Thoughts and links about Creativity and Technology – recklessly written by Cristiano M. Gaston
Such good news.
The Atlantic reports that the Israeli parliament has passed legislation that prohibits fashion media and advertising with models who fall below the World Health Organization’s standard for malnutrition banning underweight models as determined by Body Mass Index. The new law also stipulates that any ad which uses airbrushing, computer editing, or any other form of Photoshop editing to create a slimmer model must clearly state that fact.
Sometimes you just want a quick answer to a simple question (using Terminal on a Mac).
file -b filename.txt
Google Drive’s licence is slightly different from the one by Dropbox or Microsoft:
Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).
Today is Foursquare Day.
How is foursquare doing? It’s good, but good may not be enough.
Anyway, happy foursquare Day! If you check in today, you will unlock a badge.
An interesting, accurate article about the WordPress economy.
In a post on her blog last year, WordPress designer, business woman and author Lisa Sabin Wilson, talked about how thankful she is to be part of the WordPress economy. It’s an economy that thousands of people, the world over, are benefiting from (including me!). It is an economy built on free, open source software. In this article I’m going to talk to people who are active in the WordPress economy, people from all over the globe. It’s amazing to see how even in the past few years the economy around WordPress has grown, and what new, innovative, enterprises it’s composed of.
A couple of days ago I wrote a post about the “Useless Mug” created by Marco Arment on Zazzle. The mug sold more than one hundred in few hours, when suddenly orders were canceled by Zazzle (with no notice whatsoever to Marco) for a possible copyright infringement. He shared his disappointment on twitter and his followers did the same.
So did I, writing that post and sharing it on twitter. I have around one hundred followers and my blog is not advertised at all, not particularly linked, in few words on a web scale I’m pretty invisible.
It turns out that Zazzle affilate GiftsBonanza has a paper.li account promoted via the relative twitter account @giftbonanza. Guess my surprise when I read this:
My post was featured on their paper.li issue (paper.li collects automatically links via twitter filtered by topic and account) and delivered to over 1.000 targeted followers (as well as another tweet presented as a top story). In the end, Zazzle made bad advertising on its own, against itself.
I don’t know how much this contributed, but for sure the twitter excitement in support of an useless mug made Zazzle change its mind and now the mug is available again (with a promo code too: USELESSMUG50).
This teaches us two things; one, we already knew: bad advertising is advertising (more people know Zazzle now – I myself wasn’t a customer).
The other one is that if you want to use social media to promote your business, it’s better you know your tools and take care of your customers, or it will turn against you immediately.
Update (2012-04-25): The mug has disappeared again. This is a nice marketing strategy: pretend you changed your mind while the hype is up, wait for the dust to settle, then revert to your previous behaviour.
Instagram user @quietobserver about Facebook’s purchase:
I’m not much into protests. But Facebook’s purchase of instagram troubles me. I do think who owns you matters. I joined instagram because it seemed like a realtively non-commercial place to share and observe bits and pieces of people’s lives… a way to see the world. At the least, a form of social media that was iPhone-based… and at its best one that might just make the world grow a little closer together. More like Twitter, LESS like Facebook. I’ve never been interested in pumping content into Facebook. I don’t want the connections I make or the people I follow and the photos I like to be analyzed and sold off to marketers. I’d never want to see my coffeeshop photos used to target me or my followers with Starbucks adverts. Or Travelocity and Priceline because of my airplane pix. I don’t want anyone who follows me to be continually harassed to ‘like this’ or install that or whatever… which is exactly how Facebook makes its money now. I also hate the idea that all the little companies and related innovation that has sprung up around Instagram will now likely be forced out of existence or forced to pay-up if they are to continue. Take a look at your stat “snapshots” page on Statigram today if you have any doubt of what is coming (most of the data is gone) or what we are likely to lose. I doubt Facebook will allow Statigram or the others to manage a Facebook controlled account or even see these statistics… that’s part of the “prize” Facebook is after. I’m not leaving Instagram… yet. At least not until Facebook hits me with a ‘terms of service’ that claims ownership over my “content.” But I’m evaluating what my future participation will be. Also while the sale of Instagram shakes out, I’m downloading a copy of all my IG photos — everything I’ve posted, while I still can. And I encourage you to do the same (visit instaport.me for an easy tool to download your pix). So this is my protest. Who owns you DOES matter. But I’m guessing this protest won’t. Sadly my voice means very little against a billion dollars. But wouldn’t it be nice if the popular page blacked out for a change. Feel free to repost this graphic.
He is right: who owns you does matter.
Recently developer Marco Arment (the author of Instapaper, a guy you should definitely read and follow) shared its “Useless Mug” via Zazzle, an online shop that prints and delivers mugs, t-shirts and so on.
As a (very small) developer, I’ve been lucky enough to receive an extremely limited number of complaints; when you have millions of users though, you have to deal with people complaining for the weirdest things in the weirdest ways (and, this is the downside of iTunes reviews, with no possibility to reply directly and address issues). So I found the mug extremely funny and I was going to order one this morning, when I read this:
UPDATE: After receiving 116 orders for these mugs today, Zazzle canceled all of them, telling every customer (but not me, yet) that it’s an acceptable-use violation: “Design contains an image or text that may be subject to copyright.” This was just something fun, and I don’t have time to battle them on this. Now I just know that Zazzle sucks, and I’ll never do business with them again.
The word that may be copyright protected should be “Google Buzz”. Or “stars”. Or “mug”. At this point, it could be anything.
Update: the mug is available again.
Update 2 (2012-04-25): Guess what? Settled the dust, the mug has disappeared again…
Let’s be honest: thanks to the usual laziness in security updates by Apple and a huge breach in Java, this time the threat is real.
It’s not a virus (a user action is required) and Macs are still much safer than PCs but any operating system can be infected (even iranian nuclear plants) and this is why Apple never advertised its computers as virus-free.
You can now check if you’re infected via few easy steps. Removal requires a more complicated procedure, though.
If you never thought about your Mac security, this could be the right time to buy one of the most precious applications ever made for a Macintosh: LittleSnitch.
Update: the latest update fixes the issue and removes the malware if it’s present (you can download it via Software Update).
Create the most amazing app for iOS ever; reach millions of happy users in months, and keep growing; make it free (charging developers only for the commercial use of your APIs).
Prove that “social network” may mean more, much more than just “Facebook”.
Then sell it to Facebook.
5 days left: $40 instead of $79.99.
Remember that it’s free for websites up to 5 pages, so if you want to try it this may be the right time.
Even when they do something funny, there’s always something creepy too…
This is why I don’t like when the line between fiction and journalism gets blurred:
The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”
If you think this fantastic, gorgeous, modern interface you just invented is both nice and usable (and if you’re going to put it on millions of devices), just ask your dad.
This is the kind of things that make me think: “Is it possible that no one on the Internet has had this issue?”. I found just partial answers and none of them worked (neither the ones provided on WordPress site, because you need to know exactly how to format paths and which directives you need). This should be a very common problem though.
So, to the benefit of anyone coming here through a search engine via the keywords “wordpress permalinks mac” this is how I managed to activate them after a long struggle.
mv htaccess .htaccess). I do these steps because I like to see things when I’m not working exclusively with Terminal, but of course you can do all of this in many other ways./etc/apache2/httpd.conf (or /etc/httpd/httpd.conf if you’re on MacOS X 10.4 or earlier) and scroll to the bottom. Add these lines: <Directory /Users/your_username_here/Sites/my_wordpress_installation>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
Of course you can do all of this with Terminal and vi (or emacs, if you hate yourself).
If you enjoyed your reading so far, give page 2 a try. You will find there these gracefully crafted posts:
