photo: double burner
I just discovered Standford Library’s collection of documents relating to the technology and culture in Silicon Valley and the development of the Mac thanks to a link from Gizmodo. Gizmodo was excited about the mice “wine tastings” that Apple did in its efforts to develop the first consumer mouse. Elsewhere, however, I found this [...]
A lot of this is in my XML Server presentation at the Innovative Users Group conference in a couple weeks…
Jenny Levine is an outspoken advocate for the use of RSS in libraries. One example she cites is posting lists of new acquisitions to library websites. She estimates that folks in the 77 libraries of her [...]
Thank or blame Jenny Levine of TheShiftedLibrarian for this: I’ve just created a “Libraries and Networked Information” category here. More to come.
Content here at MaisonBisson isn’t well focused, but a few stories have come out winners in the Google sweepstakes of passing popular fancy. My story about a giant bear in Alaska was one such winner, but I’m happy to see a few others are also getting read. My stories about stainless steel, the heat output [...]
Melvin Rivera reports on Safari 1.3’s support for contentEditable.
It’s hard to find the words to introduce Eric Berndt’s open letter to his NYU Law School classmates. The Nation said the following:
Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the NYU Annual Survey of American Law’s invitation to engage students in a Q&A session. Randomly selected to attend the [...]
David Rothman at TeleRead linked to Franklin Pierce Law Center professor Thomas G. Field’s guide to copyright on the internet.
Field gives a clear overview of of the limits to copyright, the ways copyright applies to web sites and email, and the limited law on linking and framing web content. In his section on risks, he [...]
There appear to be two non-government-owned companies providing satelite imagery: Space Imaging and upstart DigitalGlobe (yeah, like they’re not both upstarts). DigitalGlobe is working hard to make friends with the media and regularly offers timely images of events, disasters, and wars to them. For the public, they offer some more scenic shots, like this one [...]
Henri Lartigue’s photo of a race car shows one of the wonderful ways in which the camera records its own reality. Spectators lean left while the speeding car tilts right all because of some facts about how his camera works. Lartigue’s camera had a focal plane shutter, a two-part light curtain that slides to one [...]
In Seven Steps to Better Presentations, Jeffrey Veen acknowledges the complaints against PowerPoint, but explains that the real problem is “bad content delivered poorly.”
His seven points have a lot more detail that what I’m quoting here:
Tell stories.
Show pictures.
Don’t apologize. Ever.
Start strong.
End strong too.
Stand. Away from the podium.
Pause.
My own opinion is that Veen and Tufte would [...]
The folks at the North American Vexillological Association get excited about flags. Yeah, I had to look up Vexillology too.
Anyway, they’ve got a 16 page how-to about designing a flag, for “your organization, city, tribe, company, family, neighborhood, or even country!”
Their advice centers around these five rules of flag design:
Keep it simple
Use meaningful symbolism
Use 2-3 [...]
I can’t get enough of Cat and Girl and this one just hit my funny bone.
Thinking of comics, Comic Life makes it easy to lay out your digital photos and add comic-style speech balloons. Looks interesting, though I’m not sure it’s worth $40 bucks.
I just added Jonathan Crowe’s The Map Room to my daily read. It was there that I learned that GeoURL is back, and that’s got me thinking about geocoding things again.
I spoke of geolocating photos in a previous post, but my interest has broadened. I now want to geolocate my blog posts, I want lat [...]
Google Local for mobile devices may be the most useful thing yet.
But then, I’ve been slow to get even the regular Google Search for mobile devices bookmarked.
It’s a reasonable story: guy gets iPod, buddy puts a few favorite tracks on it, everybody jams happily because they can share their little bits of culture. In a way it’s an extension of the mixed tape so romanticized in High Fidelity, but in another way — the RIAA’s way — it’s probably a copyright [...]
