Articles
- Going Paperless: Automating Repetitive Stuff about Meetings
- Hari Kondabolu Explains How Weezer Broke His Heart
- Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze Behind the Scenes
- Facebook friend of the court: The complicated relationship between social media and the courts
- Help! I Cracked My iPhone (Or Another Smartphone)
- SLyme Disease
- From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author’s life?
- The Job After Steve Jobs: Tim Cook and Apple
- What Is Russia Today?
- Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm
- George Lois on the evolution of the modern magazine cover.
- Industrial design rights in the European Union
- Going Paperless: Automating the Creation of Meeting Minutes Using IFTTT and Evernote
- President Obama’s remarks on the situation in Ukraine
- 200 Days of Writing Infographic
- I’m Jamie Todd Rubin, and This Is How I Work
- Identifying the Clandestine Videos of Supreme Court Oral Arguments Posted Online
- Scientology’s Vanished Queen
- Leah Remini Shares The Truth About The Hardest Year Of Her Life
- Beyond tweeting: Demystifying the social media editor
- If a Time Traveller Saw a Smartphone
- An Oral History of Ghostbusters
- Statement on the Apprehension of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman Loera
- Internet Legal Research on a Budget
- 25 Things All Young Lawyers Should Know In Order To Not Screw Up Their Legal Careers
- Clarence Thomas’s Disgraceful Silence
- Attorney General Signs New Rules to Limit Access to Journalists’ Records
- The Semicolon Is the Perfect Punctuation for the Digital Age
- Comcast and Us
- How to Increase Your Social Media Following by Over 700%
Listen: CMD + Space
I want to tell you about one great podcast every week. This shouldn’t be a problem for at least a and a half or so because I am currently subscribed to about 80 podcasts. The first Podcast of the Week is CMD + Space.
An interview show by Myke Hurley, CMD + Space typically features a wide-ranging conversation between he and a guest from the Apple world. App makers, pundits and others talk about how they approach app development on Mac and iOS.
Find out more about the show at its homepage on the 5by5 podcast network. If you need a podcast player, I highly recommend the one made by the guest on this week’s episode, Russell Ivanovic. His app Pocket Casts is available on Android and iOS and can sync subscriptions and played position across multiple devices.
Popcorn Time streams movie torrents, but maybe it’s more than that
The image above is the first screen you see when you open Popcorn Time. The app, available on Mac, Windows and Linux, streams movies from the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent. The technology is similar to what old school music swapping service Napster used from about 1999 to 2001, before being shut down.1
It’s getting a lot of attention this week, much of which focuses on its copyright infringement implications. And for good reason, because according to the FAQ, while you’re watching a movie, the app is using your computer and internet connection to seed the same movie to other viewers. That means you’re sharing what you’re watching, and if what you’re watching is copyrighted or otherwise protected by your country’s intellectual property laws, you may be committing a civil violation or a crime.
Yeah, it’s like that.
I messaged the Buenos Aires-based developers of Popcorn Time on Facebook asking whether they would consider adding a Creative Commons / Public Domain channel to the app. It couldn’t hurt to include some non-infringing content, and it may be a cool new way for indie filmmakers to distribute their work.
But while copyright infringement is the easy story (and the one I would usually focus on here), there’s a more interesting angle to Popcorn Time.
It has the potential to introduce “normals” to the concept of peer-to-peer file sharing. This is similar to what BitCoin has done to the idea of digital currency. While it is the first cryptocurrency, using cryptography to secure transactions, it was not the first digital currency. Several video games allow players to trade items for virtual money and have done so for a long time.
But BitCoin brought the concept to the forefront of an international conversation. I’m not sure Popcorn Time is going to be that big or game-changing (it’s still in beta; only the third movie I tried to play, American Hustle, actually began to play. I turned it off right away, because it’s good policy for would-be attorneys not to, you know, break laws).
I do think there is real value to a proof of concept when it gets a technology usually limited to geeks into the hands of a larger audience.
And the infringement potential doesn’t have to be a deal-breaker. A quick Google search for legitimate uses of BitTorrent turns up about 146,000 results.
Some totally legal uses of BitTorrent include game updates and downloads, distributing your own music, and (take note, Popcorn Time developers) public domain movie trading.
So the question is whether the extra attention Popcorn Time is getting can be turned toward the lawful uses of peer-to-peer protocols. If so, it could be the boost the system needs to become a permanent fixture in the national conversation. In other words, the interest in Popcorn Time could be peer-to-peer’s BitCoin moment.
Reading list: Hari Kondabolu, Tim Cook, and magazine covers
My favorites among today’s reads are the Hari Kondabolu piece, which is actually a video of few minutes of his hilarious standup, and the Tim Cook article, which I posted about earlier.
Introducing 'Reading List'
I’m a huge fan of apps and services like Instapaper and Pocket, which allow you to save web pages, articles and even videos for later. Whether I’m in line at a coffee shop or sitting in a waiting room, I often turn to tools like Twitter and Feedly to see what’s worth reading on any given day. The combination of all of those apps leaves me with far more content than I can read in a day, but I’m going to start sharing what I get to in a daily post over here.
This will serve two purposes. First, it will give you a sense of what I look at every day. Second, it will give me a convenient way to look for patterns in what I’m actually choosing to read versus the much larger bucket of things I’m saving. In other words, some of the stuff I save I will never, ever read. And maybe I’m repetitive or restricting myself to an echo-chamber of similar perspectives. This exercise will help me look for those things and then change them.
Most will be far shorter than this one, but in the spirit of getting off to a good start, here’s a list from the last couple of days:
Workflow Tech, Part 2: Catalog
Introduction
I focused in the first of this three-post series on how I capture information for use at home, work, for study, and in creative pursuits. This article is part two in that series, where I’ll spend about 500 words talking about how I name, organize, and save files across several platforms and devices.
Catalog
I use TextExpander on OS X and iOS devices. TextExpander probably fits into all three categories, but I put it in Catalog because I use it overwhelmingly to name and tag files. It’s not free, but it’s worth every cent if you find yourself typing the same things over and over again.
You can attach frequently used snippets of text to shortcuts like “ddate,” which automatically expands to “January 20, 2014” the moment you type it. I like to prepend the date to new the blog posts I draft as text files, so I made a TextExpander snippet that expands “.dnb” to “140120.blog.” and then I can add a name after the second period. So the file I drafted this post in is called 140119.blog.Workflow.txt, but all I had to type was “.dnb Workflow.”
That file name is also a big and relatively new part of how I catalog stuff. Computers can change the date they attach to a file based on when it was modified, when it was downloaded, or for other reasons. So I append the creation date to every file I make, formatted as a 2-digit year, 2-digit month and 2-digit day. Then, a period (many people use a dash, it’s a matter of taste) and the type of file it is, like blog, work, fic for fiction. You get the idea. The third component is the title, with multiple words
I find a new use for TextExpander every day, so it’s vital not only to working productively today, but to working even more productively in the future.
Then, of course, there’s Dropbox, which I use primarily to store files I’m manipulating across different devices. Images I edit and store for work, documents I need to share with people who don’t use Google Drive, and the text files in my /Notes folder, where I draft everything I write, all get synchronized across my home, work and laptop computers. With Dropbox mobile apps and the widespread integration of the service by third-party apps and services, there’s never a problem accessing the most up-to-date version of what I’m working on, whether I’m online or off.
Evernote, which I mentioned in my Capture post and about which I’ll write a more in-depth post eventually, is also great for cataloging after you’ve captured stuff. I tend to use Evernote only when there is email or multimedia involved, sticking to plain text notes in Dropbox for regular old writing tasks. But when email or multimedia are involved, Evernote can’t be beat.
I have a notebook for music, where I tag notes lyrics or audio or both. I have another notebook for finance, where I store and tag all my emailed receipts and other financial bits. I even have a notebook for recipes, which I can share with my wife so we can collect stuff as we find it. Evernote “stacks” even let you make what is essentially a notebook of notebooks.
Much of the work over at the Evernote Blog focuses on how to catalog with the app, so check it out if you’re interested. But I usually start my cataloging workflow in my default notebook, which I’ve labelled Inbox, since I’m so used to processing incoming email from that label.
Since we want capture to be as friction-free as possible, I just save into my default notebook. Then, a few times a week, when I need some mindless busywork to do, I’ll dive into my Inbox notebook and start moving and tagging. Sometimes, I realize I don’t really need something and delete it altogether. I highly recommend the default-now, process-later approach so that using apps like Evernote in the field isn’t cumbersome or time consuming.
Conclusion
I could go on forever about this stuff, but the basic system I use for cataloging is a naming convention when it comes to plain text and a notebook + tags system when it comes to images, PDF, and audio in Evernote. I’m sure everyone’s different so feel free to contact me on Twitter and tell me about your workflow.
The part that goes alone
This post stems from my recent conversations with a few people I know and care about who are having a very hard time of things these days.
Each of us have our own mountains to climb, our own monsters under the bed. Mostly, it’s a different battle for all of us. But there’s a common thread. I notice it while I’m trying to give advice to one person, while trying like hell just to get in touch with another, and while trying to stay as quiet as I can while the heart of a third breaks a little more every day:
However close we are to someone, there’s always a part of them we can’t help.
That part always, always goes alone into whatever minor annoyance, mundane problem or massive tragedy we face. It’s the part no one can follow, carry or comfort. Those outside your mind can’t know that part of you, and you can’t know it in them. But we all have it.
And we have to treat it differently from the other parts, the bits of someone we can reach, the bits that need encouragement or a listener or someone sitting next to them in mutually acceptable and comfortable silence.
The part that goes alone can only be recognized and respected, and that’s really, really difficult to accept when all you want to do is help someone.
Happiness and sadness are equal parts chemicals and circumstances, but understanding someone and making them feel understood, even when that means accepting you can’t completely relieve them of their burdens, is an art worth pursuing.
A Friend Under Fire
Ed. note: This article was originally published in 2007 at Phillyist, the now-closed website about arts and culture in Philadelphia at which I was an associate editor. I’m republishing it here, lightly revised, for Veteran’s Day.
It’s never easy to watch friends depart for dangerous lands, but it’s comforting to know they are members of the United States Marine Corps.
That does not mean that, when my good friend, whom I met during my first year in college, when we roomed together, and who asked to remain anonymous, deployed on his first tour of duty, I was all smiles.
The sad reality is that, however well-trained, equipped and capable our soldiers are, many of our generation’s battles are fundamentally unique. Direct person-to-person combat is sometimes taken out of the equation, replaced by death squads and pockets of insurgency that blend into civilian neighborhoods, sometimes by force and sometimes with the permission of villagers.
Classic guerrilla tactics have given way to makeshift but deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs), sometimes detonated by trip wire and sometimes set off via radio remote.
When my friend returned home from about a year in Iraq, he had many stories to tell. There was, however, one in particular that illustrated the brutal moral difficulty that faces so many of our soldiers.
My friend, a native of New Jersey who attended the same Philadelphia-area university that I did, was stationed almost directly between the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in central Iraq.
For a while, he and his comrades were posted on a bridge (the one pictured above) that fed an exit ramp across the Euphrates river. This was a highway that had been in disuse since the start of the conflict and the Marines were involved in an effort to return use of the bridge to civilians in the area.
To that end, they moved their post off of the bridge to a site 500 meters away. However, in the weeks following this decision, about a dozen IEDs were placed on or below the bridge, although two ever detonated.
It is a fairly common tactic among insurgents, he told me, to send children in with these potential IEDs, usually in the form of small knapsacks or bookbags. The idea is that if the Marines don’t open fire on the child with the decoy bag, the next child will be sent in to deliver a real bomb. Some children are suckered into this or bribed, others go willingly with a terrifyingly adult devotion to their cause.
My friend was patrolling with a sniper company one day, not long after the two real bombs had gone off. The trigger man spotted a child approaching the underside of the bridge.
The sniper, following new orders the company had received in the wake of the two recently detonated IEDs, lined up a shot and took it, instantly killing the child.
Further invesigation revealed that the bag the child had been carrying was empty.
This tragic illustration of what has happened and may still happen in Iraq and Afghanistan is not the only story my friend had. There was the eight-year-old boy who approached a patrol of Iraqi army officers and US Marines, begging for water. He quickly triggered a bomb vest he had been wearing under his clothes and took the lives of five servicemen, as well as his own. There was the other young boy who drove a car bomb up to a local school, killing himself and a dozen other children.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the conversation I had with my friend about these stories was how he told them. We discussed the sad sickness of a war that involves children, but he made clear, in the field, second-guesses are dangerous luxuries.
We can only wonder, from this side of war, what these situations are doing to men and women who fight them for us. The statistics are daunting, but this is not that kind of article. Making men and women into numbers is part of the problem.
Let’s try to keep in mind, not only on Memorial or Veterans days, what exactly it means to serve your country, and that sometimes, even if someone returns physically unharmed, they may not have survived unscathed.
They do not confine their service to one or two days a year, and we must not so limit our gratitude. It is a debt we cannot repay, but we must never stop trying.
Image courtesy an anonymous friend of the author, with permission.
NSA responds to “erroneous” data collection reports (full text)
The National Security Agency, in a mass email to press Oct. 31, presumably responding to a recent Washington Post report on the agency’s direct data monitoring of company’s like Google and Yahoo, goes all third-person self-referential on us:
What NSA does is collect the communications of targets of foreign intelligence value, irrespective of the provider that carries them. U.S. service provider communications make use of the same information super highways as a variety of other commercial service providers. NSA must understand and take that into account in order to eliminate information that is not related to foreign intelligence.
Read the rest of the statement:
STATEMENTOct. 31, 2013
Recent press articles on NSA’s collection operations conducted under Executive Order 12333 have misstated facts, mischaracterized NSA’s activities, and drawn erroneous inferences about those operations. NSA conducts all of its activities in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies – and assertions to the contrary do a grave disservice to the nation, its allies and partners, and the men and women who make up the National Security Agency.
All NSA intelligence activities start with a validated foreign intelligence requirement, initiated by one or more Executive Branch intelligence consumers, and are run through a process managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. When those requirements are received by NSA, analysts look at the Information Need and determine the best way to satisfy it. That process involves identifying the foreign entities that have the information, researching how they communicate, and determining how best to access those communications in order to get the foreign intelligence information. The analysts identify selectors – e-mail addresses and phone numbers are examples – that help isolate the communications of the foreign entity and task those to collection systems. In those cases where there are not specific selectors available, the analysts will use metadata, similar to the address on the outside of an envelope, to attempt to develop selectors for their targets. Once they have them, they task the selectors to the collection systems in order to get access to the content, similar to the letter inside the envelope.
The collection systems target communications links that contain the selectors, or are to and from areas likely to contain the selectors, of foreign intelligence interest. Seventy years ago, the communications links were shortwave radio transmissions between two points on the globe. Today’s communications flow over technologies like satellite links, microwave towers, and fiber optic cables. Terrorists, weapons proliferators, and other valid foreign intelligence targets make use of commercial infrastructure and services. When a validated foreign intelligence target uses one of those means to send or receive their communications, we work to find, collect, and report on the communication. Our focus is on targeting the communications of those targets, not on collecting and exploiting a class of communications or services that would sweep up communications that are not of bona fide foreign intelligence interest to us.
What NSA does is collect the communications of targets of foreign intelligence value, irrespective of the provider that carries them. U.S. service provider communications make use of the same information super highways as a variety of other commercial service providers. NSA must understand and take that into account in order to eliminate information that is not related to foreign intelligence.
NSA works with a number of partners and allies in meeting its foreign-intelligence mission goals, and in every case those operations comply with U.S. law and with the applicable laws under which those partners and allies operate. A key part of the protections that are provided to both U.S. persons and citizens of other countries is the requirement that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and the Attorney General-approved minimization procedures. These limitations protect the privacy of all people and, in particular, to any incidentally acquired communications of U.S. persons. The protections are applied when selectors are tasked to the collection system; when the collection itself occurs; when the collected data are being processed, evaluated, analyzed, and put into a database; and when any reporting of the foreign intelligence is being done. In addition, NSA is very motivated and actively works to remove as much extraneous data as early in the process as possible – to include data of innocent foreign citizens.
—NSA Public Affairs Office
Media Analysis: Measles Outbreak Traced to Anti-Vaccine Church
An astounding story that should be part of the national conversation regarding vaccines. Seems straight forward.
However, USA Today doesn’t mention the church’s stance on vaccines until the 13th paragraph. Gawker, on the other hand, essentially reblogs the USA Today piece but moves the pastor’s anti-vaccine stance to the headline.
Great catch by Drew Breunig here. I don’t believe in god and I’m not religious, but respect that many do and are.
However, run as fast as you can from any religious leader who claims vaccines are dangerous.
When religion and science contradict one another, particularly on matters of health and public safety, religion must, without exception or hesitation, be set aside.
This should not be difficult for religious people to accept: Any rational god would insist on that anyway.
Analysis over revision: Kara Swisher's mysterious edits to Marissa Mayer's Yahoo! memo (Updated)
Updated 12:00 p.m: Kara Swisher reached out to me on Twitter after I published this post (her tweets and my replies here, here, here, here, and here).
She said she only made minor edits to things like commas and contractions, and that she thought people would assume that she didn’t rewrite the substance. She is right; I should have focused on wanting her take on what I describe below as the interesting bits and not on her revision. She also told me I should have asked her. She is right about that, too. I stand by my wanting some analysis of the areas I mention below where Mayer’s memo departs from PR speak, but to the extent that my post appeared to question Ms. Swisher’s integrity, I am sorry._
Kara Swisher, writing at All Things D about new Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s recent memo to employees:
I took that to heart in tracking down this do-not-forward (oops) memo —- which I changed around > a bit to thwart those who try to stop me from getting these emails via tricky computer programs […]
“Changed around a bit” to what extent? Does that diminish or eliminate the value, if any, of the memo to readers? Was there any value to readers to begin with? My answers are probably “yes” and “no” respectively.
I’m not the only one thinking these things, some commenters asked the same questions. I think Ms. Swisher should have analyzed the interesting parts of the memo, posting little or none of the actual text. It would have been better use of her knowledge and skills, and would have been more valuable to readers.
The memo itself is nothing special. I can summarize it as “I’m happy to be here, I think Yahoo! is great, I have big plans, but don’t stop doing what you’re doing (unless you hear otherwise) until I learn more about the company’s management culture and direction.”
But Ms. Swisher’s casual mention that she edited it gives me pause. It’s not exactly a sensitive diplomatic report, but mysterious edits by a journalist to a document originally written by the subject of the article make me uneasy.
Ms. Swisher is laudably dogged about disclosing her spouse’s role as an executive at Google. There is a link to her disclosure and ethics policy at the bottom of all her articles. That’s why this offhand mention of memo-revision reads as out of place to me.
Ms. Swisher could have published the unedited version of the memo as an image, likely thwarting any “tricky computer programs” aimed at preventing her future access to such internal emails in the future. Alternatively, she could have simnply written about the bits that weren’t cliche corporate-speak.
For example, Ms. Mayer said in the memo that “While I have some ideas, I need to develop a more informed perspective before making strategy or direction changes.” That suggests the pace of change at Yahoo! under her leadership may initially be slower than observers would like, but will likely accelerate as she soaks up institutional knowledge about how the company functions.
Another interesting bit says “Please don’t stop. If you have questions or concerns about whether to continue or not, please ask. However, with the exception of a few things that might heavily constrain us in the future, the answer is most likely: Yes, keep moving.” What is going on at Yahoo! right now that “might heavily constrain” them in the future if employees don’t pull the plug?
Finally, Ms. Mayer said “We will continue to invest in talent, so we can produce the most compelling and exciting user experiences anywhere.” That tracks with the Flickr team’s response to dearmarissamayer.com, asking people to apply for jobs there.
But does Ms. Mayer’s comment suggest that Yahoo! will be ramping up compensation and benefits, going on a hiring and expansion spree to bet the company on a new army of innovators, or just building out the kind of infrastructure and marketing that will make current employees proud to work there again?
Ms. Swisher is a journalist and I am not a journalist. She is talented and successful, and no doubt has a better editorial sensibility (or at least a more refined one) than I do. But I can’t help thinking that a breakdown of the memo’s telling points would have been more worthy of her efforts and our reading time than posting it in its entirety with some unknown edits.
Evening Edition beautifully presents the important news you missed
Co-creator Jim Ray of Mule Design describes Evening Edition like this:
It’s a summary of the day’s news, written by an actual journalist, with links to the best reporting in the world, published once a day.
Last night, in between reading the news using various Android apps, I spotted a link to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball post about Evening Edition. I went to the new news site on my phone and, ten minutes later, I realized I had learned more in that time reading Evening Edition than an hour of playing with Flipboard and Pulse.
I spend all day reading technology news. It’s my area of interest and there are some great people reporting on it. But it takes time away from informing myself about what is happening in the world in general.
It looks like Evening Edition beautifully solves that problem. Ray’s design is elegant, minimal, and simple. (Put Evening Edition in a browser window next to this site, and you’ll realize very quickly why I’m such a big fan of Ray’s design decisions.)
As for substance, it’s like the site’s news editor, Anna Rascouët-Paz, secretly knows all the important stuff I either didn’t encounter or shamefully skipped over to read another Apple rumor.
Rascouët-Paz boils down complex topics well enough to keep you informed, but also whets your appetite to click through to her sources and get more information. Her summaries contain more rapid-fire facts and quotes than most of what you’ll find in the newspaper, and that’s a very welcome change.
If you want to read a beautiful website about the important news you missed every day, bookmark Evening Edition.
In Brief: How Reed Hastings Almost Undid Netflix
Greg Sandoval, writing at CNET:
For most of the former Netflix employees who moved to Qwikster, their old jobs had been filled. They no longer had a place at the company.
I once asked “What is going on at Netflix?” I wasn’t alone, either. Reed Hastings definitely failed all of his customers in the price-hike/Qwikster debacle, but this good article by Greg Sandoval at CNET points out that Hastings screwed a bunch of perfectly good employees, too.
No Comment
I have turned off comments here at Constant & Endless. I have had only one comment since I started writing here, from Mr. Scott Carpenter. He left a good link, and I certainly don’t want to alienate him or anyone else who wants to tell me something in response to what I’ve written.
But I trust that Scott and anyone else reading this will find it easy to reply to my posts using the avenues listed on my Contact page, or described in the posts by others I have linked to later in this piece.
I won’t turn off comments at Fiction By Joe Ross (where, it turns out, Scott has also contributed valuable comments) because it’s good to have proposed revisions or critiques right there on the page. This site, however, is a different beast. I could write a long post about why I think this is the right move for most if not all personal small (from one to a few authors) commentary blogs, but the decision is already well-defended by people with bigger audiences (for now…muhahaha) than I.
iOS and Mac OS X developer Matt Gemmell wrote on his popular blog in November 2011 what I consider a bullet-proof reasoning for keeping comments out of personal blogs. He also has great suggestions for different (and, in his opinion and mine, better) ways to respond to something someone has written on their blog. If you don’t understand why I turned off comments here, read his initial post and his follow-up.
MG Sielger, a general partner at CrunchFund, a columnist at TechCrunch, and purveyor of parislemon and Massive Greatness, chimed in on Gemmell’s posts with some thoughts of his own. If you still want some more explanation after reading Gemmell’s posts, read Siegler’s initial post and his follow-up.
So, if you want to reply to this post, have a look at my Contact page or write a blog post of your own.