U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, Washington Post article.
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
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Dubious music videos

Do you know any really bad music videos?
Admittedly it'll be hard to beat this one, but you don't have to.



No takers? OK, here's a couple more.

Just google for it

"The address Google.com does not exist. Try googling for it." 
Hahaha.

In the old days I thought it was funny, tragic, and lame that the computer could not tell the difference between a nonexisting address and a nonexisting Net connection. Then for some years it could. Now it seems we're back again to this ridiculous state.

By the way, I wonder if Google is going to sue Apple for making the Google name a generic verb?

Alison Brie a la carte

I guess this is funnier if you have seen Community and know how wonderfully innocent and naîve Alison Brie's character Annie is.



... Unfortunately I couldn't find the whole clip of the xmas-costume dance from which there's a couple of seconds at the end here, for it's one of the sexiest things I've seen, prob the hottest xmas song since Eartha Kitt.

I don't know where this is from, but she's very funny like usual:



She really is beautiful. Watch Craig Furguson here, he's so overwhelmed he has to scoot away from her!



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Quote from the show:
"There will always be a reason not to follow your dreams."
That's great. And it's useful for going either way!

"The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back"

The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back, article.
Since everybody is on Facebook, one can expect that it will in some way mirror the behavior of society in general. In the real world however, people’s opinions only have a limited reach.
Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say. Here is a network that doesn’t care about originality or the quality of content. In the time it takes to create something original, they could share dozens of things.
Just like its features, Facebook algorithms are equally stupid. Share more, get noticed more. Originality be damned.
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Scansnap as art scanner

I've mentioned the Fujitso Scansnap before. (In the meantime I got a Mac model.) It's a wonderful, fully automatic document scanner. It rights up documents after scanning*. Does automatic OCR if you want (Optical Character Recognition, reads text off a scan and imbeds it in the file, so you can search for text later). It scans both sides at once! It really great for scanning in your paperwork and such.

It is not a flatbed scanner, and it's not expensive, so it's not meant to be an art scanner. (Art in the wider sense, meaning images.) (One weakness is that the art may shift as it passes through the scanner; and of course it only takes thin objects.) But on a whim, I tested it as such, and I'm impressed.
The durn thing automatically detects if a document should be scanned and treated as color, or greyscale, or B/W. And this quick, one-take scan of a brochure is as perfect as I could have expected in every way.
The font in the brochure is very small and thin, but it's fully readable in the scan. And the color pictures are perfect, the colors are spot on, and I can see at least as much detail in shadow and highlights as I can on the original. (It seems it also adjusts contrast automatically.)

Here's a link to the PDF which the scanner made. 

*Though not successfully in this case, probably because the brochure is cut around the images, no straight edges. BTW, I like the medium grey it fills in the background, much better than black or white. 

Giraffe escapades

How often haven't you thought to yourself: "I really wish somebody would make a short-film about high-diving giraffes." I know, right!?
Well, now our wishes have come true.

Olympus OMD contrast range

Bert mentioned this image as an example of the great contrast range of the sensor in the Olympus OMD E-M5. And I admit it's a wonderful example. I'm familiar with such a subject with the setting sun mostly from the back, and the contrast is damn high, it has always been virtually impossible to get details in the shadows and keep the sky. But look at this:

After a simple, quick Levels change (on a JPG, not even RAW):

Orig scaled for Blogger:

tumblr. 1.1 billion (updated)

tumblr. I never really understood what it is. But that may be a matter of temperament/nature. Or age.
But it was developed by two guys who were fanatic. It never really made money.
And now Yahoo has bought it for 1.1 Billion dollars! Billion...
There's so much I don't understand in this world.

One thing I don't understand, by the way, is that this is apparently a "micro-blogging" platform. (What is that, blogging for people who don't write?) And yet when you come to their home page, there are no blogs to be seen. None, nada, zip. Huh? In fact I've messed around in browsers and apps now for ten minutes, and I've yet to see one actual "micro blog". Also when you sign in, there's a form, but it does not tell you if it wants a username or an email address.

Is it that young people think different? Or that usability as Jakob Nielsen and I understand it, is already a dead art and we might as well give it up?

Even after I've (signed up and) signed in, the page I get has a tall column of posts, I guess they are, but I don't understand what most of them are about. Most are just pictures. I don't understand if they are supposed to be funny, or interesting, or connected to other bits of material I'm supposed to have seen before or be familiar with...

One of the things I don't understand is that considering the fantastic amount of work which has gone into developing tumblr, and the high price it sold for... there must be something enormously unique about it, yes? But what is it? Because what is it exactly that it can do that other blogging platforms can't? Anybody can make short posts in a blog. And all of them also can be posted to in a wide variety of ways, and can connect to the Social Spider Web in so many ways that one feels like a fly just waiting for the spider.

Update:
I'm trying to set up my own tumblr blog. For some reason, it's called "Untitled"! And I can't find any way to change that!
What's more, you can install Disqus in *some* of their themes, but tumblr does not even have its own commenting system. How on Earth can anybody think this site is worth a billion bucks??

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Oh, some of the art I like though, like this one:

James Wyper. Acrylic on birch, 36x36 in.

It has a basis of slickness and order in the composition, but avoids being boring by the distressed colors in the shapes. (It is rare for me to like something which has so many different, strong colors. They usually clash badly. I guess he has done something subtly right with them.)

Good stuff for a modern home.

Contradictions

"You and I are alike. We are independent. We need each other."
— Community

I'm much enjoying this sitcom.

I couldn't find a decent image of Chevvy Chase in this show, but he's there, and he is quite funny as the obliviously bigoted but somehow innocent Pierce.

Josh Groban - "Vincent"

[Thanks to Signalroom, who heard this in concert recently]

This is very good. Though I feel he is almost too "fancy" a singer for this song, which I feel is basically a simple thing (though very good) like most things in Vincent's own life.




Original by Don Mclean:




Don by the way once said "Vincent" was the "undervalued little brother to Miss American Pie" or words to that effect.     :-)
To be fair, the songs are very different, and I am not surprised MAP is the more popular, it's a riveting song, and a dance song to boot, when done like it (I really like Madonna's version, which Don did also).

My Writing Spot updated

The web and hand-held-device writing app My Writing Spot (once called My Writing Nook, until B&N got proprietary about the word "Nook", which is idiotic, since nobody would confuse the the writing app with the ereader device) has had some nice updates to the web part, including: change of font and text size.

On a computer the lack of this feature was less important, but Safari on iPad/iPhone and the browser on Android can’t change text size. (Which by the way I consider a glaring and shameful flaw, since you need this feature more the smaller the screen is.)

There are many very good writing apps on iOS now, but My Writing Spot were the first and only one (apart from Pages) I found on Day One of the iPad era, so I still have a weak spot for it.  So far as I know, it's also the only one with a simple web browser interface included, so you can write on any web-enabled device or computer in the world, I think that's powerful. 

This is the web interface, but MWS also has dedicated apps for iOS and Android. 

It is text-only, no formatting. But I prefer that when I'm writing, and just to indicate the little formatting I need in Markdown, like one asterisk for italics and two for bold. 

MWS uses Google's authentication system to save the documents, so you need to have a google account (but not necessarily a Google email address).