My Screambird alternative trance music project now has a page on Google Play where all the tracks released so far (four of them) can be purchased (or listened to for free): http://goo.gl/tmYvd
iOS apps:
645 Pro: a camera app that has an option to create tiff files as well as jpg files, and offers some cool features like real-time ISO data, optional grid overlays, day and night modes, and aspect ratio dial.
Pocket: (formerly ReadItLater): an app that downloads the text from stories for reading later; competitor to Readability which was mentioned in episode #29.
Mac App:
Read Later: a free desktop client app for the Pocket (formerly ReadItLater) service.
web app:
ZooTool: a free social bookmarking service; works with Reeder. [Reeder was reviewed in episode #11].
NPR show This American Life was forced to retract claims by Mike Daisey about what he saw around the Foxconn factory in China that made Apple products. What this story shows is the willingness of Apple haters to believe (and repeat) the worst about the company, even when it’s not true. The clip that starts :40 into the show is of the faif.us oggcast in a recent episode in which Bradley Kuhn (even after This American Life had an episode called “Retraction“) claims “they didn’t retract it.”
The next clip is from the No Agenda podcast, in which Adam Curry tries to pretend he isn’t a Republican shill by claiming he has, yes, “no agenda.” I clipped his podcasting partner on that show, John C. Dvorak, saying similar in djmcloud podcast episode #18.
We circle back to This American Life host Ira Glass and his pompous ass-covering over having broadcast a false story for one more clip. NPR isn’t the high quality outfit he claims it is: read this blog post about their coverage of Greece.
WordPress theme
GrandFork: My free and open source theme, now with left, right and below-content-area widget sections. Uses Futura font [or sans serif if that font or Helvetica are unavailable]. No support for internal WordPress comment system, though I think alternatives like Disqus or the Facebook blog comments system might work with it. The GrandFork theme is currently in use at the Neener band blog.
-Angry Birds Space: new title from popular series adds some gravity to the game’s physics as birds are shot in and out of orbit.
-Cloudscrob: tracks what you’ve listened to on your native iOS Music (formerly iPod) app and sends ["scrobbles"] the song to your last.fm account.
-Readability: one of the numerous “read later” systems which allow users to save web pages and blog posts using a desktop browser plugin (or on iOS a specialized browser inside this app) so they can be collected together for subsequent perusal.
Mac apps – raster image editors
-Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta: a new version of the CS6 suite of applications is coming out soon and the beta version is free to try for a limited period.
1. Minecraft PE for iOS gets an update–now includes night/day cycles. That also means that at night if you are outside you can be killed by zombies, and during the day sheep wander around. Still offers the building mode without night/day and zombies/sheep. [I originally discussed the game in episode 21.]
2. Posterous micro-blogging service acquiredby Twitter. It’s easy to speculate that Twitter will be storing more media in the future (photos are currently hosted by partners like PhotoBucket [last I heard] for Twitter’s built-in photo sharing feature. They may plan to run their own servers, and maybe add video and even audio files as options for uploading–if this happens having the Posterous crew on board (and even the posterous.com site’s technology) could make it easier to start hosting a range of media files–as Posterous does now. (They tend to host files on the Amazon S3 cloud.)
4. I like the Kindle platform because it has a read-almost-anywhere quality that other ebook platforms can’t match yet at least. You can get a Kindle reader app for iOS but also the Mac desktop and the web, as well as numerous other platforms. Now iBooks really needs a Mac client–I like to read on the computer–but Kindle also needs to fix the text layout in its web client because it’s so broken, at least on the book I’m reading right now.
By Daniel J. McKeown | Published February 29, 2012
djmcloud.com podcast #27: My book is still on the way, Vimeo gets a boost from OS X Mountain Lion, I talk about music and DAWs, and Sony releases the PS Vita.
New intro audio: a mash-up of Dan Benjamin saying “Again, I sound like a conspiracy theorist, here, I’m aware of that.” on episode #80 of the 5by5.tv podcast “The Talk Show.”
This month I spent writing time with mostly writing songs: 14 in fact. I was inspired by (though not directly participating in) the fawm.org site where people share their tracks from their “February album writing month” where they’re trying to write 14.5 songs this month. 3 of the 14 songs I managed to write will probably appear on the upcoming Neener 2 album.
Up and down sound quality on the podcast. Comparing iOS audio recording and Mac OS X audio recording. GarageBand, Logic Studio and Reaper.
I talk with Jessica about Canon (point-and-shoot sales are weak while dSLR sales are strong) and Nikon (new D800).
Then I go on a long rant about how now Twitter is like Myspace used to be, driven by crass popularity statistics and thus incentivizing pandering behavior by users as they obsess over how their tweets are received. People allow reactions from a few users to shape their sharing choices. This is not exactly self-expression. Favstar seems to offer Twitter users a place to obsess over their online image, and show off to other users how often they have been re-tweeted and favorited.
Moving up the results: Okay but not stellar progress in making danmckeown.info the definitive site about people who use that name.
Congratulations to Jessica for winning an award from her employer for her excellent work.
Fallout continues in the file sharing world of the Megaupload.com shutdown and arrests. Some people report losing their files. I’ve always thought that (legitimate) file sharing should be managed at as micro a level as possible–I wrote pacificpelican.us/cms to help make it easy for anyone with web space that can run PHP can easily upload and share files on their site.
I have an ebook that you can download: Like Any Gangster: Selected Writings 2006-2011 [54 pages, PDF and iPad versions both available for free]. This first edition was made with Apple’s iBooks Author.
A discussion of the file auto-save and versioning system in Mac OS X Lion: I illustrate the change in Lion from Snow Leopard by considering the difference between iMovie 11 and GarageBand 11 (the former auto-saves, the latter uses manual saving). In addition, I consider the different implications of the new system for text files compared to image files.
