District Nights

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I'm a sucker for time lapse video of any sort, especially when it is beautifully done, such as this. Drew Geraci says this about his video:

This piece is all about DC at dusk and night -- concentrating on the monuments and historial buildings on the mall. During the making of this time-lapse, I was hassled/stopped 27 times by DC police and received 5 parking tickets. That's pretty much how it goes in DC. With help from my buddy Drew Breese, Russ Scalf, and a few unnamed sources we were able to complete this production... even if it was slightly behind schedule. It took nearly 3 months to film the sunsets -- since DC weather isn't always the best. For the production, I used a combination of standard frames, tone-mapping, and traditional HDR (on a few shots). It's quite the mixture. I hope you enjoy this piece and DC just as much as I do. The Vimeo video page lists his colophon of hardware, software and music.. Drew's website is TheVoder.com.

Stamped

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Stamped App Logo John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes:: "New social network/recommendation engine, which like Instagram, is debuting with but a single interface: a native iPhone app. The premise is simple and ambitious: you “stamp” things that you enjoy and recommend. There aren’t different types of stamps. There’s no rating from 0-5 or anything like that. Just stamped. What kind of things can you stamp? All sorts of things: restaurants, places, books, movies, music." "Stylish, distinctive, nice-branded UI, too"

Stamped describes itself as:

Stamped is a new way to recommend only what you like best—restaurants, books, movies, music and more. No noise, no strangers, just the things you and your friends love. Read their entire introductory blog post.

How Facebook Tracks Users and Non-Users Alike

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Ben Brooks, writing on Brooks Review:

Byron Acohido reporting on Facebook tracking cookies:

Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visits for 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day and adding the newest to this log. If you are logged-on to your Facebook account and surfing the Web, your session cookie conducts this logging. The session cookie additionally records your name, e-mail address, friends and all data associated with your profile to Facebook. If you are logged-off, or if you are a non-member, the browser cookie conducts the logging; it additionally reports a unique alphanumeric identifier, but no personal information. Later Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s engineering director, is quoted as saying: “But we’re not like ad networks at all in our stewardship of the data, in the way we use it, and the way we lay everything out,” Bejar says. “We have a very clear and transparent approach to how we do advertising that I’m very proud of.” So I guess the real question is, do you trust Bejar, and therefore Facebook, in general when they say these things? What about now: Adding fuel to such concerns, Arnold Roosendaal, a doctoral candidate at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Nik Cubrilovic, an independent Australian researcher, separately documented how Web pages containing Facebook plug-ins carried out tracking more extensive than Facebook publicly admitted to. I just don’t buy anything Facebook is saying these days. Ben has been on a roll with good commentary. I quoted entirely to much of his piece, but did so anyway because I didn't know how quote just one part without leaving out the main point of his piece. Therefore, please please go to his site and subscribe to his RSS.

Searching The Web For Planes In The Sky

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Jason Kottke, writing on Kottke.org:

If you search Wolfram Alpha for "planes overhead", it returns a list of planes passing over your current location along with a sky map of where to look. This is very impressive. My next question is, since Siri searches Wolfram Alpha, will this same search produce the same results using Siri on an iPhone 4S?