from Cool Tools http://www.kk.org/cooltools/
Where I live, decent public libraries with connections to the software service Overdrive allow surprisingly easy checkout of "library books" wirelessly to your Kindle. The Overdrive system provides libraries with both audiobook downloads and eBooks. I find, like most, that reading or listening to these books on a computer is untenable, but transferring audiobooks to my Sansa Clip player is as easy as pie.

For the (increasingly) large selection of books with Kindle versions, it's very easy to get free content to show up via Amazon's Whispernet. Nothing fiddly about it, no cables either. And for the earlier cool tool of "User Manual First", Kindles are a pretty good place to keep these PDF files. Either transfer via cable (easy) or use your Kindle's email address which allow your docs to show up via Whispernet.

Finally, if you sign up for Amazon Prime service, you not only get free shipping on your purchases, you also get access to the "Kindle Owner's Library" - more books without fees. And if your Kindle is a Fire (or you don't mind watching on a PC), you also get access to lots of streaming video (my wife is re-enjoying Ally McBeal (and I'm enjoying not being exposed to it, too)).

Anyway, go to your library's website and look for Overdrive services. Another convergence of several cool tools that merge to form a new level of cool tool.

-- Wayne Ruffner

The ubiquity of ereaders like the Kindle, Nook and iPad has driven a surge in ebook availability. Retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble have the lock on bestsellers and the like, but a flourishing underground market for free and cheap ebooks has become a boon for readers.

The best established source for free ebooks is Project Gutenberg whose archives contain over 36,000 ebooks that represent nearly every out-of-copyright classic piece of literature along with a vast archive of obscure but pleasurable reads. The quality of digitization is excellent, and the site's vibrant community ensures that any errors are quickly fixed. They also offer the ebooks in a variety of formats (ePub, mobi, html), including some as downloadable audiobooks.

With more and more libraries getting into the game of lending ebooks, the software company Overdrive (that Wayne mentioned) has been leading the way. Libraries contract out their ebook libraries to OverDrive who make them available for a limited loan period (via a proprietary DRM from Adobe) through their software that is available on most operating systems including iOS and Android. Once you have the application, simply add your local or state library system (some are better stocked than others) and Overdrive allows you to browse the ebooks that they have available to check out. Everything's automated so there are no late fees, and often times you can get best sellers without waiting (or, if they're "checked out" you can reserve them and when they become available they are automatically downloaded).

ManyBooks.net is the friendliest index of free ebooks of the bunch. It will search Project Gutenberg's archives, as well as troll through numerous other archives. They also provide recommendations and reviews (which is incredibly useful given the sheer number of available titles).

Outside of strictly free sources, InkMesh is the best search engine I have found for identifying if an author or a book is available in ebook form, whether it is free, where I can download it, and in what format. They have also collated a comprehensive list of free ebooks available for a variety of platforms.

Two more sources for the ebook crazy are the blogs Pixel of Ink and Books on the Knob which highlight attractive deals for the Kindle.

Finally, to manage this inundation of ebooks I heartily recommend the previously reviewed Calibre. If you have other recommended sources for eBooks and the like, feel free to leave a note in the comments and I'll make sure to update this page.

-- Oliver Hulland

Overdrive
Free

Amazon Prime
$79/year (or $39/year for students)

Project Gutenberg
Free

ManyBooks.net
Free

InkMesh
Free

Pixel of Ink
Free

from Delicious/network/earth2marsh http://www.delicious.com/network/earth2marsh "Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, 'Straight White Male' is the lowest difficulty setting there is."

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9

Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store.1 We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch.

Apple is still pulling this crap? Give an explanation at the very minimum.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9

Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Flipping heck. Former Microsofties are appalled.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Lifehacker Feed Cleaner 2.0 http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_KqfbFy42xGm7SnDp2IyXQ

Android: Widgets are awesome, but if you're keeping your eye on a service or web site that doesn't have a widget in the Play Store, you can make your own with Meta Widget.

To get started, just open up Meta Widget and navigate to the site you want to "widgetize". Then, when you get to the page you want, check the box in the lower left corner and tap somewhere on the page. It'll surround that element in an orange box, after which you can move the selection tool around with the arrows at the bottom of the screen. When you find the element you want to put on your home screen, tap the plus sign and go to town configuring text colors, widget alignment, and more to make it look just right.

It won't work with every single site out there, and unfortunately it takes quite a bit of trial and error, so be prepared to do some serious tinkering with this app. The more a site is formatted for mobile, the better it will probably end up (RSS feeds often work well too). Check out the video above to see a demonstration, or hit the link below to download it for yourself.

Meta Widget is a free download for Android devices.

Meta Widget | Play Store via XDA Developers Blog

from The Official Google Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be.
So two years ago we launched the Transparency Report, showing when and what information is accessible on Google services around the world. We started off by sharing data about the government requests we receive to remove content from our services or for information about our users. Then we began showing traffic patterns to our services, highlighting when they’ve been disrupted.
Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.
For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.

Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why. To promote that transparency, we have long shared copies of copyright removal requests with Chilling Effects, a nonprofit organization that collects these notices from Internet users and companies. We also include a notice in our search results when items have been removed in response to copyright removal requests.
We believe that the time-tested “notice-and-takedown” process for copyright strikes the right balance between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users, and our efforts to provide a useful Google Search experience. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process. We already mentioned that we’re processing more copyright removal requests for Search than ever before. And we’re also processing these requests faster than ever before; last week our average turnaround time was less than 11 hours.
At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results. We try to catch these ourselves, but we also notify webmasters in our Webmaster Tools when pages on their website have been targeted by a copyright removal request, so that they can submit a counter-notice if they believe the removal request was inaccurate.
Transparency is a crucial element to making this system work well. We look forward to making more improvements to our Transparency Report—offering copyright owners, Internet users, policymakers and website owners the data they need to see and understand how removal requests from both governments and private parties affect our results in Search.Posted by Fred von Lohmann, Senior Copyright Counsel

from Code: Flickr Developer Blog http://code.flickr.com/blog
With over 1.5 million groups, it’s no doubt that they are an important part of Flickr. Today, we’re releasing a few new ways to interact with groups using our API.

Group Membership

We are adding two new methods to manage group membership through the API.

flickr.groups.join to join a group. Before calling this method, check if the group has rules using flickr.groups.getInfo. The user needs to agree to the rules before being able to join the group. Pass the accept_rules argument if the user accepted the rules.

flickr.groups.leave to leave a group. The user’s photos can also be deleted when leaving the group by passing the delete_photos argument.

Group Discussions

We are also opening up group discussions in the API. You can now fetch a list of discussion topics for a group using flickr.groups.discuss.topics.getList, with sticky topics first, then regular topics sorted from newest to oldest.

flickr.groups.discuss.topics.add to post a new topic to a group, passing a subject and the message content.

Additionally, you can fetch a list of replies for a topic using flickr.groups.discuss.replies.getList, which includes the information for the topic along with all the replies, sorted from oldest to newest.

flickr.groups.discuss.replies.add to post a reply to a topic, passing the message content.

flickr.groups.discuss.replies.edit to edit a reply, passing the updated message.

flickr.groups.discuss.replies.delete to delete a reply.

You can only edit and delete replies when authorized as the owner of the reply. For now, it is not possible to edit or delete a topic through the API.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or just want to chat about these methods or anything else related to the API, please join the Flickr Developer mailing list.

Photos from fofurasfelinas and larissa_allen.

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 First off, my intention is not to fight you on this. You have more cars than I have dollars, and so I know I don’t stand a chance legally, and on top of that, I don’t really understand how legal stuff works. But the truth is you kind of fucked up my shit and I need to talk to you about it.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from The Official Google Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ We continue to work toward a simpler, more beautiful Google, and today we're accelerating these efforts with a new Google+ app for Android phones. The update includes lots of highly-requested features—like the ability to start a hangout on the go, and to edit posts inline—as well as a stream that celebrates the rich content shared across Google+. In all cases we're building for a mobile future, and we're excited about what's ahead.Start a hangout from anywhere, and ring the folks that matter most
With Hangouts we want to help people connect face-to-face-to-face—at any time, from anywhere. Of course, there's really only one device that's always by your side—your phone—so we've invested in mobile hangouts since early on. Today we're adding another important feature to the mix: the ability to start a hangout directly from your mobile device.
To get started, tap “Hangout” in the (new) navigation ribbon, add some friends and tap “Start.” We'll ring their phones (if you want), and if someone misses the hangout, they can ring you back with a single tap.Share your favorites, and feel awesome afterward
When you share with your circles, we owe you an experience that's both intimate and immersive. Your time and your relationships are precious, after all, so your posts should make you feel proud. Today's new Android app takes this to heart, with full-screen media in the stream, conversations that fade into view and instantly-touchable actions like +1.Do more, in less time
We think you’ll find today’s app nicer to look at, but we’re also making it easier to use. Improvements include:

A navigation ribbon that slides in and out, providing quick access to just about everything

The ability to download photos directly from Google+, and turn them into wallpaper

The chance to edit posts inline, in case you make any mistakes while on the go

The update is available now from Google Play (version 2.6), so we invite you to download Google+, and let us know what you think!

Selected screenshots from today’s new Android app

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President

from The Wirecutter http://thewirecutter.com

I've field tested the Solar JOOS Orange battery pack on many adventures, and it has never let me down. Now, we've collected some evidence that it's one of the best around.

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9Source: http://apple.com/iphone/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 I want to help port the MESS and MAME emulators to Javascript.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9Source: http://pinboard.in/

""

from Marginal Revolution http://marginalrevolution.com

Rahul, a loyal MR reader, asks:

You seem a very productive person and travel quite a bit too. Are you very cell-phone savvy and does it impact your productivity? Any apps you love or use a lot? (Do you play chess on the move! )

Can you blog about your personal cellphone selection strategy. Curious what phone(s) you use.
Ditto for Laptops. What’s your selection strategy. Small versus large screen real estate. What’s your personal optimum.

Also, Mac / PC / or Linux? What’s your ecosystem and what do you love/hate about it.

Would love a blog post on these topics! It’s convenient to imitate the choices of a productive person!

No, I am not cell phone savvy, as I still do not know how to send a text (just this year I learned how to read one).  In any case, here is my ecosystem:

1. Verizon cellphone.  Very simple, I use it only for calls, the keys are very convenient and otherwise it has no features which I either understand or use.

2. iPhone, latest edition.  I never use it for calls unless I am overseas, in which case it becomes my cellphone for receiving calls (no reason to make them in other countries).  I use it for email, and not for apps, and occasionally for visiting websites such as this one.  I have spent time with some apps to learn how they work, but for research purposes.  Overall their closed systems do not appeal to me.

3. iPad 1.0.  It’s beautiful, it was important, mine has a nice case on it, and I don’t want to part with it.  Plus I have some windows kept open on it.  By carrying around two iPads I can keep more windows open, without being confused.

4. iPad 3.0.  Better than the original iPad (which as we’ve seen is already worth carrying around), and the web connection works internationally and very well.  I now feel connected to the important information just about everywhere.  It has changed my life.

5. I don’ t know what kind of laptop I have, although I guess I could look.  It’s not optimized for anything, except perhaps my own ignorance.  It’s not an Apple Mac, I know that, and I am glad I got rid of Vista.

6. Kindle.  I still prefer real books, but for long plane rides, or sometimes even short plane rides, the carry costs of books are high.  So it gets plenty of use.

Here is an article on why so many Nigerians own more than one cell phone.

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 'a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services. Developed by Yammer to power their JVM-based backend services, Dropwizard pulls together stable, mature libraries from the Java ecosystem into a simple, lightweight package that lets you focus on getting things done. Dropwizard has out-of-the-box support for sophisticated configuration, application metrics, logging, operational tools, and much more, allowing you and your team to ship a production-quality HTTP+JSON web service in the shortest time possible.' From Coda Hale/Yammer; includes Guava, Jetty, Jersey, Jackson, Metrics, slf4j. Pretty good baseline to start any new Java service with....Source: http://pinboard.in/

""

""

"The Magic Trackpad normally slants up to match the keyboard angle. Some may prefer to use it slanted down in their lap, on the couch, or on low desks with a gel palm rest. With this hidden pref, the trackpad auto-detects hand orientation from 5 resting fingers and rotates the coordinate system to match.

When slanted down, the mechanical button is at the front, activated by the fingertips instead of the thumb. If you don't like this, try turning on tap-to-click and 3-finger drag in the trackpad control panel. (You may then want the defaults write that moves navigation swipes from three to four fingers, displacing Exposé and application switch).

Type this in terminal:

defaults write com.apple.trackpad.orientation TrackpadOrientationMode 1

The orientation detection should become active after rebooting, reconnecting the trackpad, or changing other settings in the trackpad control panel. Just rest 5 fingers on the Magic Trackpad after turning it around and the cursor will thereafter move in the desired direction.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. It has been suggested that the following command will work where the other does not. Give it a try and let us know. You will need to supply your admin password for this.]

sudo defaults write com.apple.MultitouchSupport ForceAutoOrientation YES"

Product usability and aesthetics are coexistent, but they are not identical. To understand how usability and aesthetics influence reactions to a product, we conducted an experimental lab study with 80 participants. We created four versions of an online clothing shop varying in beauty (high vs. low) and usability (high vs. low). Participants had to find a number of items in one of those shops and buy them. To understand how the factors of beauty and usability influence final users happiness, we measured how they much they liked the shop before and after interaction.

The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products' beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using the shops. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop

Texts from Xcode are hilarious

a bit like ifttt

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 "Between 11:49 and 11:54, something extraordinary happened. For about 300 seconds, the computers took over. The stock, which had dropped four points in the five minutes prior, froze in an incredibly narrow five-cent range while two sets of computers put in thousands upon thousands of bids against one another. On one side, the underwriters' computers were offering to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock to keep it from dipping below the crucial $38 level; on the other, high frequency traders were making veerrryyy slightly higher bids at just above $38 — $38.01, $38.02 — which they would sell, literally seconds later. … For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer program. The stock that convinced untold thousands of regular people with E-Trade accounts to get back into investing behaved according to rules that literally none of them understood, traded at volumes that none of them could conceive of and effectively followed contradictory orders from two sets of screaming robots. This is what future shock feels like." via Chris (Twitter)Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Marginal Revolution http://marginalrevolution.com

That is the new and oddly underreported book by Mark Kurlansky, about Clarence Birdseye and the early history of frozen food.  I found it consistently good and enjoyable, here is one excerpt:

Birdseye asked himself many questions about food and survival in the subarctic.  Why, he wondered, did people in Labrador eat lean food in the summer but a tremendous amount of fat in the winter?  The ultimate winter survival dish was something he called bruise, which is sometimes known as brewis, a combination of dried and salted food mixed with a tremendous amount of fat.  Usually it was salt cod, hardtack, flour, and water, baked hard and mixed with cubed salt pork, and then boiled and served like a hash with huge globs of melted pork fat.  Bowls of melted fat were often served on the table to spoon onto food.  Birdseye laughed when heard a host say, “Have some more grease on your bruise,” but everyone then took a few spoonfuls.  It was a Sunday morning breakfast favorite.  He remembered that people also ate a great deal of grease in the Southwest, where it was hot in the summer.  They would open a can of corn and eat it with pork fat.

Here is one picture of fish and brewis.  I found this book especially interesting on the early history of European-settled Labrador.

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 Program design: The program hung at an angle, so the names were rotated accordingly to ensure optimal readability. The hole was drilled in the bottom gutter of the booklet so it could be easily flipped through while attached to the lanyard.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Lifehacker Feed Cleaner 2.0 http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_KqfbFy42xGm7SnDp2IyXQ

If the mic on your phone, laptop, or other device leaves a bit to be desired, the bootlegMIC is a simple DIY mic that sounds fantastic and takes up almost no space at all.

Originally created for better concert bootlegs, the bootlegMIC is great for any sound that's too loud for your phone's microphone. If it sounds distorted when you record it, the bootlegMIC will make it sound a whole lot better. It's definitely on the simpler side of electronics DIY, so if you're just getting started it's a great little project, and you can order all the parts as a kit from Open Music Labs. See the video above for a comparison between a regular cellphone mic and the bootlegMIC, and hit the link below to check out the kit.

bootlegMIC | Open Music Labs via Hack a Day

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 RT @TheAtlantic: Why aren't cities littered with dead pigeons? The answer is fascinating -- and gross: http://t.co/bC91NORxSource: http://instapaper.com/

"This library is designed to create an easy way to build a custom Google Analytics Dashboard on your own page. The library is built on top of the Google Analytics Core Reporting and Chart Tools APIs and does all the heavy lifting of handling authorization, issuing queries, and transforming the results into pretty visualizations.

"

Pick HTML is an extension that allows you to grab the HTML from any currently running tab and bring it in to your application using…
Pick HTML is an extension that allows you to grab the HTML from any currently running tab and bring it in to your application using the Web Intents API.

Simple invoke a service that calls the "http://webintents.org/pick" intent with the following data type "text/html"

from Lifehacker Feed Cleaner 2.0 http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_KqfbFy42xGm7SnDp2IyXQ

I grew up making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (PB&Js) using the simplest method possible. Spread peanut butter on one slice of bread, spread the jelly on the other side, and combine. The problem with that is the jelly can make the bread soggy and can leak out after you take a bite. Reddit user ChickenMcFail uses a trick I call the "Jelly Pocket Method".

Basically, what you're doing is spreading a light layer of peanut butter over both sides and then creating a peanut butter "ridge" on one slice. Add the jelly/jam/whathaveyou to into the pocket formed by the ridge and add the other slice on top. The peanut butter keeps the sandwich from getting soggy, and as long as you don't squeeze the middle of the sandwich you shouldn't have any leaks.

Peanut Butter and Jelly: Secret Technique | Reddit

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 Also, I've wanted "Just is a four letter word" embossed on a baseball bat, for years now. (h/t @carlfish)Source: http://twitter.com/

""

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9Source: http://pinboard.in/

"Windows Update or Back-up and Restore shouldn't be doing this, search the root cause in your event log and also try the powercfg -lastwake command which will list what the last wake was."

Power control panel > advanced settings > Sleep > Allow wake timers (disable)

"PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. CasperJS is a navigation scripting & testing utility that runs on top/alongside of PhantomJS.

If you’re thinking “headless WebKit??!!?”, then it might be easier for you picture PhantomJS as a web inspector console that can be injected into any web page that you want, then accessed and used.

CasperJS makes it alot easier for you to navigate around a web page testing as you go. To be fair, my explanations don’t do these two tools enough justice. Please visit http://phantomjs.org/ and http://casperjs.org/ for a better explanation and more advanced features that aren’t covered here.

"

The GPL Does Not Depend on the Copyrightability of APIs | Public Knowledge

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 A great read, but important too for understanding why some parts of the internet are weak for fact-checking:

If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.

Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 @rem , but use a regular hook cause github never posts the username and password somehow :(Source: http://twitter.com/

from The Wirecutter http://thewirecutter.com

There are a lot of iPhone accessories out there, but only a few of them are time tested and have an actual chance of making your iPhone photos look better. Here are the best, chosen with the help of friends from Gizmodo and Instagram.

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 Must read if you want to learn about viewports: (thank you @ppk) andSource: http://twitter.com/

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

"It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I."

What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

To demonstrate this Pennebaker pointed to some of his own email, a batch written long before he began studying status.

from The Experience is the Product http://www.cindyalvarez.com

Start interesting.

Big splashy image. Provocative statement. Thought-provoking question.  Dancing on-stage.

That’s the first thing your audience wants to see.  We have faith in you — but not that much faith.  Make us care, immediately.   The best talks are the ones where not only are we looking forward to getting the information but we’re eager to hear it from you.

Tell us why we should care.

You’re not just giving your talk, you’re selling your talk.  And to do that, you need to tell me why it’s relevant.

“This affects you every time you do X.” “50% of people believe Y, and here’s how that affects your decisions.” “What you’ll learn from these lessons is how to do Z.”

Don’t rely on technology.

Live demos, slides, or video are great if they work.  It’s terrible when they don’t and the speaker can’t go on without them.

I listened to a speaker the other day who really needed his video – but first his computer crashed and then the conference wifi went down.  He tried to speak without the video, but it threw off his entire game.  He kept making little tangent complaints about technology.  He kept glancing over at his laptop screen as though to will it back to life – and every time he did it completely derailed his talk.  It was painful to watch.

Contrast that with a second speaker with the same problem.  The second guy shrugged, closed his laptop with an audible click, and just talked with no distractions and a blank screen behind him.   The audience quickly forgot that he’d ever had background props planned and focused on the speaker.

Remember Twitter…

If it’s a technology talk, your audience wants to have something pithy and interesting to tweet.  It may be petty, it may be the downfall of civilization, but it’s true: a talk with no tweetable sound bites feels like a disappointment.

Have some funny bits.  Make a memorable analogy.  Use an unexpected phrase.

…but make your audience look up from their laps.

You may be rocking it with the retweets, but if you aren’t getting any eye contact, you’re failing as a presenter.   There’s a reason why people go to conferences and listen to talks instead of reading lines of text – it’s the human connection.   Your audience is probably lazy: we’re not seeking it out.  You need to force us to engage.

Pause.

(A long pause forces everyone to look up: we’re afraid we missed something.)

A joke.

We look up when we laugh, and smile at the person next to us.

A tone change (the snarky comment, the drawn-out vowels, the quiet statement when you’ve been talking loudly).

Variation in your pace and tone of speaking helps jerk people out of autopilot so they can better absorb what you’re talking about.

Leave us wanting more.

If you have 20 minutes to talk, plan on your slides ending in 15.  If you have 50 minutes, plan on ending in 45.

The only thing worse than the speaker who races through their slides, talking quickly and sweating nervously — is the speaker who only gets through 4 of the “8 principles” mentioned in the title of your talk.  Worst case scenario is that you don’t get questions and your audience gets an extra 5 minutes for a bio-break.

Is content king?  No, when you’re talking, it’s confidence, relevance, and humanity.

from The Pickled Piper http://hapdaniel.wordpress.com

My head is still reeling from this. Today I looked at a question on the Pipes message boards that included a link to the user’s (Tikkie) pipe – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=ab21ecfcd00b90a64c2dd6be258210ed

I noticed that the Rename module was using Xpath expressions. "Well that won’t work" I thought. But actually it did! Using XPath expressions to define an element can greatly simplify that definition. For instance, the traditional way of defining the first element in the Rename module would be ‘item.div.div.div.0.div.div.1.div.p’ (it was an effort working that out). Compare that to ‘item.//*[@id="more-description"]/p’.

Here’s a link to my copy of that pipe with a few more uses of Xpath to define elements in other modules:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=d90cabfee11e17b6fc27a81c25df1bee

I’ve contacted the Pipes team about this. They’re hoping that this can be a supported feature.

Update: This use of XPath expressions is supported. I quote from Paul Donnelly ‘it’s baked into Pipes’.

Update: We can use ‘//*[@id="more-description"]/p’ instead of ”item.//*[@id="more-description"]/p’ (thanks to Paul Donnelly for this tip).

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9

One of the greatest strengths of the web is that the the ease of linking allows innovative new apps to succeed without asking anyone else's permission - but up until now that hasn't applied to integrations between web apps. Web Intents is an emerging W3C specification inspired by Android's Intents system that aims to solve the problems of communications.

Here are some slides that explain the main concepts from a pervious talk.

Fabulous idea. Android Intents is a great concept.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 Evans works for Enders Analysis. Here's a little bit from his latest report:

Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:

Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.

More to come today.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 the easiest way to run PostgreSQL on the MacSource: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 27% of emails are opened on mobile devices: statsSource: http://twitter.com/

from Delicious/network/earth2marsh http://www.delicious.com/network/earth2marsh One reason for this revolution is explained by Etsy in terms of Conway's Law: When a team makes a product the product ends up resembling the team that made it. I’ll extend this notion to say the team and thus the product end up resembling the underlying technology used to make it. When you change the underlying development infrastructure, by moving to a cloud, you are bound to change teams and processes they create.

from Cool Tools http://www.kk.org/cooltools/
Camscanner allows your Android or iOS smartphone to function as a document scanner. And while there are other competing apps from the few I've tried it's clear that Camscanner is the pack leader.

This app is better than the rest because it is intuitive and produces great results. It includes a virtual bubble-level shown on the screen when you are taking the photo, so you get the picture straight on and undistorted. When you get it level, it disappears, which is excellent design (both giving feedback that you 'got it right' and uncluttering the view at the same time). [Note: Strangely, the bubble level seems to be an Android-only feature.--OH]

When you need to crop, the cropping screen shows a thumbnail 'peek' window at the opposite corner while you pull the crop line, showing crosshairs of where you are placing the corner on the photo. No need to try multiple times since you can't see what is happening under your thick finger! The layout is very intuitive, five unambiguous icon buttons, and a quickstart document with a guided tour included (no searching for the documentation)! Did I say great design?
After you've scanned something the cropping and enhancing happen before your eyes, recapturing some of the thrill of watching a Polaroid develop. The enhancement options work well, turning even faint pencil scratchings into well contrasted digital versions.

Once the document has been processed, Camscanner can either email or upload the document as a JPG or PDF to a number of hosting services including Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, Evernote, and iDisk.

There are no ads in the free version, though it is limited to generating 10-page scan-pdf's with a 'watermark' line at the bottom of each page and also doesn't feature the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for text searches or AirPrint (which is iOS only). But other than that no annoying (and bandwidth guzzling, cpu-battery hogging) ads! The full version costs $5 and removes all limitations.

-- Aryeh Abramovitz

[I gave the free version of Camscanner a run through on my iPhone 4 and it really is far better than any other scanning apps I've tried. Its flexible processing engine turns out very readable PDFs (here is a link to a sample PDF I made) even in crappy light. It should be noted, though, that this application is limited by the quality of the phone's camera.--OH]

Camscanner
Free (with limitations) or $5
Available from iTunes Store and Android Store

Produced by Intsig

from Apigee Blog http://blog.apigee.com/

Thanks to all who participated in last week's Webcast, APIs and Copyrights: Monopolizing Ideas or Affording Protection?

The video and slides are below. Thanks to our moderator @brianpagano and the entire team for a lively and informative discussion. We'd love to continue the discussion on the api-craft forum.

APIs & Copyrights

View more presentations from Apigee

RT @landlessness: youtube video of @apigee's APIs & copyrights panel @sramji @gbrail @earth2marsh @brianpagano ...

afraid it's going to get worse before it gets better!

""

"The Stanford Javascript Crypto Library (hosted here on Stanford's server or here on GitHub) is a project by the Stanford Computer Security Lab to build a secure, powerful, fast, small, easy-to-use, cross-browser library for cryptography in Javascript.
SJCL is easy to use: simply run
sjcl.encrypt("password", "data")
to encrypt data, or
sjcl.decrypt("password", "encrypted-data")"

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 I've been trying to re-implement an HTML5 image uploader like the one on the Mozilla Hacks site, but that works with WebKit browsers. Part of the task is to extract an image file from the canvas object and append it to a FormData object for upload.Source: http://pinboard.in/

(deusx) Setting up your API to accept HTML5 postMessage calls. - @DSG [gRea

from Delicious/network/earth2marsh http://www.delicious.com/network/earth2marsh 1. Empowering with permission - but without action: It's not empowering when people are given more responsibility, yet must still obtain an unreasonable number of approvals and sign-offs to get anything done. This signals a lack of trust. 2. Leaders focused on process instead of people: Leaders look to processes, not people, to solve problems and it doesn’t work. Where's the inspiration, the vision? This signals a lack of humanity. 3. Overdependence on meetings: productive teamwork does not require meetings for every single action or decision. People become overwhelmed and ineffective when they are always stuck in meetings. 4. Lack of (clear) vision 5. Management acts as judge, not jury: If the purpose of a meeting is to think, create, or build, management has to stop tearing people down when they propose new ideas or question the status quo. This signals a lack of perspective and openness.

"Esprima (esprima.org) is an educational ECMAScript (also popularly known as JavaScript) parsing infrastructure for multipurpose analysis. It is also written in ECMAScript.

"

"I've instrumented my RailsConf presentation (Making the Web Faster) with Google Analytics, where I'm tracking slide transitions and clicks via custom events and time on slide via the user timings API:"

for finding decent netflix flicks

from Lifehacker Feed Cleaner 2.0 http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_KqfbFy42xGm7SnDp2IyXQ

If you're suffering from a moment or a long period of low self-esteem, chances are the problem isn't internal. As Psychology Today points out, the problem is more likely caused by issues you have with people other than yourself:

Think of self-esteem as the fuel gauge on a car. Most of us are busy driving around trying to keep the indicator from registering "empty." The whole time, we're focused on the alerting system-instead of on its true function: keeping fuel in the tank. "In the same way, in focusing on the psychological gauge, many psychologists have erred by concluding that people are motivated to maintain self-esteem for its own sake," Leary[, a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina] says. Instead, we should be using self-esteem as a gauge "to keep our 'interpersonal gas tanks' from running low."

Call it a "sociometer." When self-esteem sinks to the danger zone, the appropriate response is not to fix some inner sense of self, but to repair your standing in the eyes of others, to behave in ways that maintain connections with other people.

In the end, self-esteem might just have very little to do with the self. If we're not feeling good about our relationships with other people, we're just not feeling good at all.

At Last-a Rejection Detector! | Psychology Today

Photo by Mikael Altemark.

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 chrome.experimental.socket.create('tcp', '127.0.0.1', 8080, function(socketInfo) {}Source: http://twitter.com/

from Lifehacker Feed Cleaner 2.0 http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_KqfbFy42xGm7SnDp2IyXQ

Android: Alarm clock apps are typically bare bones affairs, but Alarm Clock Ultra manages to pack in a shocking number of features into a beautifully-packaged Android app.

Each alarm you create comes with a huge array of customization options. You can gradually increase the intensity of your chosen alarm sound, limit the number of times you can hit snooze, and even force yourself to solve math problems or puzzles to shut it off in the morning. Other features include a quick-start nap mode that lets you set a napping alarm with one tap, a built-in egg timer for boiling a perfect egg, and a news ticker that previews your overnight social network notifications as you wake up.

Most features are available in an ad-supported free version, but $3 gets rid of the ads and unlocks the whole app.

Alarm Clock Ultra | Google Play Store Via AddictiveTips

from API Evangelist http://apievangelist.com/ GitHub for Mac is powered by TwUI, Twitter's open source, Core Animation-based UI framework for Mac. It's the same framework that drives Twitter for Mac. TwUI lets us create fast, animatable UIs using modern APIs. It's fantastic. We've made a lot of fixes and additions in our TwUI fork: We've been working with the fine folks at Twitter to figure out the best way for us all to make TwUI more amazing. They invited us to join forces. What does it mean? TwUI has a bright and glorious future. All of our changes are now in the original TwUI repository. That includes a lot of bug fixes, HiDPI support, and our sweet new popover: We're excited to work with Twitter to make TwUI even more awesome.

from API Evangelist http://apievangelist.com/ essay on SOAP + REST in which he proposes four web service world-views: everything is a resource; everything is a get; everything is a message; everything is a procedure. I think he’s missing the point. My understanding of the key difference between the REST and SOAP positions is that resources should be addressable. In REST this means GETting a specific URI to retrieve the representation of, say, the weather forecast for Rome. In SOAP the URI is used as a command target, the command being to retrieve the weather for Rome. The same URI can be resused for retrieving the weather for Moscow and, perhaps, last week’s temperature chart for Athens. Sam also makes the smart, analogy of SOAP services being the dark matter of the Internet since

from xkcd.com http://xkcd.com/

from Developer Experience http://developerexperience.org/ Lessons learnt from shipping APIs for Microsoft's cloud platform:

Lessons learned by Sriram Krishnan from his time at Microsoft working on the Azure APIs. This was originally published in July 2011

Highlights:

REST conventions don’t matter…that much

Start with how the API is going to be used, work backwards

Reduce the cognitive load

Make sure key actions are simple and fast, prefer chunky over chatty

Measure and log everything

Versioning and extensibility

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 jQuery Plugin that casts photorealistic shadows. Perfect for eye-catching demos and landing pages.Source: http://pinboard.in/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 Desktop Apps with HTML5 and the Mozilla Web Runtime - #webrt #futurewithoutjetpacksSource: http://twitter.com/

from Pinboard Network RSS Improver http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b22b9c9acee5906aab7e8a7645a247a9 "name one other thing in the world, he said, that is used by so many people and which is created entirely by hand?  Stuff that is made by hand is hard to make, and even more hard to make well, and tends to be less sturdy than things made by machines.  [Honestly, I had never thought of it that way.  In the "Etsy Era", when everybody wants authentic and local and handcrafted, what could be more hand-made than software?!] Plus, in the history of the world, he said, is there one thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such a large scale as software, that was as complex?" via PhilSource: http://pinboard.in/