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Welcome to Open Source Cinema | Open Source Cinema – An Open Source Documentary Film about Copyright.

So I just finished watching the absolutely brilliant and fascinating documentary RIP: A Remix Manifesto… Starting off with Girl Talk and cycling through the 20th Century of American pop culture in regards to copyright, free use and mashup culture, this documentary is fantastic. There’s some great arguments about how copyright changes in the US have affected art and culture growth, and how the internet and technology have played a part in not only changing that, but facilitating a boom in creativity unmatched in our lifetime…

This Open Source Cinema site is one remarkable example (created by the filmmaker) to further the points made in the doc. Here, people are encouraged to upload their own open source video for use by others, and to remix the materials already here, including the footage from the documentary to make it an ever growing and changing thing…

There’s also some fascinating bits in the doc on how Brazil as a country has revolutionized “remix” ideals not only in art and culture but in medicine and science… There’s a ton of stuff about the effects of the RIAA in the past decade or so and the stifling and misguided nature of their efforts of control…

Cooler still, you can watch the entire thing (as well as remix it yourself) on the open source cinema site… Check it out!

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”.
So I made the leap and upgraded this and my iPhoneography blog to WordPress 3.0. and WOW… First off – easiest and smoothest upgrade yet (although I never really had issues before except having to upgrade the mySQL stuff one time). Within seconds there was a very noticible jump in page load speed, not only in the dashboard and admin of wordpress, but on my blog itself… I felt it was getting a little sluggish and thought it was because of all the plugins. Now my blog is kicking along faster (guess that should be another motivation to update it more often…). I’d say for anyone using it but waiting to go ahead and make the leap to 3.0!

Top 10 Photo Fixing and Image Editing Tricks.

Nice set of links to web resources (software and ‘tips & tricks’ related stuff…). I haven’t clicked on all the links yet, but this is definitely a nice resource jumping off point for some good info to keep in the back of your head (in regards to amateur digital photography at least…)

Japan Probe.

Crazy little site that seems to do a fantastic job of breaking down, explaining and exposing you to some oddities and other news and tidbits in current Japanese culture. There’s lots of images and videos to further the experience. If you have a curiosity or have a few friends across the way, its definitely worth checking out and/or subscribing to the feed…

Vemedio – Media Software for Mac and iPhone.

Between the music and photo apps, I keep my iPhone pretty busy.. Picked up a nice app over the weekend to beef up things on the music-side.. Snowtap for the iPhone is priced perfectly at $1.99. I’d been using FStream for a while to listen to saved streams and custom add internet radio streams.. But FStream had a few buggy bits that were a little irritating. The files saved were needlessly huge, and if I got a call or some inturruption while listening to a recorded stream, I’d have to start over with no ability to pause or jump anywhere in the recording.. A pain when you’re driving needless to say…

Enter Snowtape… First off, just a much smoother/slicker app experience… Very smooth and flowing. The ability to trim audio, save and organize for later is fantastic… Adding favorites is a piece of cake and the list of included stations in its search is huge… But I really loved the ease of which I could add the custom streams not found in their list but from sites I had found along the way…

So far after a few days, virtually NO hiccups whatsoever… The auto tagging and art tweaking features are nice but for me it’s the smooth interface and ease of recording that had me sold… My only gripe (and minor at that) would be having the ability to make sub-folders or categories with the favorites (I’ve got 42 in there so far so I’ve always got to scroll that list instead of jumping to a specific bunch…), and baing able to rename a favorited station (WCSB – 89.3 Cleveland for example shows up as N/A because they must not be streaming the call letters in their stream…Would be nice to adjust that…).. Overall tho, great app… I guess it’s also a Mac streaming radio app so those of you on macs may want to check that out…

FYI – Found This… Didn’t make this… More goodies here…

“The World is Moving to HTML 5″ and Other Flights of Fancy.

A bit of a techie article but really hits the major points of this debate in the most clear and concise way I’ve read yet! It comes from someone who has no real stake in seeing Flash stick around. Found this in a response to a Mashable article titled “Apple Didn’t Kill Flash, HTML 5 did.” Horrible title. Flash is NOT dead… But that’s neither here nor there..

To me the weirdest thing I see everyone talking and raving about is HTML 5. Sure, it most likely will be a great thing…but it’s far from being a standard and lest everyone forget there are all the browser & OS discrepancies, and the fact that there are hundreds of tools for hundreds of different uses and applications…

Best bit from this article:

The world will move to HTML X when Flash X is not needed, it is a non-argument, no amount of insane zealous preaching from within the idealist world of either side will make this happen in the real world. The market will use whatever tools provide the best solutions for the best return on investment.

Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash — Engadget.

Here we go again…. So at first glance after reading Steve Jobs’ latest perspective on all things flash & web, I have to say I started to feel he was making some valid points. I’ve always agreed with the mouse verses touch issue, but disagreed on the video issue and haven’t seen enough true tests to truly understand the battery life issue. As far as the developing in flash for native iPhone, I disagree, but can see his point a little… REMINDER: I absolutely LOVE my iPhone!! and I absolutely HATE working on a mac on a day to day basis… Just sayin…

Then I let it all sink in… and PLEASE if you read this, read the comments following the press release… Here you’ll get a true cross sample of the overall opinions on this press release and suprisingly (or not) it’s largely negative… The problem is the backbone of his arguments are based on this idea of Apple as ‘open’ and non-proprietary and being so “new” and removed from what he calls the PC era… Crazy-talk…Apple was invented in the ‘PC era. The internet, computers, mobile devices, etc were all spawned in the past and the grow and change to suit the user needs and keep up with technological advances. To think Apple is any different is weird. But to then come off like the creator behind every technological advance in the modern era is preposterous…

It’s also funny his thoughts between what is open, closed, and what is the future (as if peering up from his crystal ball). HTML 5 looks like a great advancement but it is in no way close to being a “standard” yet. h.264 is great for video, but will also be great for some serious licensing $$$ in the next few years.. HTML wants to support ‘ogg’ video anyway, which is buggy and has no strict standards in how its created.

Then there’s the whole idea of choice. Sure Apple has made some great judgment calls on which way to go with products and technology that have revolutionized the industry… But it also has made some serious judgment issues and has its share of bombed project ideas… Jobs doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s effectively trying to take the ability to decide away… He can’t help but use language in the press release to re-enforce the “best ever” mentality at Apple.

Ultimately people will decide what technologies and devices stay or go. We didn’t want Bill Gates deciding everything for us 10 years ago… Do we really want Steve Jobs to do that now???

Gil Mantera’s Party Dream will change your life.

Nice write up with accompanied video snippets of Youngstown’s infamous GMPD… I was at the mentioned Grog Shop appearance and it was quite a spectacle..

The Quietus | Features | Anniversary | All That Useless Beauty: 20th Anniversary Of Lush’s Mad Love.

Fantastic article about one of my fave bands of all time… Lush!