PMN Log

Flexslider looks really cool! I need to add it to one of my sites on the welcome page.

Smashing Magazine gives the lowdown.

The plugin includes fade and slide animations, customizable options as well as all the navigation options you would expect in such a plugin — touch gestures inclusive! It uses simple, semantic markup to create the slider and is lightweight, weighing only 5 Kb (minified). The plugin has been tested in Safari 4+, Chrome 4+, Firefox 3.6+, Opera 10+, and IE7+. iOS and Android devices are supported as well. In three simple steps, you can have a fully responsive slider for your responsive design.

PopPhoto reports about a new site GadgetTrack that tracks if your stolen camera has uploaded images to flickr or 500px

John Heller was on assignment for Getty Images at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, when his Nikon D3 and lenses were stolen, but it wasn’t until a substantial amount of time later that he searched for the camera’s serial number on GadgetTrak’s service, which has indexed all the serials embedded on images from 500px and Flickr from 2006 onwards. With a positive hit on a couple of photos on Flickr, the police were able to track the camera down to a photographer, who bought it not knowing its origins — and even had a receipt for the transaction.

Petapixel notes that Google Images now includes some EXIF information in their image search.

I just joined Google Plus. The main thing I have been getting my head around is how it works. Since I didn’t really use Google Wave or Buzz that much, I was intrigued to find out if lessons had been learned. It seems that they have and are taking the best bits from Facebook and Twitter. I found this article that includes the following paragraph that illustrates its purpose very well: 

That is the big difference between Google Plus and most other networks. Twitter is an all or nothing model. You can share with everyone or you can only share with all the people that follow you. But you can’t share with only a sub set of the people that follow you (such as a specific Twitter List.) Facebook is a little more flexible than that. But you must be friends with people or you must reduce your privacy. You can limit who sees individual things you share, but it is difficult to do and not intuitive to get set up.

It seems that Google learned something from its former employee Paul Adams. His presentation of the real life social network illustrates the problem of using facebook and shows how personal networks are more complicated than the facebook philosophy of everything about you should be public. Look at the whole presentation to see understand his point.

Nice cheat sheet for HTML5 and CSS.

I’ve read many articles about how fantastic HTML5 is going to be. But I haven’t really seen many articles showing how it can enrich the end-user experience until I saw this post on the Opera website. It details all of the new elements that are available to web developers in the new standard.

HTML5 aims to standardise some of the most common rich form controls, making them render natively in the browser and obviating the need for these script-heavy workarounds.

Version 4 of Firefox had just been released. Already over 6 million downloads have been registered. Just got it myself and all of my addons don’t work. But it does look more modern and seems faster. What’s interesting is that I found out about it on the new linked in feature of top discussions.

This story in The Guardian got my attention. Imagine having 4 years of work removed at the drop of a hat? That’s what seems to have happened with Google’s decision to shut down some music bloggers. Apparently, they weren’t even give any warning.

In what critics are calling “musicblogocide 2010″, Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.

This is not a problem of Google per se. It’s a problem of depending on any third-party to hold your data whether it’s Facebook, Salesforce, Flickr, Hotmail or any other site holding your data. I came across this problem during the initial internet bust when my files were deleted by a data hosting company and I was unable to retrieve them. If it’s important, always make local backups of your data and have workarounds in place so that if one provider kicks you off or goes bust, you have an alternative option to keep functioning. If you blog, get your own domain and hosting provider and backup your files. It’s much easier than remembering what you wrote 4 years ago…

John Naughton’s column in the Observer yesterday analyses the impact of the coming Google operating system.

The flip side of all this, of course, is that Chrome netbooks will be the ultimate in tethered devices. You may own the machine, just as you may think you own your Apple iPhone, but in fact Google controls it, just as Apple controls the phone. If, for example, you’ve tinkered with the device overnight, and the Google server detects the change as you hook up to the net, then the operating system may be remotely deleted and a fresh version installed without your knowledge or consent. Google will argue that this is for your own good – that it’s an effective defence against the viruses, trojans and malware that plague current users of Microsoft operating systems.

And so it is. But it’s also a limitation on your freedom. In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet – and how to stop it, Harvard academic Jonathan Zittrain painted a vivid picture of the dangers of a world in which most people’s access to the internet is via tethered devices controlled by powerful companies. If Chrome OS takes off we will have taken a giant leap into that nightmare. For 1984 read 2010.

Imaginative video exploring the perceptions of reality.

Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.