Blog About Photography

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Adobe launched Photoshop Express not too long ago. It’s a web-based app that offers online photo editing plus a little bit of flickr-esque community. You upload images, edit them in this online version of photoshop, and then you can save them for others to view at your “personal sharing address”. The whole thing’s kind of whatever, and I wouldn’t even mention it if not for one thing. This is from the terms of use:

you grant Adobe a worldwide (because the internet is global), royalty-free (meaning we do not owe you any money), nonexclusive (meaning you are free to license Your Content to others) fully sublicensable (so that we can permit our affiliates, subcontractors and agents to deliver the Service on our behalf) license to use, reproduce and modify Your Content solely for the purposes of operating the Service and enabling your use of the Service. With respect to Your Shared Content, you additionally grant Adobe the rights to distribute, publicly perform and publicly display Your Shared Content (in whole or in part) for the sole purposes of operating the Service and enabling your use of the Service and to sublicense Your Shared Content to Other Users subject to the limitations of Section 7 below.

For those of you who don’t want to bother reading or deciphering that, it means that when you upload something to Adobe Express, you retain ownership of your image but automatically give Adobe the right to do anything they want with it pretty much without paying you any money. Right?

They should probably rethink this. I don’t know who’s going to be cool with that idea. Or maybe it’s just a way of restoring balance to the universe given that we rampantly steal their software. But I stopped uploading my pictures to Facebook a few months back for the same reason.

This is incredibly dorky but I’m posting it anyway. There’s got to be at least one other person out there who will care about this and that’s good enough for me. I have a Macbook Pro and those of you out there with the same computer now how ridiculously huge the power adapter is for this thing. It’s like lugging around a brick. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be happy to know that Apple just redesigned this thing and made it much, much smaller. Lucky for me, I have two of the old ones.

My friend Britt just showed me this because we’re both doing Flash in a design class.

This has nothing to do with art, but, man, the internet is getting so good. I just read this Times article about GrandCentral, and immediately signed up for it. What it does it pretty rad. It lets you sign up for a phone number (you can pick your area code - I picked 917 - and then it let’s you choose from like 30 numbers) that, when called, will ring all of your other numbers at once (work, cell, home, etc.) It’s in beta testing right now so it’s free. After beta is over, it’s free for two numbers. A premuim plan is a little pricey for the casual user - $15 per month.

I only have one phone number, but I signed up anyway because of the other useful bit of funtionality this service provides. Pretty soon I’m going to be moving from DC to New York, and I suppose I could change my phone number and it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But it would obviously be a pain and I still get opportunities from time to time that would stop coming if I were to change my phone number. GrandCentral let’s me link my current number to a 917 number. Problem solved.

The other cool thing is that when people leave you voicemail when they’ve called you using the GrandCentral number, you can manage all the messages from an email-style inbox on the GrandCentral website. I have a real problem checking my messages because I get really fucking bored going through them one by one. This kind of functionality is long overdue and it’ll be good for those of us who can’t afford an iPhone.

This is great. Christian Patterson posted a link to this HOW TO a few days ago. It goes step by step and shows you how to hack a CVS one-time-use video camera.

This is taking forever.