Thought Provoking

Flogging passports

Business, Economy, Finance, Thought Provoking, Travel

The FT’s Tim Harford takes on the cost of EU citizenship.

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I hardly think that €650,000 cheapens the EU passport. For the typical British citizen, the message Malta is sending is that the passport in your pocket is worth more than your house and your pension pot put together. Which may not be far wrong: take a typical UK citizen, dump her in Calcutta or Dar es Salaam and see how she gets on. EU citizenship is more valuable than most EU citizens realise.

Multiple Sclerosis breakthrough?

Health, Thought Provoking

Encouraging news from Canada on treating this debilitating disease. Not sure how fast this treatment will become available as the profile motive doesn’t seem to be very strong in this approach.

Eliminating MS completely and watching patients improve surprised both Freedman and Dr. Harold Atkins, a bone-marrow transplant expert, who started the study. The two originally set out to monitor the development of the disease and find a way to treat it. Their theory was this: Wipe out the entire immune system, reboot it with a transplant of the patient’s own bone marrow and wait for MS to regenerate.

“We thought we might be able to intercept one of the signals that initiates the disease and that would then give us a clue on how to treat it,” Freedman said. He jokes that they “had, in effect, failed because the disease never came back. No one expected to see zero disease activity after the transplant.”

Full article here.

Giving yourself a chance to get your smartphone back

Mobile, Tech, Thought Provoking, Travel

Very informative post about how one techie got an iPhone that was in flight mode back to its owner.
Robert Freeman’s post about how he got an iPhone back to its owner.

One of the main points was at the end of how any smartphone owner can help a finder get in contact with you if you ever lose your phone.

If you have a smartphone, take a look at it and think how anyone would get it back to you if you lost it. Why not put your contact details on the lockscreen right now?

iOS users can do this by replacing their lock screen wallpapers (screenshot above) .

Android users go to Settings > Lockscreen > Owner Info (if you have Jellybean).

Settings > Security (if you have Ice Cream Sandwich).

I need to do that myself later. One commenter suggested getting stickers done also. Nice idea.

The death of Google Reader

Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Read two great articles on the death of Google Reader this week explaining the bigger picture of why it was shutdown.

Marco Arment in this wonderful post Lockdown contends that Google with Facebook and Twitter is building walled gardens to lock users in. The open RSS model doesn’t fit that strategy.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

Following on from that:

Dare Obasanjo writes that Google are no longer pretending to be the good guys anymore.

His conclusion:

Google Reader has been living on borrowed time since Facebook and Twitter became prominent. The only thing that has changed in 2013 is that Google’s management doesn’t think it’s worth it to throw a bone to millions of geeks and early adopters by keeping the lights running on the service with its existing skeleton crew. This new Google doesn’t care if geeks and early adopters just see it as another money hungry corporation that only focuses on the bottom line. Larry Page doesn’t give a shit.

Welcome to the new Google.

Buzzfeed actually received an increase is traffic from Google Reader after it was announced. The graphic showing the comparison of traffic from Google+ and Reader is quite illuminating.

I initially used Bloglines to for reading rss feeds but after they closed down, I did examine moving to Google Reader but instead chose netvibes which is free for individuals. I was uncomfortable about handing over another service to an ever smaller number of providers. There was also the fact that feeds are a core part of netvibes whereas Reader was just another auxiliary part of Google.
My advice: Stick to services that are provided by companies where the service is a core part of their business.

Text editor inside the browser

Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Type the following text into the address bar of your browser.

data:text/html;charset=utf-8, <title>TextEditor</title><body contenteditable style="font-size:2rem;font-family:monaco;line-height:1.4;max-width:60rem;margin:0 auto;padding:4rem;" spellcheck="false"><h1>Text Editor</h1><p>Start Here.

Voila, a text editor inside your browser.
Thanks to Jose Jesus Perez Aguiaga and the commenters. There may even be better suggestions in the comments later on.

Instagram Conditions and the new Flickr app #Instagram #Flickr

Arts, Mobile, Photography, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

I haven’t used Instagram a lot for sharing photos although I do like going through the photos of my contacts. Today they announced they updated their terms and conditions which has resulted in the internet going crazy. One of the best posts I read was on Business Insider.

If you want to stop social networking services from exploiting your likeness for advertising, you’ve got to start paying up.

Within the article, a reference was made to a post last year from the founder of pinboard.in which basically boiled everything into “Don’t be a free user”.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it’s culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

So where does that leave everyone? Well, there is an alternative that offers a paid option for enhanced membership. Co-incidentally, they also added a new app this week that rivals Instagram in design and surpasses it in interoperability with other sites.Yes, it’s Flickr. Nice that they include a post clarifying the ownership and rights of photos

In fact, when you upload to Flickr you set the kind of license that you want to apply to the photos, ‘All Rights Reserved’ is the default, or you can select one of the many flavors ofCreative Commons licenses. The choice is yours and you maintain control over how your photo can be used by others. If you want to make your photo available for use by everybody in the world, license it using Getty Images, or to license it to a fancy magazine, it’s up to you..