B12 Solipsism

Am very leery of this new kind of advertising, as it has the potential to be extremely irritating.

LIKE many retailers, the North Face has been having trouble luring shoppers into its stores. The company, which sells outdoor apparel and gear, is about to try a new tactic: sending people text messages as soon as they get near a store.

Advertisers have long been intrigued by the promise of cellphones, because they live in people’s pockets and send signals about shoppers’ locations. The dream has been to send people ads tailored to their location, like a coupon for a cappuccino when passing a coffee shop.

…

The campaign was created by Placecast, a location-based mobile ad company in San Francisco. It uses a practice called geo-fencing, which draws a virtual perimeter around a particular location. When someone steps into the geo-fenced area, a text message is sent, but only if consumers have opted in to receive messages.

…

Placecast created 1,000 geo-fences in and around New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston, cities where the North Face has many stores and areas that get a lot of snow or rain, so the company can tailor its messages to the weather. In urban areas, the fences are up to half a mile around stores, and in suburban areas they are up to a mile around stores

[Click to continue reading Advertising - North Face Campaign Sends Texts When Shoppers Near Stores - NYTimes.com]

Some corporations are fairly loose in their definition of “Opt-in”, if these businesses start sending text messages, there are going to be a lot of angry customers. We’ll soon see.

A few interesting links collected January 18th through January 20th:

• Change of Subject: W.W.R.D? — What Would the Republicans Do? – [Republicans]

  now control the U.S. Senate, 41 votes to 59.The Democrats, based on this one very notable setback, seem poised now to attempt a strategy of retreat and appeasement, exactly as is being demanded by their harshest critics on Fox News. Evan Bayh, Barney Frank and the coalition of the pouty and lily livered seem to think voters in the fall will be drawn to the sight of their fluttering white flags.

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• Chicago Transit Authority urges commuters to report photographers | Photography is Not a Crime -

  The Chicago Transit Authority is so “committed to safety,” that it is urging commuters to report people committing “excessive photography/filming.” The sign posted inside the train stations places photographers on the same level as, say, a non-CTA employee walking the tracks or an unattended package or “noxious smells or smoke.”

  In other words, it accuses photographers of being possible terrorists or just suicidal maniacs.

  The problem is that these signs not only encourage commuters to dial 911 when seeing someone taking photos, which will tie up real emergencies, it contradicts the CTA’s own policy on photography and videography within train stations

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• Econundrum: 10 Eco-Apps for Your iPhone | Mother Jones – Econundrum: 10 Eco-Apps for Your iPhone

I’ve been having entirely too much fun with the Hipstamatic iPhone application¹. I’ve taken over two hundred snapshots in the first 48 hours²: a pace that probably won’t last, but for now, I’m enthusiastically exploring the capabilities of the camera.

Turns out there was an actual plastic 35 mm camera called the Hipstamatic, with an interesting back story. The inventors are unfortunately deceased³, but their older brother has created a blog to tell their story, and the story of the iPhone app.

Founders: Bruce and Winston Dorbowski
Founded: November 1982 (Unofficially, as in no lawyers)
Location: Merrill, Wisconsin, USA

The Idea: Bring people a camera that cost less than the film. Bruce had a Russian plastic camera that our father gave him as a Christmas gift in 1972. The camera had since broke and was no longer being made or sold, at least anywhere he could find it. So Bruce and Winston came up with a plan to recreate something similar. Winston had fallen in love with his Kodak Instamatic and that was the start of the Hipstamatic.

Camera Specs
Model: 100
Material: Plastic Body, Plastic Lens
Produced: 1982-84
Type: View finder camera
Lens: Hipsta A1
Film: 35mm
Picture Size: 28mm x 28mm
Original Cost: $8.25
Focus: Automatic
Aperture: 2.8
Flash: hot shoe

[Click to continue reading The Great Hipstamatic 100]

I never owned my own Hipstamatic, but the iPhone app seems like a pretty good simulacrum, even going so far as to force you to use a tiny little viewfinder to frame your shot.

the camera takes a second to warm up (well, at least it pretends to be warming up the transistors), also ‘turning on the flash’ takes a few moments. Can’t take rapid-fire photos, in other words. I’ve missed a few shots because of this, but I suppose it’s part of the game, yo. And since there is no flash on an iPhone, I’m guessing turning on the flash just adds a bit of randomly controlled coloration to the image.

changing lens, film, flash is as easy as a swipe of the finger…

My other complaint about the application is that the cost doesn’t include some extras like this film, for instance. The application could have been priced a couple of dollars more and included. Not that big of a deal really, mostly annoyed me because my iPhone password is fairly robust and includes a lot of typing, numbers, capital letters, etc. I bet the $1.99 initial price spurs sales though.

Once your image has been “developed”, you can either email it, or upload it to Facebook. I’m happy with these options, as I usually upload iPhone snapshots to Flickr via the email-to-Twitter option. Alternatively, the image is saved in your iPhone photo library for you to sync to your computer or whatever else you normally would do. I chose to email via the Hipstamatic application interface as Hipstamatic then records what lens, film, flash is used⁴

I have bought a few other iPhone camera apps⁵, none have been nearly as much fun to use as The Great Hipstamatic.

1. available here, if you have an iPhone that is [↩]
2. though only uploaded a handful [↩]
3. killed entirely too young by a drunk driver [↩]
4. for instance, the photo at the top of the page used Lens: John S / Film: Float /Flash: Off. [↩]
5. Best Camera and CameraBag are the two I’ve used the most [↩]

Evening rush hour hipstamaticly, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: John S
Film: Kodot Verichrome
Flash: Off

decluttr

there’s a new iPhone phone app called Hipstamatic that’s sweeping through the Flickr community. Sort of a quirky application, but fun nonetheless. I’ve already snapped dozens of shots in a few hours worth of use. Doesn’t seem like it saves high resolution versions though, which is a flaw, imho.

Another way to pretend our fancy smartphones are toy cameras or Holgas.

A few interesting links collected December 16th through December 17th:

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : AT&T: Chokehold is “irresponsible and pointless” – It’s their own fault, of course. Go look at their financial statements and open up the Financial Operations and Statistics Summary and look at capital expenditures over the past eight quarters. I’m no math whiz, but it looks like capex has gone down by about 30% over the time period. Scroll down a bit to the Wireless section and check out data revenues — they’re up 80% over the same period.

• 

• WordPress › Pretty Link « WordPress Plugins – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. You can now shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host.

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• The Conway Twitty Tribute Pistol (MP3s) – WFMU’s Beware of the Blog – If you’d prefer to remember Conway Twitty for his talents as a singer and songwriter, here are a few MP3s to help you out. All were written by Twitty, with the exception of Pop A Top, which was composed by Nat Stuckey.

A few interesting links collected December 10th through December 11th:

• Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border – “Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

  “In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.”

• 

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T – By April, twelve weeks after that album came out, the Beatles had the top five spots on the Billboard chart.Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted. … Randall, baby. we’ve got a hit on our hands. We’ve got the smartphone equivalent of Meet the Beatles.

• 

• ‘Editor & Publisher’ to Cease Publication After 125 Years – Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.

  An announcement, made by parent company The Nielsen Co., was made Thursday morning as staffers were informed that E&P, in both print and online, was shutting down.

Pope ensconced in purple, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Office cat living the highlife, modified with CameraBag, using the Helga setting¹

decluttr

I don’t really know much about Holga cameras, other than they seem popular in the digital age, probably because they introduce an element of unpredictability into a photo. I’ve heard musicians add a bit of static (or vinyl record static, more precisely) into their digital music files for the same reason. A bit of analog signal in a digital world.

I’ve never used a Holga, but several iPhone applications emulate the process, as do some Photoshop filters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holga

The Holga is an inexpensive, medium format 120 film toy camera, made in China, appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga’s cheap construction and simple meniscus lens often yields pictures that display vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions. The camera’s quality problems have become a virtue among some photographers, with Holga photos winning awards and competitions in art and news photography.

The Holga camera was designed by T. M. Lee, and first appeared in 1982 in Hong Kong. At the time, 120 rollfilm in black-and-white was the most widely available film in mainland China. The Holga was intended to provide an inexpensive mass-market camera for working-class Chinese in order to record family portraits and events. After the cameras began to be distributed in the West, some photographers took to using the Holga for its surrealistic, impressionistic scenes for landscape, still life, portrait, and especially, street photography. In this respect, the Holga became the successor to the Diana and other toy cameras previously used in such work. A Holga photograph by David Burnett of former vice-president Al Gore during a campaign appearance earned a top prize in a 2001 White House News Photographers’ Association Eyes of History award ceremony.

Recently the Holga has experienced a revival due to the gaining popularity of toy cameras.

1. Helga not Holga, probably due to copyright reasons [↩]

A few interesting links collected December 9th through December 10th:

• From the Desk of David Pogue – Free Speech (Recognition) – NYTimes.com – Remember the Gmail brouhaha? … At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.

  As for the names in your Contacts: they’re sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.

  What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?

  I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.

• 

• Jon22 » today’s grammar lesson: rob enderle – Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.

• 

• Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Electronic Frontier Foundation – privacy option telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API.”

  That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an app.

  Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don’t want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn’t use Facebook.

A few interesting links collected December 6th through December 7th:

• “Do I have the right to refuse this search?” | Homeland Security Watch – TSA Terrorism Theater is a Joke, and not the 911 kind¹ “Within the last few months, I have been singled out for “additional screening” roughly half the time I step into an airport security line. On Friday, October 9, as I stepped out of the full-body scanning device at BWI, I decided I needed more information to identify why it is that I have become such an appealing candidate for secondary screening.

  Little did I know this would be only the first of many questions I now have regarding my airport experiences.

  Over these last few months, I have grown increasingly frustrated with what I view as an unjustifiable intrusion on my privacy. It was not so much the search (then) as it was the embarrassment of being singled out, effectively being told “You are different,” but getting no explanation as to why.”

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• Mark the Spot: Tell AT&T where the iPhone sucks – Well now there is an electronic version of that crosswalk button for me to push whenever my signal degrades. This app, free in the App Store lets you pinpoint your location when the call was dropped. Expect a good constellation of points around my house

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• Oxford American – The Southern Magazine of Good Writing :: Ode to a Pecan Pie – The pecan pie has been on the Brigtsen’s menu for all twenty-three years of the restaurant’s history. It is evidence of Brigtsen’s broader philosophy.

  “I wanted it to be just that: a classic Southern dessert. I am not out to change the world with my food. I am not out to reinvent the wheel. I’m only here to make people happy. And whatever it takes to do that is my goal. I also believe that just because something is one hundred years old or twenty-three years old doesn’t mean it isn’t good anymore.”

1. or the 9/11 kind [↩]

Depth of feeling, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Lake Michigan – Door County

modded with Mill Color [a free iPhone app: website for The Mill ]

A few interesting links collected November 1st through November 2nd:

• Redeeming iPhone App Promo Codes in iTunes – You can redeem a code at the iTunes Store by following these instructions: Open iTunes. Click iTunes Store in the pane on the left-hand side of the window. Click the Redeem link in the QUICK LINKS box on the right-hand side of page. Enter your code. Click the Redeem button.
• 
• Two Bare Hands – Staring at your two bare hands For hours.

  Just like a young,
  Sexually frustrated male
  On a Friday night
  With nothing better
  To do.

Lonely bike in the rain, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

view from my office window

how many days of rain can one county have? Did we move to London when I wasn’t looking?

Clarity of distress, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

iPhone snapshot modified with Best Camera App

View On Black

probably my personal favorite iPhone snapshot, so far. Might be a copy of some famous photo, but not consciously, if at all.

Street corner in the rain, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

West Loop, from my office window. Modified with Best Camera app

View On Black

if I had opened this on my computer before uploading, I might have cropped this a bit, but not drastically.

A few interesting links collected October 5th through October 6th:

• Why I give marijuana to my autistic child. – Last spring, I wrote about applying for a medical marijuana license for my autistic, allergic 9-year-old son, J., in hopes of soothing his gut pain and anxiety, the roots of the behavioral demons that caused him to lash out at others and himself. After reading studies of how cannabis can ease pain and worry, and in consultation with his doctor, we decided to give it a try

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• Have You Gotten Your Google Wave Invite? – Google Wave – Lifehacker – “So far the only people I know who’ve received their invites were people who were in the dev preview, people who were invited by someone at Google, and the rest of those who were part of the very early 100,000 invite pool. Which is to say, I don’t believe that anyone who’s been invited by another Wave user has gotten their invitation yet. I quickly sent out my Wave invites to my fellow Lifehacker editors as soon as I was in, but as of now none of them have received an invitation.”On a related note, I still have a couple unclaimed invites to Google Wave. I sent out several of the eight as soon as I signed up, but nobody has gotten their invite yet that I know of

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• iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple « LambdaJive – iSinglePayer available in the App Store Thanks everyone for raising this issue publicly. Over the weekend Apple approved iSinglePayer and it is now available for download in the Healthcare and Fitness section of the App Store. I am glad that the app got through, and I hope that Apple will not be rejecting any more applications because they are politically charged. Thanks again, all!