parker higgins

Since it was introduced, the SoundCloud Record button has been hard to get to work in Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions. Fortunately, my buddy Omid, who is a SoundCloud developer, has found a solution.

NPR Berlin reported today that Berlin’s public transportation authority, the BVG, launched the Touch&Travel program [de] earlier this month, which allows Vodafone and Telekom customers to use an Android phone or an iPhone to pay for their transport tickets. Participants “check in” while boarding, and confirm their location either through continuous GPS data directly from their phones, or by scanning a QR code at the end points of their trip.

My friend Patrick Hammer sent around a video of Rebecca MacKinnon’s TED talk about the need for users to take back the Internet. It’s a great talk, and it reminded me of how effective the TED talk format can be at communicating complex ideas to people who don’t want to dive into a monograph or two.

This Tuesday, I had the chance to take a tour of the Kamaka ukulele factory guided by Fred Kamaka Sr., whose father Samuel Kamaka founded the company in 1916. As a ukulele enthusiast, it was a real blast: Kamakas are some of the best in the world and have been the weapon of choice for, among others, Jake Shimabukuro and George Harrison. Even better than the factory and showroom, though, was getting a chance to hear Fred Kamaka tell all kinds of stories about growing up making ukes.

Inspired by a handful of sites that have popped up in the last few weeks to mock a design change made in the official Twitter app for iPhone, my buddies Robb and Johnny and I have put together a project called the Dickens Bar. The idea is simple — enter the URL of any website, and see it immediately enhanced by the “trending topics” of one of the most popular English novelists of the Victorian Era. See, for example, this very site with Dickens Bar addition.

My friend Arlene Wszalek has written a blog post describing a “conundrum” facing users of Klout, a service which aims to quantify online influence by evaluating some 35 metrics related to Twitter and Facebook. Arlene lays out the problem: one factor Klout apparently considers is the proportion of your followers who are actively engaging with your profile or stream. But by using another service called ManageFlitter, Arlene determined that 27% of her followers are inactive, having not used Twitter in over a month. So her score may be being skewed downwards by that soft cap of followers that are active and could actually be reasonably expected to engage.

I put together some mosaics of common images using dice faces as tiles. So far they only exist in computerized form, but the hope is to buy some dice wholesale and actually arrange some of these on a board. I’m still experimenting with what kinds of source images make for good output, but for now I’ve stuck to simple black-and-white symbols and line drawings. I’d like to start using more grayscale and complex shapes, but the challenge is keeping the image clear at a resolution low enough that the dice are still discernible and reasonable to arrange. (Some of these contain thousands of dice, which is a bit impractical.)

This post is cross-posted from the Students for Free Culture blog. I’ve also submitted a shorter version to the Crimson as a letter to the editor.

Expanding on last month’s very rough Kindle screensaver experiments, I’ve now put together a real set of ten nice looking close-ups of subway maps from cities around the world and packaged them for use on the Kindle. In order to install any kind of custom screensaver, you’ll need to perform the (very simple) Kindle “jailbreak” hack. Once that’s done, you should just be able to drop the image files into the directory created by the jailbreak.

Earlier this week I read a new essay by Benjamin Mako Hill called “When Free Software Isn’t Better.” Although I found it incredibly insightful, the reaction to this essay hasn’t been universally positive. The criticism has focused on a perceived attack on the Open Source Initiative. I want to address why I think Mako has taken a stance here that’s not aligned with the OSI, and why I also think it doesn’t constitute an attack.