Tag: Shared by digittante

• Momento Is Perhaps The Perfect Passive Diary App

  To me, one of the most interesting thing about Foursquare is the History tab. It transforms the service from a “where you are” app, into a “where you were” log. In a way, it’s sort of like a diary. I wish Twitter was better at this idea as well. Because what I tweeted a year ago says something about how I was feeling, or what I was doing back then. In fact, a lot of the web services we use on a daily basis would be perfect for this type of passive diary writing. And that’s exactly what Momento, an iPhone app, makes happen.

  At its core, Momento (made by the UK-based d3i) is a straightforward diary app. It allows you to easy write “Moments” (diary entries) to express what you are doing or feeling on any given day. It takes the process a step further by allowing you to tag friends (from you iPhone contact list), places, events, and add photos to these entries. But the real killer feature of the app is that it also allows you to import bits of information from a number of services including Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, and any RSS feed. The result is a brilliant log of almost everything you’re doing online.

  Other services have tried to do similar things before, but Momento works because they’ve nailed the user interface and experience. The entire app looks like a journal, which is broken down by days in descending order from the current day. In this view, you get a snapshot of any given day, including the most recent items (tweets, check-ins, etc). Clicking on any of these days takes you to a detail page which shows you all of your activity for that day. All your tweets, check-ins, blog posts, pictures, etc, are here.

  There’s also a calendar view which allows you to quickly hop to any moment in the past. Clicking on a date will again take you to a specific day page with all of your info with what you did that day.

  Another view allows you to see entries broken down by tags. From here, you can choose to see only entries with certain people tagged. Or you can see only entries that you gave a high rating to (when you make your own Moments, you can rate them if you want).

  There’s also a way to see just certain types of elements, such as tweets. Again, these are broken down by the day they were sent. And what’s really awesome is that you can search all of this stuff if it has been imported into Momento.

  The key to Momento is that all of this information is for you and you alone. You import social items, but it never sends anything out. It’s simply a way for you to log and keep what you did on any of these services in a given day. And it’s all presented in a very nice, easily accessible package.

  It’s another of the anti-social social apps, like OhLife and the newer Path, which seem to focus more on what experiences mean to you (or a very small group of friends), rather than to strangers and the larger web as a whole.

  With the personal approach in mind, Momento also comes with an impressive way to both backup and export all of your data (this is accessed through iTunes file sharing).

  Momento also comes with some nifty importing options to better tailor you data. For example, you can tell it to leave out tweets with a certain hashtag. Or you can tell it to only import tweets with a certain hashtag. You can tell it to leave out @replies and/or retweets, etc.

  Momento actually isn’t a new app; it first came out about a year ago. But version 2.0 was recently released, and with it comes a huge number of excellent improvements including all the geolocation service integration and the video service integration. Both of these features are pretty key for a full and interesting social service diary.

  Simply put: I love this app. I think it’s a near-perfect execution of a very compelling idea: passive diary writing. The downside is that it currently only works with the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad. But if you have one of those devices, this app is well worth its current $1.99 price (that’s a limited-time price). Find Momento in the App Store here.

  

  

  

  

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• Dancing with Invisible Light: portraits shot with Kinect's infrared structured light
  

  Shown here, images from Audrey Penven's photography series "Dancing with Invisible Light: A series of interactions with Kinect's infrared structured light." From her description of the project:

  
  
  With these images I was exploring the unique photographic possibilities presented by using a Microsoft Kinect as a light source. The Kinect - an inexpensive videogame peripheral - projects a pattern of infrared dots known as "structured light". Invisible to the eye, this pattern can be captured using an infrared camera.

  The Kinect uses the deformation of this dot pattern to derive 3D information about its subjects (an ability which has already spawned an explosion of incredible digital art).

  As a photographer I am most interested in the nature and quality of light: how light behaves in the physical world, and how it interacts with and affects the subjects that it illuminates. For this shoot my models and I were essentially working blind, with the results visible only after each image was captured. Together, we explored the unique physicality of structured light, finding our way in the darkness by touch and intuition. Dancing with invisible light.

  View the full set here (prude alert: contains both portraits and nudes). To purchase a print, contact the photographer at audrey.penven@gmail.com: 11x14 for $60, 16 x 20 for $120.

  Dig the crazy lens flares the Kinect light creates in the shot below!

  
  

  Related coolness at openkinect.org.

  Credits:
  
  Models: qtrnevermore, C. King, Mike Estee, Sloane Soleil, Helyx, Star St. Germain, Ian Baker, Annetta Black, Josh St. John.
  
  Assistants: Aaron Muszalski, Ian Baker, Mike Estee

  An earlier photo set is also online here.

  (Thanks, sfslim!)
  

  
  

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• Daniel Radcliffe Geeks Out, Bites My Steez

  If you've ever hung out with me past the third gin and tonic, you know that I only have one party trick: I know all the words to Tom Lehrer's The Elements song. (My dad taught it to me in fourth grade so I could perform it at the Camp Orkila talent show. I learned the song but was too shy to do the show. Ha!) If you've ever hung out with me past the sixth gin and tonic, you know that I FANCY MYSELF A WIZARD. I love any stupid shit that involves wands and cauldrons and quests and women who sometimes turn into cats or whatever.

  So that's why I feel like this adorable clip—of Harry Potter (NOTED WIZARD!) singing The Elements—was basically uploaded to YouTube directly from my brain's uterus:

  Via Movieline via tippers Clinton & Bryan.

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• A Love Story Told at 325 Photocopies Per Minute [Video]
  
  
  

  Boy meets girl. Girl runs away. Boy pursues. Girl falls head over heels—literally. It all sounds so familiar, but when it's been shot entirely on a photocopier, it feels as sublime as the very first time. More »

  
  

  

  

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• Mick and Keith: A love story
  

  Eric often sends me links that crack me up, so my first response on Friday when I saw he forwarded me a parody response by Mick Jagger to Keith Richards's recent autobiography was to prepare for a good laugh. The alleged response, called "Please allow me to correct a few things," is, in fact, written by ace rock critic Bill Wyman, who has the novelty of sharing a name with the Stones' two-decades-gone original bass player. Wyman, who once received a legal demand by the bassist to change the name he was born with, seemed uniquely positioned to write a cutting fake retort.

  Then I began reading and realized this was No Joke. As a longtime Stones devotee (read Late night thoughts about the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world for one recent example), I've often wondered what the surviving original members really think about each other, how they work together, what their work means to them as they're aging. Wyman has clearly spent way too much time pondering this, too. I've never talked to Mick, but Wyman's faux-Mick response feels true to my imagined Jagger. The tone of the essay veers from hurt to self-righteous, apologetic to withering, the voice always taut. Fake Mick hates Keith as much as Real Keith hates Mick; this essay shoots down Richards's book Life but doesn't forget to point the gun inward from time to time.

  Yet, more than anything else, Wyman's version of Jagger is full of love for Richards, regretful that money, drugs, and narcissism tore them apart, grateful for what they had together before they devolved into mere business partners. He knows how much he owes Keith ("Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone?") and how Keith's work can still touch him, no matter how far they've both fallen ("When a song is beautiful -- those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns -- the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.") This is idealized stuff. It's unlikely that Real Mick's response to Keith's book, if there ever is one, will be as tough-minded and vulnerable. Wyman conjures up the Stones as we want them to be at this late age, but even we diehards know that's just our imagination running away with us.

  UPDATE: Wyman has written a postscript to his terrific piece.

  
  

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• Cut-up artist alphabetizes the newspaper

  
  Kim Rugg is a Canadian visual artist with a very sharp knife and a lot of patience and glue: she newspapers, stamps and other paper ephemera up, letter by letter, and makes does delightful and demented art like newspapers in which all the type has been rearranged in alphabetical order. The work is a beautiful and provocative commentary on the form and content of print media.

  Kim Rugg - A London artist's knife skills and knack for precision

  Kim Rugg, Mark Moore Gallery

  
  

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• How Iphone, Android and Blackberry Users See Each Other
  Thought this was quite funny. I wonder how Maemo 5 fans see themselves. I know they see iphone users as sheep or ******s.

  Attached Images

   

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• Star Wars Revisionism: it was all Jar-Jar's fault

  This cute Lego Star Wars video presents a revisionist look at the original Star Wars trilogy in which the prime moving force was the off-stage bumbling of Jar-Jar Binks.

  (via Super Punch)

  • More Star Wars revisionist history
  • Post-It note showing all of Chewbacca's dialogue from Star Wars ...

  
  

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• Dress like Carl Sagan, impress potential romantic interests
  

  Nerd Boyfriend is a Tumblr that provides a guide to dressing your significant other in the style of pretty much every male nerd superhero you can imagine—from Adam West to Woody Guthrie. (Plus quite a few dudes that I don't really think of as geeky icons, like Yves Saint Laurent. But maybe that just because my list of nerderies doesn't include "fashion".)

  I'd be intrigued by this Carl Sagan cosplay ... that is, if my husband didn't already pretty much dress exactly like this.

  Via Kottke

  
  

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• Calling the (live) Time Lady in 1950
  Via the BB Submitterator, Boing Boing reader Pea Hix says,

  "This is an excerpt from a recording I found on an old wire spool (pre magnetic tape recording medium). On April 23rd, 1950, a New Jersey man by the name of Fred Weber was setting his wire recorder up to record a phone conversation, and to test the signal he called the local Time Bureau. On the surface this would appear to be a rather mundane recording, but it isn't until you hear the time lady sneeze that you realize - this is a LIVE person reading off the time in 15-second intervals! "

  Video link, and there are links to more recordings of this kind here in the video description on YouTube.

  
  

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• Poe's "Raven," performed by Star Trek's Q

  Quantum Mechanix has released a nerdtastic Hallowe'en video: John De Lancie (Star Trek's Q) reading Poe's The Raven. I still prefer Lord Buckley's 1950s hipster argot version, but this is damned cool nevertheless.

  (via IO9)

  • Poe's "The Raven," translated into 50s hipster argot
  • Gaiman on Poe: read him aloud!
  • Laser cut Poe in stainless steel
  • Literary sports jerseys
  • Poe paper toy
  • Rock and roll cover of The Raven from 1969
  • Why is a raven like a writing-desk?
  • Famous poems as limericks

  
  

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• Time Traveler Caught on Film in 1928?

  This has been circling the usual internet crazy sites lately, and now it's finally made the conspiracy big time that is Disinformation. Apparently, in the new DVD release of Charlie Chaplin's 1928 The Circus, you can "clearly" see a female extra walking by talking into a cell phone. Here's the video:

  The YouTube comments would be hilarious, if so many of them didn't seem to be serious:

  I bet anything that "woman" is really Nikola Tesla if you pause the video at 3:35 you clearly see he/she is holding a black box to her face. The nose, chin & right cheekbone look to be that of Tesla when he was in his 60's.

  Tesla was also a huge Chaplin fan!

  Nikola Tesla Predicted the Cell Phone in 1909.

  Also the person who first thought of the concept we now call the "internet ("world system") was yup you guessed it, Nikola Tesla.

  It's a conspiracy, you guys! Someone tie it in to 9/11, quick!

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• Stop-Motion Lite Brite: My Two Favorite Things In One Spellbinding Video [Video]
  
  
  

  For anyone whose first adventure in artistic expression was plugging tiny colored bulbs into a Lite Brite board, this amazing video will make the kid in you squeal. And the adult in you amaze at how much work it took. More »

  
  

  

  

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• The Real Privacy Scandal On Social Networks: The Feds Are Spying On Their “Friends”

  

  All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal’s so-called Facebook “privacy breach” article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup, and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that’s much bigger.  It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to “friend” people in order to spy on them.

  The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook.  For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them.  Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other’s news posts going forward.  But that’s not how the government sees it.

  In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy.  Here’s a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo: “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.”  And it gets worse.

  The memo explains that these “tendencies” provide “an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.”  Translation: spy on unsuspecting people on Facebook and MySpace in order to catch the bad guys.

  Such tactics are decidedly creepy (how many completely innocent people are they spying on), but the argument could be made that if you have nothing to hide, then why worry?  Here’s why: many people post items to their profiles that they forget to update or that are not necessarily true, and which they certainly wouldn’t be saying if they knew they were under investigation.  Indeed, a recent study initiated by UK insurance company Direct Line concluded that “people are more likely to be dishonest when chatting using technology, such as Twitter, than they would be face to face.”

  Why is it that people might lie more on social media than in person?  According to Psychologist Glenn Wilson, “we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.”  This leads to a few common sense conclusions.

  First, government officials need to take note that one should not believe everything one reads on the Internet—even if it is generated by a “person of interest.”  Second, as the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch pointed out, “the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.”  In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, government should not be in the business of creating an atmosphere that could chill expression.

  On October 18^th, Congressmen Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which they expressed their concern about marketing companies that “gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users’ friends.”

  To many tech folks, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for government representatives to be going after Silicon Valley companies for using social networking data when the government is doing exactly the same thing itself (and more).  In addition to bureaucrats urging agents to befriend targets, the EFF also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used “a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.”  And, recall how Google Maps has been used to track down hoes with “unpermitted” pools in Long Island, NY.  Those Big Brother moves are much more disconcerting than Facebook applications using referrer URLs to better target ads.

  Editor’s note: Guest author Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow in technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute and has been writing about privacy issues for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @soniaarrison.

  Photo credit: Flickr/nolifebeforecoffee.

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• John Brockman's "Edge: Serpentine Map Marathon" (UPDATE: Now with more Boing!)
  

  Image (click for large): The map of the genome of the first synthetic cell
  J. Craig Venter: Genome Scientist, J. Craig Venter Institute; Author, A Life Decoded

  From the Edge.org Serpentine Map Marathon. John Brockman writes:

  Three years ago, Edge collaborated with The Serpentine Gallery in London in a program of "table-top experiments" as part of the Serpentine's Experiment Marathon . This live event was featured along with the Edge/Serpentine collaboration: "What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm? Formulae For the 21st Century."

  Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine, has invited Edge to collaborate in his latest project, The Serpentine Map Marathon, Saturday and Sunday, 16 - 17 October, at Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR (Map).

  The multi-dimensional Map Marathon features non-stop live presentations by over 50 artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, musicians, architects, designers and scientists. The two-day event takes place in London during Frieze Art Fair week.

  The event features maps by Edge contributors, and an Edge panel of Lewis Wopert, Armand Leroi, and John Brockman, on Sunday (17 October) 1:15pm-2:15pm. The gallery is a work-in-progress. We are posting Edge Maps as they are received.Information Technology, Genetics, Neurobiology, Psychology, Engineering, Chemistry of Materials (yes, even the chemistry of materials. We are made of matter, and therefore any effect on what we are or we will also become the chemistry of the elements that we are made or not?). All these matters, pertaining to domains that are essential for understanding what "means" to be "human."

  The whole collection is here, and more about the project here. Contributors whose works are included so far include Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran; Lewis Wolpert; Armand Leroi; Kai Krause; Tim Berners-Lee; Sean Carroll; Douglas Rushkoff; Marina Abramovic; Joan Chiao; Nicholas A. Christakis and James Fowler; Emanuel Derman; Jennifer Jacquet; Joel Gold; J. Craig Venter; Gino Segre; Bruce Sterling; Laurence C. Smith; Cesar Hildago; Bryan Hunt; George Dyson; Brian Knutson; Matthew Ritchie; Neri Oxman; George F. Smoot; James Croak; John Baldessari; Dimitar Sasselov; Dave McKean; Carlo Ratti; and Nicholas Humphrey.

  Update: A Boing Boing map is now in the mix.

  
  

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