Rocket Science

Guess, what?

Apple has a built in way of taking a screenshot on your iPhone. (Which explains how I’ve inadvertently gotten a screenshot in the past.)

Hold down the Home button and the sleep/power button on the top of the phone for 1 second. (Keep in mind that holding down this button combination for 10 seconds can cause the phone to reset. Also this requires a 3G or newer iPhone running iPhone OS 2.x+.)

While surfing on my iPhone, I ran across a site using the WPtouch theme by the folks over at BraveNewCode. I thought it was cool enough to upload to my personal website and the two project sites I’m maintaining.

Here’s a screenshot of what my site looks like using the theme. (Unless you have an iPhone to access it yourself via the iPhone’s web browser.)

(…waits for Tom to copy this too…)

First off thanks to Alan Levine of NMC for the post that inspired me to automate a bit of my process of including Flickr photos.

I downloaded Alan’s script that uses Greasemonkey (for Mozilla) and made a change to match the way I’ve been doing citations on my site.

I commented out the way Alan does his attribution, and inserted what I use on this site:

+ '<br />Brandon\'s Blog Citation<br /><textarea rows="5" onClick="this.select()" name="ccatttxt"><div id="mura-citation">Photo Credit: @' + '<a href="'+ photolink + '" title="' + phototitle + '">' + usernick + '</a>/flickr</div></textarea><br /><br />';


So when I go to a flickr page with a Creative Commons licensed photo, I see a small box at the bottom of the left column.

Which produces HTML which looks like:
<div id="mura-citation">Photo Credit: @<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/80185247@N00/2612619153/" title="Napkin">muramatsub</a>/flickr</div>

That I then include with the photo I’ve linked.

Alan also talks about how he downloads images from Flickr that he uses on his site. I do something similar. On my computer, I’ll keep a copy of the URL directly to the image until I’ve had a chance to write the article or otherwise use the photo. I think modify the filename to include “flickr” and the “username” before I upload or use the photo. This tells me the site I got the photo from (“flickr”) and which user’s photo I’m using (“username”). As Alan points out in his article this is all good as long as the user’s account is still active (or Flickr continues to exist). I think the site Don of the Education Technology that is Changing Alaska blog suggests, Imagestamper is also an interesting way of tracking licenses.

So, I ordered an iPad — I’m still not sure if I’m going to keep the order, or cancel it.

But, I saw a link to the video below about a “live” (well somewhat live) magazine cover mockup for the iPad. And I immediately though about the advertisements and magazines in movies like Minority Report.

Some articles have focused on the interaction aspects between the iPad as a step towards those in Minority Report, but what struck me by the video was where once static content (or, shudder, advertising) might go in the near future.

Many magazines that have been print-only since their existence now have the opportunity to immerse their readers in interactive video, sound, and motion.

Source: Rosten, J. (2010). Going Vertical. Retrieved on March 26, 2010 from Jesse Rosten Website: http://jesserosten.com/2010/going-vertical/

Here’s a video of the advertising in Minority Report.

Ok, I’m spoiled at MIT. We have a completely open network, anyone can connect for up to 14 days through self registering. And once you’re on the network, you can run any and all network protocols and services. This has been explained to me as, every time IS&T tried to lock down the network, the students promptly circumvented the protocols. So instead of protecting the pipes, they protect the servers (I’m guessing).

I’m at yet another university that has locked down their network so far that it gets in the way of doing simple things — like IM. For some reason the firewall and/or routers are not routing those ports. Great, thanks.

This is one of the reasons I like Google, they do everything in a web browser over port 80.

But, the point of this post is that AIM has made available AIM Express which does the same thing for AIM–yay! I can IM with people.

(I really wish I could have my friends that can break through these network blocks in my bag when I travel to other universities to show folks how silly all this unnecessary security is…)