[ http://player.vimeo.com/video/33434885?title=0

FUTURA LE SPECIMEN ANIMÉ from Thibault de Fournas on Vimeo.

via I Love Typography

I’m not incredibly concerned about some apps sucking out my address book. After all I do have some degree of control on that.

Yet I am a bit annoyed about my own address being posted all over the place by thousands of people and their apps.

In other words: I can stop using Path today (I won’t), but my address will continue to be posted to hundreds of different sites every day without any control. The moment you give any piece of information to somebody with a smartphone, that piece of information is no longer private. End of story.

Warning: this is one of those “amazing what you can do with technology these days” kind of post.

When I was a teenager I used to hang around in a friend’s shop selling video equipment. This is where I used a video camera for the first time. It was something like this:

It was the most incredible piece of technology! It had a tiny black and white monitor, and you could see the world in this little TV, in real-time. It’s probably impossible to understand today how exciting it was back then.

After shooting there was editing. Not all consumer VCR could edit videos, most could not. At the shop we had one called “Hitachi VT-8″ (why do I even remember this?), which was an extremely advanced tool which allowed to edit video material.

…25 years pass by…

I’m working from home these days, and a couple of hours ago I went downstairs for a coffee. While the coffee was brewing I watched out of the window, the Bora wind blowing in my garden, and with my phone, I shot and edited this.

This page on Google Reader (it’s not exactly hidden, but not very easy to find either), has a number of useful tricks if you need to get RSS feeds from some services or set up watch lists on search engines.

Looks like the google street view car passed by. Good, it will make giving directions much easier.

While watching a TV show the other night I heard a song and used Shazam to find out author and title (and see real-time lyrics, isn’t that feature cool?).

The next day I tried to buy the song on iTunes store, but it was only available as part of an album. Which I did not want to buy.

At this point I was quite ready to steal it, but then I found it on another site, Italian, and I got the mp3 there (it was cheaper too).

As soon as the mp3 was downloaded, iTunes imported it and it notified iCloud of my new purchase.

Seconds later the very same file that Apple didn’t want to sell to me had been automatically downloaded to my iPhone.

We live in interesting times.

This is an interesting idea.

I’ve been a big fan of Quicksilver for a long time, and recently I have found myself more and more going to the Search feature of the MacOS Help menu as a shortcut to other menu options. It perfectly makes sense to me. [via Brent Simmons]

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/w_WW-DHqR3c ]

For the last couple of months I have kept Safari, which is my main browser, logged off Facebook. When I want to check what’s going on there (there’s many people I care for on Facebook, mostly family), I switch to Chrome. This is actually not very different from switching to the Facebook app when I’m on my iPhone or iPad. The reason I do this is to prevent Facebook from tracking my web surfing (would be nice if they would expose who they think I am as Google does).

In this set up what I find annoying are web applications that rely exclusively on Facebook for some features. For example, I would like to look into Wavii but they only support Facebook log-in (it’s a beta). Or in the case of Pinterest, the only way to find friends is, again, connecting my Facebook account.

To use these other apps I just switch to Chrome and do whatever I need with them, it’s not very different from switching from a browser window to another, I have plenty of RAM and I always run several browser anyway. But the curious result is that Chrome is becoming the ghetto of FB-only apps.

Wonder where this will end…

On September 15, 1947, Gorizia was incorporated into Italy again, and a new border was drawn (or literally painted) with Yugoslavia. I always find old footage fascinating (click the picture to go to the British Pathé site).

The border is still there but there are no checkpoints and anybody can freely cross it.

We are working on some projects which should contribute to make these borders even less relevant.

All other days I know everything.