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.
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?
It had been introduced 41 years earlier by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but sometimes it takes a few decades to move the Overton window towards sanity. ↩
By almost any measure, Jack Andraka, the 15-year-old science prodigy from Maryland, should be a hero of the open science movement. After all, he has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in the past few months for his work developing a new test for pancreatic cancer. By his own estimates, the test he developed is 168 times faster and 26,667 times cheaper than the existing state-of-the-art test. He says the insight for the test came to him while he was “chilling out in biology class,” and that it was helped along by search engines and free online science papers.
I recently finished the free online Stanford cryptography course offered through Coursera and taught by Dan Boneh. It’s a challenging class, with at least four hours of lectures a week, and it actually took me two attempts to get all the way through it. I’m really glad I did though: cryptography is a tremendously empowering subject, and learning the theoretical foundation can be not just educational but inspirational. In one early lecture, Boneh lays out a basic tenet that really spoke to me:
I’ve submitted two proposals for panels at next year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin. I really hope one of them gets picked. The PanelPicker is currently open for voting (I’d appreciate your votes!) and then I’ll know later this year if I’m in.
