener because it stores your research and also makes it easy to focus on a particular part of your paper. If I need to prepare a document with some layout and defined styles, then I’ll turn to Pages. For a linear document where the content is more important than the layout, then I’ll use Byword.
For taking notes and preparing for class, I’ve been using OmniOutliner. If you think about it, a class lecture or a presentation is basically a sequential list of points you want to communicate. Outlining them allows you to list the major topics and to drill down to elaborate on those topics. The best part of the outliner is that you can easily rearrange any part of your outline. I’ve recommended it to students as a note-taking solution, but most starving students balk at the price.
Earlier today, I found Fargo, a free HTML outliner that stores its files in your Dropbox. It lacks a lot of features compared to OmniOutliner, although it works great for a web app. But Fargo has one feature that OmniOutliner doesn’t have: it publishes to your WordPress blog, which is how I posted this entry.
If you want to see how an outliner is superior to a word processor for certain tasks, try Fargo.
Until I read about Google’s recent decision to preload all images automatically in all Gmail messages, I never thought about what happens when I read a message with images. Apparently, almost any message from a marketer will load those images from a remote server. Because of the nature of HTTP, when each message is loaded, your email client communicates a great deal of “analytic data” about you. It reveals your computing platform (mobile vs. desktop), your operating system, your IP address, and even your geographic location.
For years, you’ve been able to tell your email client to not load remote images. It’s a matter of setting a preference. For example, in Mac OS Mail, you just go to Preferences > Viewing and uncheck the “Display remote images in HTML messages.”
In iOS, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and turn off the setting for “Load Remote Images” to do the same.
I thought the only purpose of this preference was to speed up downloads, but since I’ve had high-speed Internet for years, I never considered activating it.
Once you stop loading remote images, many email messages look terrible. Many image-rich email messages require using the very worst principles of web design, such as tables and single-pixel invisible images, and all you see is a lot of blank space.
There is some upside to this: all those barebones messages load really fast. And they make us less attractive to marketers.
On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart, who died earlier this year, demonstrated, for the first time, a few computer technologies that we take for granted today. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber writes:
Engelbart and his team presented for about an hour and 40 minutes. The talk consisted of, among other things, the first public demonstration of a computer mouse. It introduced WYSIWYG editing. It showed off hypertext. It demonstrated the graphical user interface. Engelbart and his colleagues explained these new technologies; they also employed many of them as part of their presentation. (A young Steward Brand acted as one of their camera operators.) For people who had been used to thinking of computers as little more than fancy calculators, the whole thing was fairly mind-blowing.
Although most people probably use a touch screen to interact with computers, such as smartphones, we still rely heavily on a graphical interface. I would guess that fewer than 5% of current computer users have ever dealt with a command line. We have also adopted navigating from one page to another as an everyday part of our computing experience. The web as we know it wouldn’t be a reality for another twenty-two years.
But perhaps most importantly, the battery status menu in Mavericks now includes a “hall of shame” section that lists applications that are currently using “significant energy” on the system. The battery status menu now calls out energy-hogging applications. I can imagine Mac developers everywhere cringing at the thought of the e-mail they’re going to receive from users when their application shows up as an energy hog.
Since I learned of this feature, I’ve noticed four apps that regularly appear in that list:
Handbrake
Aperture
Mail
Safari
It makes sense that Handbrake draws a lot of energy, since it’s busting ass to decode and encode video. Aperture, too, can suck a lot of power after I’ve imported a ton of RAW photos. Siracusa notes as much, “Some applications need ‘significant energy’ to do the task they’re designed to do.” But Mail and Safari!? Both of these are Apple apps. Both were updated for Mavericks, but they still consume “significant energy.” And in the image to illustrate Siracusa’s review, it shows Photo Booth, another Apple application.
There are few organizations that I agree with everything they do, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of them. They have been vigilantly defending our human and constitutional rights since 1990, three full years before the World Wide Web had graphics, including these issues:
your right to privacy and online security
your right to free speech
your right to remain anonymous
fighting government and corporate surveillance
protecting the public domain and fair use of copyrighted works
My membership just came up for renewal, and I was happy to throw a few Shekels their way. You should donate to the EFF, too.
I was a late adopter to YouTube. I never liked that it used only Flash to display its videos in its early days, making my over-clocked PowerBook get hot from watching a video. I also disliked the low default resolution of its videos. For years, the typical YouTube video had 360 lines of horizontal resolution, which was fine for watching on the web, but if you wanted to use it for close study, you were almost better off watching a VHS and certainly better off finding a DVD.
Over time, I began using it here and there for quickly locating films I hadn’t seen in years. For example, in my experimental film class, YouTube was useful for compiling a screening list. I could locate films I considered screening, and verify that they matched my memory of them. In this case, YouTube was a wonderful resource for teaching and research.
But today, YouTube reminded me how it can be a terrible resource for teaching and research. As a way to search for a specific video, it’s great. But treating it like an archive will disappoint you. It’s simply too impermanent to use as reliable teaching tool. Some videos are so evanescent—here yesterday, gone today— that they may as well have never have existed on the site.
On a WordPress site for my American Film Industry class, I posted separate entries for two films we referenced in the class. Each entry included a embedded video clip from YouTube. As I went to look for review those entries today, the two clips are gone.
The poster image for a clip from Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? on YouTube.
The first entry included an embedded YouTube clip from a somewhat forgotten film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957). The clip was of an “intermission” towards the end of the film, where the lead actor, Tony Randall, breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience. As US audiences of the 1950s abandoned the movie theater for the comfort of watching television at home, this forced intermission reminded audiences of the sacrifices television viewing demanded they make: a smaller picture, radio interference, vertical scroll, and snow. And of course, let’s not forget about the interruptions from advertisers, which are an object of satire in this film about advertising.
Although a poster image for the clip still appears on the blog entry, the embedded clip will not play. The error notice indicates that the clip was taken down because the “video contains content from Fox, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.” Fox does indeed own the rights to the film, as the film was released by 20th Century-Fox and will hold the copyright until the middle of this century. But the clip hosted on YouTube allowed me to use it in accordance with fair use doctrine. My use of the clip was for comment and criticism and constituted only a part of my blog post, albeit an important part. The short clip on YouTube and my associated blog post could even serve as promotion for a forgotten film that could be resuscitated. Depictions of the American mid-century advertising industry might have been exploited some years ago. Instead, the clip was taken down, and the film will remain in obscurity.
I posted the second entry, on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, to demonstrate the influence of the French New Wave on Bonnie and Clyde. The clip demonstrated the use of jump cuts in the film. As any student of cinema knows, Breathless popularized the use of the jump cut, and it gave young filmmakers of the 1960s a feeling of “breaking the rules.”Arthur Penn used it extensively, most noticeably in the opening sequence of the film when Bonnie Parker is filled with ennui in her room and becomes excited when a stranger comes to her home.
When I went to review the blog post, the clip was gone. YouTube indicates that the “video is not available in your country.” It’s seriously disappointing that the clip is gone because it robs my students the opportunity to see the nine jump cuts in a thirty-five-second sequence. To demonstrate this, I either have to search for another YouTube clip that will be undoubtedly be blocked in the future or resort to circumventing the copy protection on a DVD to extract that clip.
Amazon said Sunday delivery will begin on Nov. 17 in Los Angeles and New York and expand next year to Dallas, New Orleans, Houston and Phoenix, among others. Amazon will bring packages from its warehouses to Postal Service locations on Saturday evening or Sunday morning. The agency will then deliver them to doorsteps.
Sunday delivery of Amazon purchases is great news for the postal service and Amazon customers. It is probably less good for the non-existent brick-and-mortar shops in our corner of Long Island City.
The USPS may not have the global network or the perceived speed of UPS or FedEx, but it has something that’s very important for most New Yorkers: access to your apartment building. UPS, for example, can’t access your apartment building. When they attempt a delivery and you’re not home because you work a regular job, you’re greeted with one of those dreaded InfoNotice slips on your door.
The dreaded InfoNotice that says you’ll have to wait yet another day for your goodies.
After UPS makes three attempts and they can’t deliver your package, you’re trekking to the calming shores of Maspeth, Queens to get your goods. As you can see in the Lois Stavsky’s photo below, Maspeth sits at the end of the Bushwick Inlet and is, for those not in the know, about as a close to the middle-of-nowhere as you can get in New York City.
After missing countless Amazon orders that were shipped via UPS, I resorted to using the Amazon Locker at the local 7-11 store in Long Island City. It’s a reliable way to get your packages because it’s 7-11 and there’s always someone home, but it’s a good 1.3 miles away from home along a heavily trafficked stretch of Long Island City, making it pretty terrible bike ride.
Since Amazon has been relying more on USPS for deliveries, Amazon packages are reliably waiting inside the apartment building. No more trips to 7-11. No more trips to Maspeth. The same is true for any other shipper that uses USPS for deliveries, such as my precious Tonx coffee.
The best part of Amazon using USPS to deliver to your home seven days a week is that it’s available for everyone, not just Prime members like myself and it starts this coming Sunday in New York.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you signup for a Prime Video trial, I will earn a commission fee.
Researchers have uncovered software available on the Internet designed to overload the struggling Healthcare.gov website with more traffic than it can handle.
“ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people,” a screenshot from the tool, which was acquired by researchers at Arbor Networks, declares. “We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience!”
As much as I empathize with any diligent protest movement, there’s no law that has been constitutionally tested than the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. It has gone through all three check and balances outlined by the Constitution. It was passed by the Congress, signed by the President, and affirmed by the Supreme Court.
Interfering it is a denial of the people’s Constitutional rights.
The Fifth of November has been observed in England since the plot to bomb Parliament in 1605. Activists have reclaimed this day and Guy Fawkes to stand against unjust state and corporate power. Techies can commemorate this day and rebellious spirit with iFixit’s EFF Activist Bundle:
This 5th of November, iFixit is teaming up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to empower technology users (AKA everyone) to take their digital stuff back from government interlopers and corporate money mongers.
What are we reclaiming? Common sense and fair use. iFixit is fighting for your right to repair your stuff. And the EFF is fighting to protect your right to use that stuff without the NSA—or anyone else—peeking over your shoulder.
For $60, start repairing your own digital gear. It’ll pay itself very quickly, as well as raising some funds for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
