running blind. We are all just running blind.

If you’re not somebody who films the devastation wrought by the U.S. on the countries it attacks, or provides insight into Iraqi occupation opponents and bin Laden loyalists in Yemen, or documents expanding NSA activities on U.S. soil, then perhaps you’re unlikely to be subjected to such abuses and therefore perhaps unlikely to care much. As is true for all states that expand and abuse their own powers, that’s what the U.S. Government counts on: that it is sending the message that none of this will affect you as long as you avoid posing any meaningful challenges to what they do. In other words: you can avoid being targeted if you passively acquiesce to what they do and refrain from interfering in it. That’s precisely what makes it so pernicious, and why it’s so imperative to find a way to rein it in.

Amen.  I hope we find a way before it’s too late.

Great video about how shooting with fisheyes can increase your creativity and also how shooting two cameras at the same time can allow you to get shots you would otherwise miss.

Video games are fucking worthless. Put against the opportunity cost, they have contributed absolutely nothing positive to my life and they have made me miss out on infinitely more valuable pursuits in my childhood, like learning how to code or write novels or start businesses.

…

If this post doesn’t make any sense or sounds like shit, it’s because video games destroy your mind. Boom. Point proven.

Anyone looking for the con side of the video game argument - read no further.

Actually, there is another use case of Siri: showing off how amazing the iPhone is. “I can tell Siri to set an alarm clock at 6AM and it will!” the fact that no one ever does this outside of boasting only reiterates my point.

Is it weird that I do this almost every night and it’s one of the few things I actually use Siri for?

At first blush, it might seem that the smart phone ushered out the era of voice in favor of SMS and short form messaging and mobile application use. After all what fraction of time spent on a mobile making telephone calls? But a more accurate refinement of that statement that the mobile phone ushered out the era of synchronous voice.

Goodbye synchronous, some of us will miss you.

There’s a new and completely unique Kickstarter campaign that started this morning, and it hopes to make it possible for you to control a window’s opaqueness from an app. SONTE Film is a self-installed “digital shade” that is applied to windows and can be made opaque — or clear again — with a tap on an app button.

Sounds like the future of hacking will present all sorts of unique challenges and opportunities.

The truth is that the current TV system is a great deal for everyone.

Cable TV is socialism that works; subscribers pay equally for everything, and watch only what they want, to the benefit of everyone. Any “grand vision” Apple, or any other tech company, has for television is likely to sustain the current model, not disrupt it directly.

Hard to believe, but the logic and math seem to make sense.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

This is just sad.  I bet the conversations themselves would have been covered as well if only they were as easy to store and transmit as the call data. Is this the future we have to look forward to?

Prism by JohnDesq Imaging

Follow the link to see it larger.

Just imagine if Apple could replace all those tax lawyers with creative new software geeks or industrial designers. It might win back some of the market share it has been losing to Android in recent years.

Indeed, just imagine.

FTS3 and FTS4 are SQLite virtual table modules that allows users to perform full-text searches on a set of documents. The most common (and effective) way to describe full-text searches is “what Google, Yahoo, and Bing do with documents placed on the World Wide Web”. 

Full-text search in SQLite.  It’s like we’re living in the future or something.