Chris Devers’ blog

The WYSIWYG post editor on Vox drives me batty and I wish I could disable or circumvent it. I know HTML. I'm not great at it, but I don't want anything fancy, and for what I want, it would be more than enough for the task. In particular: * I never ever want to use <font> tags (or CSS equivalent) -- the overall page template imposes fonts and I'm fine with working within that context. If I try to paste some text from elsewhere, such as another web page, the WYSIWYG Javascript editor somehow tries to pick up the pasted formatting -- fonts, styling, etc -- and apply it to the blog post. This is never what I wanted. Aside from hyperlinks, I'd be happy with flattened, styling free text. * I embed one of my Flickr photos with most or all of my Vox posts. This used to be twitchy, but basically worked. Now, the last two times I've tried to use it, it's throwing off the formatting for the whole post. In the current example (http://chrisdevers.vox.com/library/post/amazon-misremembers.html), I've ended up with a block of blank lines at the top that the editor won't let me delete, and a big unwanted margin all the way around the image. What I really want is an option to just use HTML, or even a subset of HTML -- the only tags I'd consistently need would probably be <p>, <a>, and <img>, with an occasional (but easily dispensable) <b> or <i>. That's it. Is it so much to ask? This has always been kind of annoying, but it's getting bad enough to make me seriously start thinking about migrating to another service such as Tumblr... :-(

Amazon.com's iPhone app has an interesting feature called "Amazon Remembers" where you can take a photo or something, wait a while, and then it magically tells you what the product is and what the best price they could find for it was. The idea, obviously, is you can go to the store, take a photo of something you're interested in buying, and see if there might be a better deal on the same product online somewhere. And for this, it works pretty well. But what happens if you abuse it? Amazon has at least to an extent anticipated the kind of misuse I'm thinking of here, as you're forced to take a photo, rather than take one from your existing library -- meaning you can't just put some silly photos in the library and pump them to Amazon to see how it handles them. On the other hand, taking a photo of a computer monitor works just fine. Yay analog hole. Just to see if Amazon loves a good scam as much as I do, I decided to "buy a bridge". I took a photo of Wikipedia's entry on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sure enough, Amazon identified it as the Brooklyn Bridge, and helpfully found a book called "Brooklyn Bridge" that could be bought for just $12. Not bad! Tried the Golden Gate Bridge next, which produced a photo of the bridge, along with a link to a poster of it. Two for two! Well, kind of, it's not selling me the actual bridge, but just products that mention it. Still, pending someone putting up the actual bridges for sale online somewhere, this will have to do for now. Trying more famous bridges, I try Scotland's Firth of Forth bridge next. This one responded with a poster of the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge in Pennsylvania. A fine bridge, to be sure, but not the landmark I was shopping for. Then I tried the Charles Bridge in Prague. Amazon responded with a rather dull poster of a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So now Amazon is down to 2 for 4 success rate on selling me bridges. Not even that, it's 2 for 4 on representations of the bridges, and 0 for 4 on the actual bridges themselves. Disappointing, I'd hoped for better from them.

Here's a thought: There's a widely circulating idea that the only way a lot of newspapers are going to sustain themselves is if they start charging for access to the web site, but if any of the other sites remain free, then it's a suicidal move. In the best case scenario, as you hint at here, the newspapers do all start charging at the same time, but then this has negative knock-on effects that could end up being just as suicidal, from damaging blog-journalism to diminished realized revenue. Either way, it seems like the only way forward is for a big fraction of the major papers to take some kind of coordinated effort. So how about the newspapers look into some kind of confederated subscription model, where being a "member" of one paper gets you access to other ones as well? If you get a membership to the Franklin Park & Stone Zoos, or the Museum of Science, that membership also gets you access to free or reduced admission to other zoos & science museums all over the country, and even internationally. Maybe the newspapers can do something similar, and this could play out in various ways. A membership to the NY Times might be more expensive than others, but would get you into other any other newspaper site in their network, while a cheaper Boston Globe membership might get you access to a handful of NYT articles per month, but not unlimited access there, but maybe it would get you full access to the Patriot Ledger, etc. Yes, this would involve getting a bunch of competing companies to come up with a way to pool & distribute revenue amongst themselves, but it's starting to seem like a situation where they'll either stand together, or hang separately. They have little to lose by trying it.

Kenny Ascher and Paul Williams received Oscar nominations at the 1979 Academy Awards for the movie score and for "The Rainbow Connection", which Allmusicdescribes as an "unlikely radio hit ... which Kermit the Frog sings with all the dreamy wistfulness of a short green Judy Garland."^[1] and goes on to add that "'TheRainbow Connection' serves the same purpose in [The Muppet Movie] that 'Over the Rainbow' serves in The Wizard of Oz, with nearly equal effectiveness: an opening establishment of the characters' driving urge for something more in life."^[1] The song was also nominated for the Golden Globes for "Best Original Song" in 1979, losing both Oscar and Globe to "It Goes Like It Goes" from Norma Rae.

For example, I've just uploaded a batch of ~200 photos from my honeymoon in Paris five years ago. Over the years, the file names got messed with, the photo sequence got a bit messed up, and I don't quite remember now what all these things were or, more importantly, where they were. So I start with the Map view, placing the places I can remember on the map and doing some digging to try to figure out where the rest might have been, and for the most part this works well. But now I've got a big batch of photos, and I want to be able to say "all of these were of Versailles, while all of those were of the Eiffel Tower, and all of *those* were of Notre Dame. Ideally, I'd just be able to draw a square on the map (same UI as adding notes to an photo), but I could also just zoom out enough for the pins to merge, then select a pin. From there, I want to be able to add tags to the batch of all photos taken at that selected location, &/or do similar batch operations -- adjust the geoprivacy settings to all of them, batch-change the date, etc. 

So, remember all those posts I had back in the spring about peak oil, peak travel, peak globalization, peak food, peak population, peak suburbia, et cetera?

JEREMY HOBSON: The Baltic Dry Index measures the price of hauling sea freight. It hit an all-time high in May, and it's fallen 85 percent since then. Part of the reason is a drop in Chinese demand for raw materials like iron ore and coal, which make up a significant portion of worldwide dry shipping. But, says Douglas Mavrinac, the head of Shipping Research for Jeffries and Company...

DOUGLAS MAVRINAC: A significant portion of that decline has to do with the credit crisis, and banks aren't issuing letters of credit to companies to facilitate global trade.

Just like other industries, sea trade relies on a constant flow of money from banks -- loans for the producers of commodities, which have seen their value drop dramatically in recent months and loans for the shippers themselves.  

At the municipal recycling center in Branford, Conn., residents drop off all kinds of items: cans, plastic, paper, cardboard. So far this year, Branford — a town of 29,000 on Long Island Sound — has earned about $93,000 from selling recyclables. But solid waste manager Peg Hall says Branford soon may have to pay to dispose of certain items, such as mixed paper.

In the past, Branford has sold much of its paper to an intermediary that sells to China mills, which recycle it into packaging and cardboard boxes. But the economic slowdown has lowered demand for packaging, says Scott Taylor, a vice president at America Chung Nam, the world's largest exporter of recycled paper.

Taylor, who is based in Jersey City, N.J., says America Chung Nam was buying 400,000 to 500,000 tons of mixed paper a month this summer, when "you could get $70, $80, $90" for a ton. But prices collapsed in October, he says. As of late November, a recycling company had to pay $5 to $10 a ton for its removal.

[....]

DeVivo points to a mountain of paper. A few months ago, it was worth $56,000, he says. Now, "I can't sell that for the life of me. I have to pay a paper mill to take it away."

This summer, the plastic used to make water and soda bottles — polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — sold for $300 a ton. Now it's down to $20. Tin is way down, too.  

Is there some kind of unspoken rule among tech journalists that every article about Apple doing something has to have the phrase "Apple quietly [verb]"?

Consider:

1. Apple quietly releases Safari 3.2.1 • The Register
2. Slashdot | Apple Quietly Releases Safari 3.2
3. BetaNews | Apple quietly refreshes MobileMe
4. PC World: Apple Quietly Recommends Using Antivirus Software
5. Ars Technica: Apple quietly discontinues the 23" Cinema Display
6. Ars Technica: Apple quietly settles lawsuit over dithered laptop displays
7. Apple Quietly Kills FireWire 400 | Gadget Lab from Wired.com
8. Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro quietly updated - Engadget
9. Don’t Tell Anyone: Apple Quietly Updates iMac! | The Mac Night Owl
10. Apple quietly updates U2 iPod, lowers price | iLounge News

That's just the first ten hits for a Google search for "Apple quietly", skipping over duplicates. But there's lots more where that came from -- 38,500 right now, and more every day.

I think I'll quietly hit the submit button now.