512 Pixels

I can’t wait for this film to come out this summer.

This is great stuff from a guy who just published a book.

A book, for Pete’s sake!

“Trojan Kitty,” on blogging and journalism:

So, let’s get this out of the way: a blog is something between a personal diary and a newspaper. It’s, entirely incidentally, published online, as it’s the cheapest publishing mass media available. And it allows anyone to join. That’s good in some aspects, but it also lets too much noise in. There is no filter or distinction between a diary and a newspaper online. And people who have online newspapers get confused, and treat their newspaper as an online diary, and launch into personal fights with colleagues from their company and other media.

[…]

I do have a problem with every single person with a blog on this planet being piled in with the greatest journalists of the 20th and the few remaining in the 21st century; people who uncover corruption scandals, report from places of conflict, people who have the self-control to spare you the fluff, and give you the real news; wise people, who not just inform you of facts, but teach you about how this world works. And I don’t pretend or want to stand up to all the scrutiny of being a real journalist, so I’m a blogger. So are millions more. And that’s good: we’re not journalists.

And sure, just as we have journalists online, increasingly, we have bloggers in print. It is a real problem.

This debate is tearing journalism schools and newsrooms apart right now. The question is this: where is the line? I would argue that there is no clear boundary between journalism and blogging. Yes, there are some blogs that are, without a doubt, journalistic. At the same time, there are tons of blogs that aren’t even close to producing real journalism.

While I do think I perform a journalistic service here at Forkbombr, it is different than publishing via a newspaper or magazine. Here, I can write with a personal tone, and take sides on an issue. Am I reporting news and events? Yes. Am I adding commentary? Yes.

Am I a working as a journalist as I type this? Hell if I know. I’m not convinced “Trojan Kitty” does either.

I’m not sure the question even matters, as long as I stay in the gray space between the two forms of writing.

[via David Chartier]

I get emails pretty often about how I added the “Send to Instapaper” link next to the date on single post pages here on Forkbombr.

First of all, there is a great Wordpress plugin named Instapaper Read Later Links that will add a “Read Later” button to posts. This button’s placement can be adjusted via CSS fairly easily.

However, I couldn’t find a place where the button didn’t seem massively out of place with Forkbombr’s design. After digging through Marco Arment’s documentation for publishers and asking around a bit, I got the text links working.

The Code

Here’s the code, as a text file.

It works just like a normal link, with destination, title and rollover information. I’ve kept it pretty simple.

Adding the link is as simple as placing this in the appropriate Wordpress template PHP file. Mine is present in the single.php file, so it is only present on individual post pages, below the date and category information. In my opinion, a link is a lot cleaner looking than a “Read Later” button.

How it Works

The link takes the reader to a new page, asking them if they want to add the article to their Instapaper queue. It then redirects them back to article on my site. While this isn’t a streamlined as Instapaper’s bookmarklet, it’s great for those who may be reading Forkbombr in a browser without their bookmarklet configured.

Happy reading.

Fraser Speirs, on replacing MacBooks with iPads in the classroom:

When looking at the iPad, it’s important to break out of the old mindsets. Replacing a cart full of laptops with a cart full of iPads will deliver a worse solution than the laptops. Here’s why:

Let’s call this model “thin slicing”, where each pupil gets to use an iPad for an hour or two a week. That’s how we used to share desktop computers and, with desktops and their multi-user operating systems, that was easy because each user’s files and settings were separated from every other user’s files and settings by the login system.

iOS has no such clear distinction. When you hand an iPad from Pupil A to Pupil B, Pupil B is able to raise merry hell with Pupil A’s files.

Speirs outlines a great solution he calls “chunking.” If you’re working with technology in school, this — and Speirs’ entire site — is well worth a read.

Apple sent an engineer; Google sent a lobbyist.

In a rare interview with the New York Times:

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.

Good times here in the South.

Patrick Rhone and Ben Brooks have been talking this week about minimal computing.

More specifically, about applications and minimal computing.

The most minimal Mac is the base model MacBook Air. At 11.6 inches with just 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, operating one seems to be a practice in minimalism in and of itself.

I’ll be honest — I love the small MacBook Air. I’m often tempted to order one, as it would be a great fit for me. At home, I have a beefy 27-inch iMac, and a super fast 15-inch MacBook Pro at work. Those machines aren’t minimal, simply because of what I have to accomplish while using them. However, I would love a third machine — the little Air — as a machine to use primarily for writing.

With such a machine, I could live without the CS5 suite, QuarkXPress, Aperture and many of the other tools I use at home and at work on a very regular basis.

So, what software would I have on such a Mac? For one, I would re-install OS X with no printer drivers, no language packs and no iLife.¹ Doing so would save some space. Here’s the list of what I would install, in no particular order:

• Dropbox
• MarsEdit
• Transmit
• Twitter for Mac
• OmniFocus
• NVAlt
• Reeder
• Pages
• Keynote
• TextWrangler

That’s not a lot of software. While I wouldn’t want to lug around a USB drive with music on it, I think I would have plenty of space for 5 or 10 of my favorite albums in iTunes. Hell, maybe I’d just play them in QuickTime X.

Looking at this list makes me really, really want to pull the trigger on a new laptop. Right now, I use the iPad or my work MacBook Pro as my mobile machine, and I’d love to leave the MacBook Pro at work each evening. Too bad I have real things to pay for first.

Ed Bott at ZDNet, talking about malware on Macs:¹

Now I am seeing evidence that the next target is OS X. That’s potentially very bad news for Mac owners who have abandoned their PCs in the belief that switching to a Mac somehow immunizes them from malware.

Security experts know, of course, that there’s nothing magical about Macs when it comes to security. They just haven’t been targeted because Windows has been such a big juicy target for so long.

Oh man, this is good stuff. Clearly, Bott’s article — and the others listed in Gruber’s aptly titled article — isn’t entirely accurate.

To date, there have been very few security threats made against OS X users. I can count them on one hand.

The malware attempts that have been made have made in the form of trojan horses — applications that aren’t what they seem. The most famous examples are Background on OSX.Trojan.iServices.A & .B, which was some dormant malware hitched to a hijacked, stolen copy of iWork.

( I wrote about this in depth back in April 2009 if you want to know more.)

In that article, I wrote about what Bott and many others have written about — that the Macintosh is safe because worldwide, Apple’s market share is very small. It simply makes more economic sense to invest in malware that can hit a much wider base of targets.

While the Mac is growing, this continues to hold true, but Bott spoke of the technical end of things.

In that April 2009 piece, I also wrote this:

OS X requires the user to enter their admin password to install software. The iWork trojan horse gets around this by simply adding another package to the payload for OS X’s Installer to process. This is probably how future trojan horses will work as well, since it is so simple and elegant. Very, very few people log at Installer’s log files during or after an installation, letting the additional files to be installed right before their eyes without them knowing.

This is a very important piece of the puzzle. For many Windows years, most Windows users ran as a Local Administrator, allowing malware to be installed without their expressed permission, as older versions of Windows didn’t require the user to enter their password to install software. Windows 7 and Vista, however, require it. Today, if I want to install something on my work PC (running Windows 7), I have to enter my password, even though I’m running as the administrator user.

The Mac, of course, has had this in place since OS X launched 10 years ago.

While I think anyone running anti-virus on a Mac is probably the same type of person who I could sell some snake oil to, there are some things that every Mac user can do to make the world a little bit of a safer place. The biggest thing is to not allow Safari to open “safe files” upon download.

But the single biggest thing you can do to stay safe? Use common sense. Don’t install pirated software, and don’t believe everything guys like Ed Bott publish.

Joshua Topolsky:

RIM seems to have two distinct problems: the first is that it doesn’t seem to adapt quickly to a changing market, and the second is that when it finally does make a move, the results too often feel half baked. The company and its leaders seem almost indignant about the fact that they no longer lead in a field which they clearly feel they created. The unfortunate reality for RIM is that it’s in the process of trading first place for third, and in an increasingly crowded market, it’s not battling to win, it’s battling to stay alive.

Agreed.

The Omni Group has lots of goodies on the way.