NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me: Web Design Ledger has a writeup on a metasearch engine for Creative Commons photos. You can also toggle the different searched resources on and off. I ran a few random searches and all the photos were gorgeous. Great resource.

TWEAKS & UPDATES

The Hoover Archives has put its poster collection back online after some system upgrades. “More than thirty-three thousand posters from the Hoover Archives Poster Collection are back online after a series of system upgrades. The posters represent more than eighty countries and range in date from the late 1800s to the late 1980s. The posters can now be accessed using our ONLINE POSTER DATABASE.”

Instagram has released Boomerang, a standalone application for one second videos. “Boomerang ‘takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a high-quality mini video that plays forward and backward,’ according to the blog post announcing the app, automatically saving the result to a user’s camera roll. The brief animations can also (of course) be shared to Instagram’s main app.” Videos are going to get shorter and shorter, until one day we’ll go full circle and have videos which don’t play at all. And we will call them photographs.

Ubuntu 15.10, Wily Werewolf, has been released.

You can now put your Twitter and Vine profiles together. I have a Vine account but I haven’t done much with it. There are some very clever Vine-makers out there. “Assuming that you’ve connected your two accounts, your Twitter user name will pop up on your Vine profile and ‘in other places throughout the app,’ the team says. The most helpful part is that if people search Vine for your Twitter name, you’ll now come up. Tap it, and then boom they can follow you.”

YouTube is shutting down its Music Key service. “Come November 30, users outside the US will be without ad-free music streaming from YouTube when the subscription service ends and YouTube’s new venture – YouTube Red – won’t yet have launched.”

USEFUL STUFF

If you’re not into Skype, Ubergizmo has a list of alternatives. The only one I had heard of is Google Hangouts.

The US National Archives has put up on YouTube the sessions for its Virtual Genealogy Fair which happened earlier this month. Day 1 is here (about 4.5 hours) and day 2 is here (A little over 5 hours.) You can get copies of the slides and the presentation handouts here.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The MIT Center for Civic Media has an interesting article on blockbots. “What are block bots? They are information infrastructures that support community curated collective blocklists. People who were having to block the same kinds of people were doing much of the same work. Using a block bot, when one account is added to this community blocklist, everyone who is already subscribed will get all of those blocks as well.” I knew about blockbots in the context of Twitter but I had no idea that the concept as a whole was as well developed as it is.

Google and General Assembly are teaming up to launch a developer boot camp. “Google and General Assembly are luring students to the course with the promise of job placement opportunities. VICE Media will hire an apprentice right out of the course, said Ben Jackson, director of mobile applications at VICE Media. General Assembly has said in a statement that it will connect developers who finish the course with jobs in its hiring network, including data company Karma.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Hey! Creating easy-to-remember, complex passwords — using poetry forms. That makes sense. Now let’s turn them into advertising jingles and we’ll never forget them EVER. (I heard a Red Man Chewing Tobacco jingle on the radio at least 40 years ago, and every now and again it pops up in my brain and makes me miserable for about ten minutes.)

When you think of security vulnerabilities, you think about things like browsers and smartphones. But with the Internet of Things, all kinds of things can get infected. including Fitbits. “The malware could spread to your PC/Laptop if you’re using the syncing dongle, or to other Fitbit trackers. From what I’ve read of it though, it’s mostly theoretical. It could work under some circumstances, but there’s no real live code out there infecting Fitbit devices and spreading itself.” Since we’ve already had a refrigerator sending spam, I don’t think it’ll be long before someone makes something out of this. Good morning, Internet…

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