The implosion of Lexmark
Using iPhone for TV journalism
Not-So-Easy Listening: It Takes a Trek to Hear This Track
Interesting article (from the Wall Street Journal, of all places) on a novel form of music distribution chosen by one of Sufjan Steven’s fans.
-1 style points for inane use of the word “curate,” though. It’s quickly becoming the dumbest buzzword of the ’00s.
In awe of The Beatles: Rock Band opening cinematic by the consistently out-of-this-world Passion Pictures.
This is amazing. Watch it in HD at the link above. Watch it now.
Canon SD960: Great Pictures, Great Video
The Political Graveyard
Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.
(via azspot)
Free word count services
I tend to do a lot of plaintext writing in Mac OS X’s TextEdit, since it has all features I need to write things down. Unfortunately, it does not have a word count feature.
Enter Devon Technologies’ Word Service. A free download, Word Service lets you get a word count from any app that has a Services menu. Nice.
Panel recommends ending tenure at Kentucky's community and technical college system
Robot Programmed to Love Traps Woman in Lab, Hugs Her Repeatedly
There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.
Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.
I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
Cupertino, start your photocopiers
It looks like Safari 4 copies Chrome’s UI wholesale. Besides Safari’s separate “Address” and “Search” boxes, everything — including Top Sites — is the same. On Windows, the similarity is even more striking. For example, compare this image to this one. Notice that, in addition to the titlebar tabs’ position and the top sites grid, Apple has also copied the “page” and “gear” menus to the left of the location field.Saving newspapers
Fred Clark examines Walter Isaacson’s recent Time cover story:
His big solution, in short, is that somebody needs to invent some kind of convenient micropayment system that would allow newspapers to charge for the online content we’re currently giving away for free. Web advertising, Isaacson figures, will never produce sufficient revenue to cover the cost of producing all that free content.
Well, maybe that would help. Partly. Perhaps. Although I’m far from convinced that newspapers are really suffering from a problem of insufficient revenue as much as they are from a problem of foolishly inappropriate revenue expectations.
Oh yes all that, and then the added problem of any such magical micropayment system breaking the freaking Internet. As in, suddenly an entire class of Web pages are available only to users with Web browsers and operating systems blessed by content providers. It would be like the old browser wars all over again, except that anyone using a minority Web browser or operating system will be left out in the cold. A good rule of thumb: if you’re considering a Web policy that will lock some users out, it’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.
But I agree with Fred that newspapers are dying and there’s little we can do to prevent that. What we need to do, somehow, is figure out how to preserve the best qualities of newspapers in this new media world.
