David Pearson’s Flickr collection has a number of superb sets. This First Book of Jazz set is a great place to start your exploration.

What intrigued me most about the tweet was the second part ”…look just the same, just as Facebook does with people’s lives.” I had been thinking much the same about Facebook. I know it isn’t completely true. It isn’t that Facebook makes everyone’s lives look identical, but the framing of it creates a kind of uniformity, a blandness. My news feed is a mix (high school friends, PBS, the Dali Lama, people I know professionally, Charlie the Bassett Hound) but each element in the feed is framed the same way.

What about the first part – that Instagram makes everyone’s memories look the same?

I question the idea that Instagram is about memories at all. But when I think about the photos I share, some might serve as replacements for memories of trivial things. Loaves of bread I have baked. Like most casual photography, it complements memory. And obviously that is the most common use for photography.

Does Instagram make images look the same?

Instagram carries a burden of clichés. The clichés are largely visual, but there are social and business factors involved as well.

Visually, there are two main components to Instagram. First, the square form factor of the image. I like it; and as a purely formal choice, it is a good one.

The second, optional component when posting a photograph in Instagram are the filters. They seem popular with other Instagram users, but I rarely use them. I probably have more interest in using the filters that change the framing of the image, or make a color photograph monochrome, but the color changes and fake film effects bore me. I am sure there are photos on Instagram that I like better because they were processed through a filter, but I KNOW I see mediocre photographs that are even more mediocre because they were filtered. These are qualities of the medium that dominate what the viewer sees, and like the way Facebook “frames” updates, it seems arbitrary. And uniform.

Beyond the formal, visual, there is an awful lot of photo sharing on Instagram that falls into the category of non-technical clichés. Partly the result of Instagram memes. Photos of the ground, with the photographer’s feet popping up from the bottom edge (#whereistand) for instance. Other clichés seem to be the result of the popularity cycles built-in to the Instagram system. There is a popular page, where photos that have been well liked are displayed, increasing their ability to be found and liked more. This seems logical. I don’t think it is good, if what you want is creative diversity, but I guess it serves another purpose.

I prefer to browse the “news” tab, looking for images that are liked by people I follow.  This is a great way to find interesting images, “curated” by people whose images were interesting to me.

Instagram is an example of a tool that excels at a narrow form of sharing. Something I have been thinking about lately, and hope to write about soon.

With a Speck plastic cover snapped on the back of the iPad, and an Apple Smart Cover protecting the front, I am happy to carry it almost everywhere.

It is a great drawing tool, using apps like Brushes or AutoDesk Sketchbook. I love it.

• Improving what I already do well
• Learning something that is out of my comfort zone
• Being more generous

I spent part of last weekend going through some boxes. Found a few things I liked, including this oil sketch I did about 20 years ago. Painted on an 8″x8″ gessoed plywood panel.

Even if I didn’t care about the message of the book, I think I would buy it for the illustrations. But I do care about the message: very, very much.

A dovetail gauge is used when marking out dovetails, of course. It certainly isn’t required – a sliding T-bevel, or some other angled or adjustable square can be used. The advantages of a gauge like this, however, are it’s lack of adjustability, and it’s light weight. It isn’t larger than the job requires, and that makes it easier to hold in place when marking out the work.

Like most squares, this tool has a stock (made of a dark hardwood here, “wenge” I believe) that butts up against the workpiece, and a blade that serves as a guide for a pencil or scribing tool. One blade is angled, for marking out the tails (in this photo, the tails are marked out – the shaded areas will be removed, leaving the tails between) and the other blade is square to the stock. Drawing square lines along the endgrain of the workpiece is another common task when laying out dovetails, so it is convenient to have the two blades on one tool.

The time I spent making this wasn’t trivial, but it was pleasant work. The brass stock was already a uniform width. Using a sliding T-bevel and a steel scribe, I marked the lines, then cut close to the mark with a hacksaw. I finished each edge by filing to the line, then dressing them with emery paper. I don’t recall the exact steps I used to mount the blade, but most likely I clamped them together and drilled pilot holes through the brass and into the wood. Enlarging the holes in the brass a bit, to create clearance for the threads of the screws would make sense.

If you know how to program in any language, you can probably make sense of  using Python. It’s popularity, and the available packages that dovetail with the data miner’s needs, make it a natural choice for a book like this.

Russell covers a lot of territory. The chapter on microformats alone is enough to keep me tinkering for a while – recipes are always interesting. Email doesn’t strike most people as a particularly sexy Social Medium, but I found a new interest in what I can do with my own data there.

I am sure I am not the only reader who was a bit bemused at the inclusion of an example using Google Buzz, but it makes sense, really. Buzz is a fine place to exercise information retrieval tools. I found the discussion of text mining in that chapter very interesting. I am new to TF-IDF.

Russell’s approach suits me well, but I can see how it might not satisfy someone who wants a narrow focus towards greater depth. I found it fun to read, and it has motivated me to explore data in new ways.

If you want to find out more about the book, here is the O’Reilly catalog page for Mining the Social Web.

This is the third book I have reviewed as a part of the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program.

By the time I read the “keep calm and carry on” post, I had already moved my bookmarks to a couple of other sites. More importantly, I saved my exported file locally, and am working on my own application to solve the problem of a universally available bookmarking tool. I made a local copy of my photostream from Flickr as well, since Flickr is another Yahoo service. I felt like a panicky account holder taking his money out of the bank. Why all the fuss? One word sums up what I am after: autonomy.

The Gawker and SilverPop hacking stories helped increase my sensitivity to the idea that each of us needs to be more concerned about maintaining our own well-being on the internet.

We don’t want to lose valuable assets like years of links, in the case of Delicious, or to have our online identities usurped, in the case of the Gawker security failure. Of course it makes sense to take steps to avoid running into these problems, but like a run on the bank, the risk is a kind of stagnation.

If I never got in the habit of using Delicious, I know I would have saved fewer bookmarks. The personal artifacts of my links and tags would not exist, because I would have never bothered to preserve them. I never would have found the other users of Delicious whose areas of interest intersect mine, because a file of URLs on my desktop can’t take part in the “chance encounters” with other links that an online service like Delicious hosts. The loose interaction on sites like Flickr or Delicious lead to interesting associations. I don’t want to move all these nice things into a walled city like Facebook.

Dan Gillmor suggests we maintain our own outpost on the web. Your email is your email, when you pay for hosting at a company that respects your privacy, or host it at your own server under your desk.
===

It took me a couple of weeks of commuting daily with the new pedals to feel like I had a good idea of how usable they really are. My first impression wasn’t very warm – I found it irritating to step on the SPD side if I was wearing running shoes, and if I was wearing my bike shoes with cleats, it seemed like I was always flipping over the pedal so I could engage the SPD side. Now that I have adapted to the pedals, I like them. It was a compromise, but a good compromise.

In use,  whenever I need to flip over the pedal, I slide my foot forward and kind of catch the trailing edge with my heel, flipping it over.  Neither side of these pedals are so heavy that gravity will decide which one should be “up.”

I thought about adding a bit of weight to the one side so the other side would always face up – think of the cars on a Ferris Wheel – but that seems unnecessary at this point. Even with cleated bike shoes, the platform side of the pedal comes in handy. Since I commute on my bike, I often prefer to leave one foot unclipped for a short stretch when negotiating a path around standing autos, in case I need to stop. Being able to apply power in a quick start is nice too – I don’t always want to pause for clipping-in.

Sure, a single purpose pedal would be better in either case, but like multi-tools or Swiss Army knives, the value is in having easy access to a variety of functions. Like everything else I have bought from Shimano, these pedals are designed and manufactured well.