Lookybook allows you to actually embed an entire book in your page:
The interface is outstanding - no cluttered TOCs, index, or taxonomies - just click and turn the page. The Flash even sizes to match the book’s spine, so there’s no awkward white space around the book.
It’s most useful for children’s books and other books with lots of illustration (where you don’t have to scan text or see a lot of detail) but the idea of embedding an ENTIRE BOOK into a blog or web site is incredibly impressive. There’s a certain tactile sense of turning the page, and it would be easy to layer additional features (search for word etc) on top of the application, much like YouTube’s ability to rate videos within the page itself.
A somewhat eerie thing happened yesterday - I bought a ticket for American Gangster on Fandango, and a message popped up saying “Fandango is telling Facebook that you bought a ticket to American Gangster.”
The odd thing was that I hadn’t enabled this feature or added an app. Fandango and Facebook had taken the initiative and chosen to talk to each other without my permission. It was also a bit odd to think that my online activities were being tracked to the piont where my Facebook friends could see what movies I’d purchased tickets to.
I investigated on Facebook, and found that you can change the privacy settings of this feature to have Facebook notify you before posting your purchase to your news feed. I chose to OK it, just to see what the posting would look like.
Strange to think that my various online profiles are sharing information about my behind my back.
Upgraded Wordpress to the latest version. The new theme looks fine; glad I won’t have to fix it over the weekend.
Various plugins stopped working; I got errors about post categories and found this post from Wordpress. I deactivated and deleted some plugins and now it works like a charm.
Some fixes may not come up till I get to play with the site a bit more, but overall it looks like the upgrade went smoothly.
Amazon is advertising a product called “Flip,” which appears to be a digital camera with a built-in USB:
Genius - one of the biggest drawbacks of my current camera is that I need a special cord to transfer photos from the camera to a computer. There’s been a few times at work (or while travelling) where I’ve wanted to transfer the photos but haven’t carried around the cord.
However, an Amazon review notes that it uses two AA batteries instead of the usual rechargeable battery. Also, I imagine the quality of the photos and video may not be as high as a standard camera.
Though I won’t buy Flip, I hope it’ll inspire other camera developers to build USB ports into their own cameras.
