MadeByMark.com

ChatRoulette

 

Okay, so, I'm a little addicted to ChatRoulette.com.

Up front: this is NOT a safe place for kids or the faint of heart. Chat Roulette connects you at random with anonymous strangers all over the world. Some will be college kids at parties. Some will be lonely singles. Some will be folks looking for an alternative to watching t.v. Some will be rude. Some will be fondling parts of themselves you might (or might not) want to see fondled. 

But that's the crazy, insane beauty of Chat Roulette: when the system drops you into a video chat, you never know who will be on the other end of the line ... or what they'll be doing ... or what they'll think of you.

If that person isn't to your tastes -- or if you aren't to theirs -- either party can click the NEXT button and be instantly whisked away to another anonymous chat with another anonymous stranger. 

In fact, most of your time on ChatRoutlette.com will be spent jumping from person to person to person, as most of the thousands of people on there are clicking NEXT just as soon as they determine you're too young, too old, too thin, too fat, too pretty, or too ugly to suit their tastes. The result: you get these little glimpses into the living rooms, bedrooms, and dorm rooms of people all over the planet. The door opens, you get a quick peek, the door closes, and they're gone.

I did manage to have three actual chats last night, each of which lasted all of about forty-five seconds. One was with a young Japanese woman -- studying English -- who practiced a few polite phrases with me. The second was with a college kid who was amusing himself by hurling insults at people. The third was with a guy who just kept asking questions: What would chairs look like if our knees bent in the opposite direction? What would a goat's name sound like to another goat? What makes the sky blue?

Chats include full video (if you have a camera, and allow it -- but if you don't, no one will talk to you), full audio (so watch what you say), and text. And remember: don't just sit there like a bump on a log. Adopt a persona. Be The Angry Guy. Be a Jehovah's Witness. Be a Tarot Reader. Be That Annoying Guy who Just Keeps Asking, "What? What?" 

Give it a try. (But not at work, and not if you're easily offended by random acts of profanity, insanity, or nudity.) 

Ten Toys that Made You Gay

via youtube.com

I will have nightmares about number 1.

I actually didn't have any of these, but I'd add Major Matt Mason, the Easy Bake Oven, and the original Star Trek dolls to the list.

Traumatic memory: I had the entire set of Star Trek action figures from Mego, along with the Enterprise bridge ("with working transporter!") playset. While I was away at college, Mom let a vicious brood of visiting cousins "play with those Star Trek toys you never play with anymore." 

Those brats pulled off heads, stripped off arms, and lost phasers and tricorders, destroying in one afternoon a collection I'd preserved in pristine condition for seven years. 

Posted via web from Mark's posterous

The iPad and the End of Publishing as We Know It

The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry. Today's creative writers could bypass the industry altogether. The opportunity is already there to a degree, via a number of self-publishing programs, but Apple's iBookstore would give them a power partner with a unique technology and powerful distribution.

via pcmag.com

Yes, exactly.

Instead of asking, "How are we going to maintain the price of a book when Amazon.com sells ebooks for $9.99?" publishers should be asking, "In a world where anyone and everyone can distribute engaging content to millions of readers, what aspects of our business model need to be abandoned in order to remain competitive?"

Posted via web from Mark's posterous

That Third Device

 

When I'm writing a book or composing a longer email or blog post, I want the convenience and power of a full-sized keyboard. Despite all the promise of voice-dictation technology, nothing beats the speed and accuracy of a keyboard for funneling text out of my head and into the machine.

A laptop, though, is overkill when casually (okay, okay -- obsessively!) checking email in a restaurant, or when tweeting a 140-character movie review, or when checking on the status of my Facebook peeps, or when amusing myself during a boring sermon in church. For this, the iPhone -- a device I didn't even know I needed three years ago -- is absolutely perfect. For quick tasks and basic Internet access on the go, my iPhone is the perfect mobile device.

And now, there's the iPad -- a third device -- and since its introduction, everyone is asking the same question, ad nauseum: "Do we really need a third kind of device?"

So I've been thinking about that.

Must the iPad's Arrival Doom $9.99 eBooks?

The difference between Amazon and Apple is this: Amazon is very much in the ebook business to sell ebooks. They want you attached to their platform. That's why the Kindle Reader is on both PC and iPhone, as well as the eponymous e-ink device. Ebooks are huge for them. They sell six ebooks for every 10 physical books. That's why they want to own the market. Apple, on the other hand, sells content in order to sell hardware. The iTunes Store, the App Store and the brand-new iBooks Store exist so you'll buy iPods, iPhones and iPads, which is where Apple really makes money. iTunes revenue is just a bonus, though an ever fatter one with the explosion of the App Store.

via gizmodo.com

I've loved paying $9.99 or less for new release books, and Amazon's discounts have been very successful at driving ebook adoption. (I won't even buy hardback books anymore.) But as products like the iPad expand hardware options beyond Amazon's Kindle, publishers will leverage that variety to raise the price of ebooks by denying rights to deep discounters.

I still believe that an ebook edition of a book *should* cost less than a bound copy. In distributing ebooks, the publisher doesn't incur any printing, warehousing, or shipping costs. So the question remains: as publishers force higher ebook prices, will people like me continue to feel as good about ebook purchases?

For now, I'm not sure.

Posted via web from Mark's posterous

Uncle Mark Gets Facebooked

This week, I've come to terms with the facts: I'm going to have to embrace Facebook.

I've had a Facebook account for ages. My first -- scored back when Facebook limited itself to college and high school kids -- was under an assumed name: Pasquale Voortman, an Italian/Amish foreign exchange student. Pasquale, who posted updates in charmingly broken English, was a senior at my nephew's high school ... and with my nephew's help, he was always in the know about schoolyard events.

Pasquale's posts were always innocent and squeaky clean -- but one day it occurred to me that some parent somewhere might get freaky about "a forty year-old man pretending to be a student at the high school," and Pasquale bit the dust.  

When Facebook opened up to adults, I snagged an account right away. But back then, my adult friends were still standing around, scratching their heads, and saying, "Face-what?" Apart from using the service to keep up with the nephews (I still remember the poignant moment when I found out through Facebook about a painful breakup!), Facebook was mostly useless to me.

Fast forward two years, and suddenly, everyone and his grandmother has a Facebook account. About a year ago, I tried to become more involved with the service, and started issuing and accepting friend invitations willy-nilly. But in short order, my newsfeed was packed with updates from total strangers and five bazillion Farmville alerts ("This total stranger you've never heard of has found a piggy on Farmville!"), making every trip to Facebook an exercise in frustration. 

In an effort to make the service have more value for me, I quietly de-friended everyone I didn't want to hear from on a daily basis. This worked very well for a while -- and then, people started noticing that they had been de-friended. This led to some uncomfortable confrontations, and so, once again, I backed away from the Facebook.

As a way of maintaining a presence there, I set things up so that my Twitter tweets would become status updates. My MadeByMark.com posts are automagically cross-posted, too, along with photos I post to flickr.com. As a result, a lot of people think I've been very active on Facebook ("Man, you're *always* posting updates there!"), when, in fact, I'm *never* there. And this creates problems, too, because people comment on those tweets and posts and photos -- or, worse, send me Facebook messages about them -- and, because I never actually log into Facebook, I miss every single one of those attempts to make contact.

Long story short: there are people I want to be in touch with who, for various reasons, will never tweet or blog or post their photos to flickr ... and so, if I want to be approachable and involved and engaged with those people, I'm going to have to embrace the Facebook.

So: I have the Facebook app on my iPhone, and I check in twice a day. I've set up Facebook to email me when people comment or reply or send me messages. I'm processing friend requests (and even sending out a few). It also really helps that Facebook now allows me to hide unwanted info (like those #$@! Farmville updates!) without de-friending someone. Hallelujah!

After years of being the early adopter of all things online, it feels a bit odd to be the new guy on the Facebook block. When you see me there, be sure to say hello.

10th and Fed

via flickr.com

Quickly-snapped panoramic shot of the corner of 10th and Peachtree, taken last night near sunset.

Posted via web from Mark's posterous

Midtown Morning

via flickr.com

Wow. After downloading Calico, I went out on the balcony and snapped nine photos (a 3x3 arrangement). I took these without taking any great care to create overlap ... and still, Calico fused them into an almost perfect hyper-wide-angle image with just one click. Total processing time: less than two minutes.

Posted via web from Mark's posterous

Calico Makes Seamless Panoramic Images Easy

As part of the great MacFriendly promo, I picked up Calico, a panoramic image stitching app from Kekus Digital. I've worked with this kind of software before, on both Mac and Windows platforms ... but I have never seen anything as fast and easy to use as Calico. 

To test the software, I dumped in four photos from a long-ago Hawaiian vacation: a view from the balcony of the Hale Aloha guesthouse on the Big Island. These were made years ago, with a handheld camera ... and Calico took just seconds to stitch them together into a perfect, seamless image:

Click for larger version

Most panoramic software I've used introduces splintered artefacts or distorted stretchmarks into the final image -- things that must be manually corrected or photoshopped in later. Not Calico, which aligned and merged the photos with a single click of the mouse.

And there's more: drop a folder of images you intend to use to make a panorama, and Calico will find the images you intended to group. Yep. It's that easy.

This is great stuff, from a package and a programmer I'd never heard of before. If you drive a Mac, and you're interested in taking more panoramic images, get Calico.

How to Report the News

via unreasonablefaith.com

Here's a great little video skewering the tired, cliche conventions of network newscasts. (With a tip of the hat to Daniel Florien at Unreasonable Faith.)

Posted via web from Mark's posterous