It’s done all in Javascript, using the canvas element. Simply amazing. And you can save your drawings as PNGs!

As long as I am revealing my conspiracy theory side, the Hungry Beast has a great rendition of all the things Google is up to:

THE BEAST FILE: GOOGLE from Hungry Beast on Vimeo.

Like patent trolls themselves, someone has not only come up with an idea but patented it. In this case, however, the idea is patent trolling, and so, given the USPTO’s history so far, Clive Menesez could soon be in a position to claim that he holds a patent on patent trolling and all patent trolls would have to license their method from him.

Oh, irony, how sweet thou are.

Link to patent onUSPTO website.

A lot of people I know use Facebook. It’s true that the site is amazingly good at connecting or re-connecting people. The problem is that people then stay within the confines of Facebook for these connections, corresponding with each other, commenting on each other’s photographs, and setting up events and holding larger conversations.

And that’s all well and good. That was and is the promise of the internet. The problem is that it’s not the internet: it’s Facebook. It’s a private internet. It’s AOL reborn. It promises privacy. It gives you the illusion of privacy, but in the background Facebook is relentlessly grinding statistics about you and selling this profile of you and your relationships to advertisers. And if you haven’t updated your privacy settings since Facebook changed its Terms of Use, it is also exposing you and all your friends to the larger internet, which may or may not be a much darker and scarier place.

And just in case you thought Facebook was a safe kindergarden, it turns out that the guy running the show has been peering into your e-mails. Zuckerberg, and allies like the guy who founded Zynga, are willing to pry themselves as far into users’ lives as users will let them. (The Zynga link is to a Youtube video featuring Mark Pincus where he reveals, in NSFW language, how willing he was to screw users — sorry, that’s the most polite word I could come up with.)

And that’s why I mostly post to Facebook from my Twitter account. Twitter has not, so far at least, locked my data up. More importantly, a number of my Twitter posts act merely as selective feeds to this site. This site is not as full and complete as I would like it, but finishing it is entirely within my control.

One of the reasons why I picked up an iPhone 3GS was for its GPS functionality.¹ I had been thinking about getting a separate GPS unit, and in fact had asked for one Christmas 2008, but it turns out the delay worked to my benefit. At this point in time, I don’t want turn-by-turn directions, all I want is to be able to note my location coordinates and then tag my notes and my photographs with that information so that future researchers will have that information available to them.

However, getting those coordinates from somewhere on my phone to all those images is not as easy as it should be. This may have something to do, from what I can tell, with the iPhone’s SDK, which up until now has made it hard for apps to save data in a place or in a form that could be used elsewhere. This may all change with the iPad, which obviously needs to make something like a file system available to apps for storage of information. (Again, I could be talking out of my hat here — it’s a lovely IU baseball cap, and so I look quite good talking out of it.)

I have downloaded a few GPS apps, but none of them have done what I want. “Geo logging” wasn’t quite the right search. I should have been using “geotagging.” (It’s often one word these days.) And so I have turned up a number of applications that promise to make this pretty effortless:

• GeoTag for iPhone is inexpensive at $1.99 and offers to track your location for you. You then use a desktop application to tag your photos.
• GeoLogTag is more expensive at $4.99 but it doesn’t require that you install any software on your Mac. Instead, you connect your phone to your wireless network and then tell GeoLogTag to tag your photos. (How exactly this works isn’t clear.)

Frustratingly neither of these apps, and a few others at which I looked, mentions specific use cases with Lightroom. They mention iPhoto, Aperture, and Flickr, but not Lightroom.

All these apps also discuss tagging your photos within a given time window — five minutes or such. Since I tend to be at a given location to document something, I would prefer to capture that data, manually even, and then be able to drag and drop it onto a given set of images — rather like one tags with keywords in both iPhoto and Lightroom. Both of these apps, and others, assume a kind of automation which is very nice but doesn’t exactly fit with my own workflow.