Blog About Photography

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.