parker higgins

Advanced users of the New York Times may know about the “two-shift click” trick on that website: hit the shift button twice on any article page, and you then have the option to link to specific paragraphs or even highlight arbitrary sentences throughout the article, in a way that’s stored in the URL so you can send it around. It’s a shame it’s not more widely known — it’s pretty amazing.

There’s an important rule in the cryptography world: you should never implement it yourself. So much can go wrong in the implementation of a crypto-system that you’d better leave it up to experts. Funny, then, that exactly the opposite rule applies to planning CryptoParties.

On Tuesday, I’ll be voting in person for the first time in my native California. I’ve only ever voted by mail before. (I voted from Berlin in the 2008 presidential election, and had a charming exchange in broken German with the women working at the post office. They, like nearly all of Germany, were following the election as big Obama fans, so I had little trouble convincing them of the significance of the letter I was handing off.)

Sometimes I see a few seconds of a video I’m watching and I think that it’d make a great animated gif. But because I don’t always have access to a bunch of graphics software, and because I might be using my Ubuntu or OS X box, it’s nice to have a process that works with widely- and freely-available free software command line tools. So I’ve worked out a process that uses the command line and requires only the programs mplayer, imagemagick, and gifsicle. Here’s how it goes:

I know this is a wonky thing, but I was reading the Library of Congress blog this week when I saw an article about the centennial of copyright for film works. Prior to that date, film was not on the list of classes of work that were eligible. Filmmakers would instead send in collections of stills from the film, because photographs had already been eligible since 1865, like this series from 1894 of a man named Fred Ott sneezing in an Edison Kinetoscope movie. By the way, I love that this is what movies used to be.

Square dongles really truly make processing credit cards not just easier, but possible for all sorts of groups that didn’t have access before: I’ve bought from bands selling merchandise, taxi drivers, food cart operators, and more. I’m worried, though, that Square also makes credit card fraud easier by teaching credit card users security anti-patterns.

I was really struck by Maira’s “Sceneries From The Plane Window,” so I decided to shoot my own on my trip back from Portland. Her camera is better than mine, and the conditions in her plane were a bit better suited for photography, but I like the way some of these turned out.

The talks at day one of the XOXO festival have been incredibly high quality: actual innovators and creators of disruptive media and technology have relayed their experiences of eliminating middlemen and charting new territory for success. It’s just amazing to see what a cool group of people have come together for this event.

The influential federal judge Richard Posner turned some heads recently with a long review of Justice Antonin Scalia’s new book Reading Law. In the critique, which serves as more of a general indictment of Scalia’s school of textual originalism, Posner digs in with some strong words. The whole thing has kicked off a back-and-forth worth reading. But why should I care about a verbal judgefight — even one that pits the great Posner against Scalia?

I like this song by Paul Kelly, called “Careless.” It’s embedded below: