Rachel La Corte:
Gov. Jay Inslee said Tuesday he was suspending the use of the death penalty in Washington state, announcing a move that he hopes will enable officials to “join a growing national conversation about capital punishment.”
Legal weed? Check. Same-sex marriage? Check. No death penalty? Check. Lots of things being done in Washington state these days.
Chris Bowler’s thoughts on Writer Pro are largely mimicking mine right now. It’s good, I have faith in it, but it’s not wowing me right now.
Food to Fitness:
Whiskey is beneficial for preventing cancer. It is high in anti-oxidants which help in restricting the growth of cancer cells. Whiskey contains ellagic acid which is a natural phenol anti-oxidant.
Works for me…
Bruce Schneier:
The Review Group believes that moving the data to some other organization, either the companies that generate it in the first place or some third-party data repository, fixes that problem. But is that something we really want fixed? The fact that a government has us all under constant and ubiquitous surveillance should be chilling. It should limit freedom of expression. It is inimical to society, and to the extent we hide what we're doing from the people or do things that only pretend to fix the problem, we do ourselves a disservice.
While I was on leave Editorially announced that they were shutting down. As Pat mentioned, this is a service that was used heavily on this site, and was quickly becoming universal among the editor-freelancer workflows. It was and is the best of the lot of services like it.
I was granted early access to the service, and loved the idea immediately, but I noted to the team at the time that it really should be a platform, not an app. In a longer post about the service I said:
But most of all I want it to act more like a service — for example, the way Github does. Wouldn’t it be great if writing apps could integrate Editorially support like they do with Dropbox? You pull down the latest version and it is checked out until you are done editing — then it is pushed back up for others to edit and review changes. You could write in your favorite app, but have the full power of collaboration. In my mind that is where these tools need to be heading and I’d post with exclamation points upon this vision being realized.
I think the web based nature is what killed Editorially, because I don’t know many writers who actually liked writing in Editorially. Almost everyone I knew wrote in their favorite app and copy and pasted in to Editorially — or just didn’t use Editorially because of that extra step.
Editorially should have been a platform.
We should have been able to open up Writer Pro, Byword, Ulysses, TextMate, whatever, and pulled down our documents, seen the changes, and edited the writing and sent it back to Editorially. The web view should have been there, but that should have been about as well used as Dropbox’s website is. In my opinion the focus of Editorially was too heavy on the app side, and not enough on the platform side.
Users should have been finding out about the service because all the good writing apps were suddenly including support for it. It’s a real shame the service is shutting down, but here, at The Brooks Review, we have already received recommendations for six other like services and I still hold out hope I will get the platform like service I desire.
The three Ps:
Perfectly normal for parents, and after the first few times it stops bugging you.
Claire Cain Miller:
Thanks to Plus, Google knows about people’s friendships on Gmail, the places they go on maps and how they spend their time on the more than two million websites in Google’s ad network. And it is gathering this information even though relatively few people use Plus as their social network.
I stirred up some controversy on App.net today, but among this was an incredibly salient point. Before I get to that, a little context.
The conversation ((Or whatever you want to call it, I don’t care.)) was about Google and the topic of this conversation was “Evil”. You can now see why I was involved.
@duerig @benbrooks @jbouie I just want to chime in to say I agree. I think the way we use words is incredibly important. Language has meaning and we should be cautious. If Google is evil, if Microsoft is evil, etc, then “evil” ceases to mean anything.
I knew this. I knew this. And yet I forgot it. We all seem to have forgotten it. Perhaps because Google famously says “Don’t be evil” is their motto we feel free to use evil when we disagree with that Google does. Even that motto doesn’t mean we should lower the debate, and devalue the meaning of ’evil’, by applying it to a technology company that has yet to, and may never actually do, something truly worth calling evil.
Evil should be reserved for truly evil things, just as using the word “rape” should always be reserved for actual instances of rape. I’m glad to be reminded of this.
A fantastic, free, Lightroom plugin that analyzes the metadata of your photos like you are the NSA. See what aperture, focal length, shutter speed, and more that you use the most of. It’s pretty interesting to see the break down.
I tend to shoot around f/2 at 1/60th with a 35mm (full-frame equivalent) focal length.
I would have bet money that I shoot more with a 50mm at 1/100th than any other length. Wow. The aperture setting was as expected.
(I only analyzed my latest 6,600 images.)
Bruce Schneier on recent Snowden revelations:
As fascinating as the technology is, the critical policy question—and the one discussed extensively in the FirstLook article—is how reliable all this information is. While much of the NSA's capabilities to locate someone in the real world by their network activity piggy-backs on corporate surveillance capabilities, there's a critical difference: False positives are much more expensive. If Google or Facebook get a physical location wrong, they show someone an ad for a restaurant they're nowhere near. If the NSA gets a physical location wrong, they call a drone strike on innocent people.
This is a reaction to this post from Glenn Greenwald.
Guys, very sorry but a few hundred of you are getting legitimate email confirmations from me via aweber.com. This is because I need to send you a one time email pertaining to your account on this site.
I am very sorry, and hoped to avoid this, but I cannot keep getting my email flagged as a spam sender so I needed to use a service.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald:
As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.
What amazing reporting, and a horrible program by the US.
I’m supposed to be on break, but this is a great kit to get you started on the Fujifilm system.
The X-M1 with kit lens. The lens isn’t the best, but the camera has a great sensor in it. By all accounts it is a solid entry level camera. Get it here for $600 on Amazon. There are also deals on all XF lenses so you could go body only and get the fantastic 35, 23, or compact 27 (the 27 is only $199).
A year ago John Carey started a site called Yesterday Was Only. I am bummed because I didn’t follow it right away (I didn’t know about it), but I love following it now. Carey shot over a thousands photos over the course of the year for the site, and they are all good. He’s now making them into a small book:
I am not limiting the amount of books sold but this will be the one and only run of the book. If you do not order now there will not be another opportunity to buy it in the future, once these first copies are gone, thats it. I will sign and number each copy based on the amount of them that are ordered when ordering closes.
I ordered one, and it’d be smart of you to get one too. These types of books, photography focused, are the only physical books that I buy anymore.
Wow, what a great camera. It seems to me that they had to really grasp to find complaints, giving it just one point shy of a perfect score. The sensor is the same (except the ISO range) as the X-E2 that I have. The X-T1 looks amazing, here's the conclusion from Mark Goldstein:
The new Fujifilm X-T1 is the best X-series camera to date, and one of the best interchangeable lens cameras, mirrorless or otherwise, that we've ever had the pleasure of reviewing.
It's going to take a lot of self-control to resist picking this up.
Bill Rigby:
Most agree that Nadella’s background in creating Microsoft’s Internet-based, or “cloud,” computing services makes him a safe pair of hands to take the company forward, but there remains a question over his ability to make Microsoft a hit with consumers or with impatient shareholders.
Safe choices are always how you incite change… Oh, wait.
Looks interesting, but I haven’t used it as it doesn’t support Fever. The best right now is Mr. Reader on the iPad, and looking at the Unread I’m not sure it would fit my usage pattern anyway.
Seems like a very strongly designed app, which is nice to see for a change. ((I don’t like the name though, it gives me anxiety just thinking about it.))
Georg Petschnigg of FiftyThree (maker of Paper):
There’s a simple fix here. We think Facebook can apply the same degree of thought they put into the app into building a brand name of their own. An app about stories shouldn’t start with someone else’s story. Facebook should stop using our brand name.
Facebook response: crickets.
JC Crafford on the X-T1:
PS: Can I make a prediction? This will be many photographers camera of choice to photograph weddings with in the future.
I’ve been posting a lot about cameras and Fujifilm in particular, but that’s because there is a an interesting turning point happening in photography. Not unlike the changes in computing that iOS brought about, mirrorless is here to stay, but more than that it seems to be really changing the idea of “pro-gear”.
Ask any photographer if they would prefer the kit that is traditional, or the one that’s just as good and half the weight.