Category Archives: good code

Free the Airwaves: Whitespace campaign


My contribution to the “Free the Airwaves” campaign, a push to free spectrum “whitespaces.” Continue reading

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Dems unite on Network Neutrality

Matt Stoller at OpenLeft has been collecting positions from Democratic candidates about network neutrality. As he reports today, every single Democratic challenger supports open access. Check out the table, including contributions (or for most, the lack of contributions) to the candidates from telecom companies. And bravo for the work to make this dimension of this election clear. Continue reading

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one step until brilliant: ScreenFlow

So readers of this blather will know that I’ve long struggled to find useful software for capturing and making available presentations I make, and that I’ve whined often about the flaws in everything that’s out there. (See, e.g. this.) I prepare my presentations in Keynote which (alone) provides the key functionality critical to how I present — good preview of the next slide, almost perfect ability to integrate other media, almost never forgetting links to existing media). I was therefore very happy when Keynote promised the ability to sync narration to a presentation.
That happiness was short-lived, however, because except for short, media-bare presentations, I have never found the syncing function actually keeps synchronization. (Like selling a spreadsheet that can’t multiply).
ProfCast was a hopeful bet, but it has never thought it necessary to enable the capturing of transitions, or media. And so for those of us who obsess about making that stuff useful (maybe uselessly, of course), ProfCast simply won’t work.
SnapZPro was an almost perfect alternative, though for reasons similar to the complaint below, it is hard to use it when trying to capture an actual presentation (again, you’ve got to set up the screen capturing settings just before you record, which is awkward and awful when you’re trying to launch a real presentation.)
But I’m now very hopeful utopia has been found. ScreenFlow is an elegant and powerful program that captures a presentation and synchronizes it flawlessly. It even has post-production editing built in. And while I’ve hit some flakiness with long presentations (I’m a lawyer, what do you expect?) with media (genuine flakiness — weird screen colors, apparent freezes for minutes at a time), almost always it has recovered and allowed me to save the sync.
One extremely frustrating feature/bug with the program as it exists now is no simple way to link the launch of the program to the launch of a presentation. My flow is to get to a stage, and begin a presentation immediately. But ScreenFlow imagines I’ll get to the stage, set the record preferences to capture the second screen (you can’t set that preference until it actually sees the second screen), then launch the record, and then launch the presentation, and then when you’re finished, exit the presentation and stop the recording. Twice now I’ve lost the recording because I’ve had to close the screen after the presentation and then when I tried to open it again, nothing was there. And even when it has worked, the steps to fire this up every time have been a huge hassle.
Simplest and most obvious changes to make this almost perfect bit of heaven perfect: (1) Let me tell you in advance what you should be capturing, trusting you’ll see it when I start. (2) Give me a simple way to link the launch of the recording to the start of the presentation, and same with the end. (3) Give me a simple way to get to the scratch file if there’s a failure.
Given the almost perfection of the system so far, I’m optimistic someone will get this right soon. Continue reading

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JZ on Colbert tonight


Zittrain was on The Colbert Report. Continue reading

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TotalRecut remix contest

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TotalRecut has today launched a remix contest: “What is Remix Culture?” I’m a judge (as close as I’ll ever get to that title, but now twice — just finished judging the Obama in :30 contest). Cool prizes. Great question. Get busy. Continue reading

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fantastically cool code to watch

This is something to watch, as its potential to enable real integration is amazing: Apture.


Apture Getting Started Tutorial from Tristan Harris on Vimeo
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Wired Science — final episodes of the season

So as an iTunes subscriber to Wired Science, I’m a bit biased here. But you can get Wired Science for free tonight and next week — last two episodes of this season — on broadcast TV (PBS).

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A US CTO?

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society is now in the early planning stages for a conference to be held April 18/19 about the idea of a CTO for the United States government. Obama of course suggested the idea in his tech program. But this conference has nothing to do with the Obama campaign.
My current thinking is to pick four policy areas, and get experts to reflect upon how a CTO might impact or advance policy interests within each area. The four I now plan are (1) privacy, (2) security, (3) transparency, and (4) efficiency. Then at the end of the day, experts in administrative law will reflect upon how best to architect the office of the CTO to achieve these objectives.
No doubt there will be lots of fun speculation about who the US CTO should be. My own view is that the person should be someone at least with experience as a CTO at a major organization. (I.e., s/he needs to be a credible techie.) S/he should also have a rich sense of policy.
I’ve set up a page on my wiki to invite suggestions for the planning of the conference. And if you’d like to be informed when final plans are made, send a note to [email protected] Continue reading

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Tom Bell on "Intellectual Privilege"

Tom Bell is writing a book about (what’s called) “intellectual property” in public. He calls it “intellectual privilege.”

I here offer a third view of copyright. I largely agree with my friends on the left that copyright represents not so much a form of property as it does a policy device designed to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (as the Constitution puts it). I thus call copyright a form of intellectual privilege.
Like my friends on the right, however, I hold our common law rights in very high regard. Hence my complaint against copyright: it violates the rights we would otherwise enjoy at common law to peaceably enjoy the free use our throats, pens, and presses. That is not to say that copyright is per se unjustified. We can excuse facial violations of our common law rights, such as the takings effectuated by taxation or the restraints imposed by antitrust law, as the costs of obtaining a greater good. But it does mean that copyright qualifies, at best, as a necessary evil.

Watch and participate at his website. Continue reading

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Miro: An important new world

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An important advance in the life of the network happened today. Miro 1.0 was released. Think about the history of computing technology — from the bottom of the stack up, the movement has been from proprietary to free. The hardware became a commodity, then the OS, then many apps. Miro represents the commodifying the content protocol layer. “It’s a platform that benefits everyone by keeping online video open,” the website promises. Here’s my promise: it signals the movement of those seeking proprietary profits further up the stack. That’s always a thing for innovation and growth. Continue reading

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