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Found via Reddit. Click to see at full size.

This is a photo of a photojournalist taking pictures at the scene of the recent F-18 crash in Virginia. She’s got at least 2 SLR-type cameras and 3 telephoto lenses that we can see, but in the photo, she’s taking a picture with a mobile phone, leading to the funny meme caption.

With all those fancy cameras at her disposal, why is she taking pictures with a phone? Probably because it can do what her cameras can’t: quickly send a photo, whether it’s to the news organization she’s working for, or quickly post it online.

Once again, I’m reminded of William Gibson’s quote from the short story Burning Chrome: “The street finds its own uses for things,” and that’s certainly the case for mobile tech.

Found via Reddit.

Let’s face it, a lot of the slides you see in people’s presentations could be replaced with this one.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

If you haven’t yet listened to episode 460 of This American Life, Retraction, you should. It’s the one in which they retract the content of episode 454, Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, in which Mike Daisey relates his experiences of a visit to China to see the factory where iPhones and iPads are made. Daisey tells stories of meeting with underage and injured workers, armed guards at the factory and secret union meetings at Starbucks — stories which turned out to be fabrications when investigated further.

Daisey was invited back to NPR’s studios to explain himself, and in the episode, he’s a total weasel. He does apologise for presenting his piece as journalism, but he insists that it’s theatre, which gives him some artistic license in telling what is essentially a true story. He refuses to acknowledge that he lied or attempted to cover up the truth, even when confronted with evidence that he did so.

Instead of being a grown-up and owning up to his mistakes, when questioned, he hedges, he makes lame excuses, but most damningly, he just sits there and says nothing. There are long periods of silence after he’s asked questions that would clearly expose his fabrications, and they’re rather painful to listen to.

Michael Sippey’s done something clever: he’s taken those questions and the following silences and turned them into a single piece titled The Silence of Mike Daisey, which you can listen to using the audio player above. It’s all of Daisey’s weaselling, all in one go.

Found via Jason Kottke. Thanks, dude!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

HackDays, the cross-Canada API hackathon, returns this Saturday, March 24th at the offices of A Thinking Ape and Shopify will be there. HackDays hackathons are all-day gatherings where developers of all manner of platforms and skill levels to take APIs from providers like Shopify and other sponsors like iQmetrix, YellowAPI, FreshBooks and TinEye and build some cool apps by using one or more of them. It’s a great way to put your coding and app design skills to the test, discover new APIs, meet other developers in your community and even win great prizes!

The “Scavenger Chest” app being presented at HackVan, August 2011.

At the start of the day, you’ll gather your team — you can either bring them with you or find people to work with there — and come up with an idea. Ideas must use at least one of the sponsored APIs, and we’d really love it if you used the Shopify API!

You’ll spend a handful of hours putting together the app…

Ducking out of the way of the projector while making a presentation at HackVan, August 2011.

…and at the end of the day, each team will present their apps. A panel of distinguished judges will review the presentations and pick the best apps to receive prizes.

The hackers watch the presentations at HackVan, August 2011.

If you’re looking for a fun, mentally challenging, rewarding and unusual Saturday in Vancouver, come to HackVan this Saturday!

The Details

The HackVan Main Event (Saturday, March 24th): Register here for $10.00 — the money shows you’re serious about attending, but it goes a long way. You’ll get breakfast, lunch, and a free invitation to the Friday pre-HackVan mixer!

The Friday pre-HackVan Mixer (Friday, March 23rd): Register here for $10.00 — if you can’t make it on Saturday or won’t be coding, come to the pre-HackVan mixer and meet and network with everyone!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Octocat looks a little lost. I snapped this photo of a guy wearing a giant Octocat head while posing for photos on Austin’s 6th Street during South by Southwest 2012.

There are still many developers out there who seem a bit uncomfortable with Git and GitHub. If you’re one of them, these tips and tutorials mights help you learn and have fun along the way.

Githug: “Git your game on!” is this project’s motto, and it’s an accurate description. It’s a game where your objective is to get to the next level, and the way to do that is to use git commands.

Git Immersion: A guided tour created by the people at EdgeCase. It’s “learning by doing”; as the site explains, it’s inspired by the premise that to know a thing is to do it.

The Git Community Book: An online, collaboratively-written book creating by members of the Git community. A pretty thorough book on Git that’s also kept up-to-date. You should bookmark this one.

Mark Dominus’ Git Habits: Mark’s a serious long-timer on the ‘net: he’s been hacking on Perl since forever, founded  Kibology (anyone remember that?) and wrote Higher-Order Perl. He’s sharing the way he uses Git, and it’s probably a good idea to steal a few tricks from him.

Getting the Hang of GitHub: Once you’ve gotten good with Git, the next step is to get good with GitHub, the hosted Git service, which lets you  share your Git-versioned projects.

Let’s Suck at GitHub Together: My friend and fellow BarCamp Tour member Chris Coyier (the guy behind CSS-Tricks) has a great screencast on learning GitHub.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

There’ve been rumors about PayPal putting together some kind of competitor to Square for some time, so it wasn’t a complete surprise when they announced PayPal Here earlier today. As with Square, it’s a small reader device or “dongle” that plugs into the audio jack of your smartphone (and presumably your tablet device) and allows you to accept card payments. It also includes an app that will let you to scan in cards and checks using your phone’s camera (according to The Verge, if you use the camera to scan in a card rather than the dongle, you’ll have to manually enter the card’s CVV code and the zip code associated with the card into the app).

PayPal’s entry into the “accept credit card payments with your smartphone” game is a sign of things to come. It “validates the market”, to use a phrase in the startup vernacular, moving it from a relatively fringe idea to something you’re going to see more often in the coming months. Shopify’s biz dev dynamo Brennan Loh observed at a recent conference for retailers that there seemed to be two schools of thought about what cash registers should be: the old school vendors with their old-style anchored-to-the-checkout-counter cash registers and the new school vendors, who cash registers were either phones or tablets, a la the Apple Store.

Shopify’s Edward Ocampo-Gooding watches as “Cajun” the pedicab driver charges his credit card with his mobile phone.

I’ve made mobile payments indoors a number of times, at a couple of small shops where there just wasn’t room for a traditional cash register. It wasn’t until a couple of days ago when I got the “fully mobile payment experience”. My coworker Edward and I were at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival and took a pedicab — a bicycle-powered cab that can take two passengers — when we realized we were both short cash.

“No problem,” said “Cajun”, our driver. “I got Square.” When we got to our destination, he took his iPhone out of his pocket, stuck the Square dongle into the headphone port and swiped Edward’s card, a transaction that would’ve been impossible only a couple of years ago. And now, there are at least two big providers of such a service.

It’s an interesting new arena, and as a techie in the ecommerce and mobile businesses, one I’ll definitely keeping an eye on.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.