Snapsort Simplifies Digital Camera Research

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If you’ve been in the market for a digital camera, you know that choosing one camera from all the competing brands and models can be a challenge. Many people like to research before they make a major investment, and there are some great resources to help guide you with your purchase. This blog post is mostly about a tool called Snapsort, but to more fully appreciate that tool, it’s worth briefly mentioning a few other resources that are available.

Flickr Camera Finder

A camera’s specifications are important, but so are the photographs that it can produce.
The Flickr Camera Finder is a great tool for looking at photographs taken by a specific model of camera. Flickr makes it easy to filter by the content of the photograph (such as portraits, landscapes and night shots), as well as photographs that other Flickr users found interesting. Flickr also lets users post their photos into groups that are specific to a camera or even a camera and lens combination, and these groups are another way of finding sample photos for a particular camera.

Of course, product reviews are important, and while there are many camera great review sites, two in particular stand out as my personal favorites: DPreview.com and DCResource.com.

DPReview

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Branding Exercise Leaves Fish Dead, Owl Satisfied, Drupalers sad

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Note: This article was originally published on the Growing Venture Solutions website.

A routine branding exercise went awry early Friday in Brooklyn when Growing Venture Solutions performed a ["mind map"](http://ezra-g.com/files/cod_scout_mindmap_0.png
) exercise to aid in the creation of logos for two of their flagship products, the Scout hosted sercurity review service and COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution for Drupal.

Drupal Scout LogoConference Organizing Distribution logo

"Connecting to the unintellectualized, visceral, gut responses we get from each logo helps us maximize branding potential so that we can produce marketing collateral that's sure to engage members of our target market segments, helping them to connect to each brand at an emotional level, which results in increased conversions" said social media expert Robert H. McJellyPants. He added, "Tachyon converter beam subspace electron resonance tuning."

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Vote for Flat World Knowledge in Huffington Post's 7 Startups that will Change the World

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Update: You can vote for Flat World Knowledge here.

From Spring 2008 through the Winter of 2009, I consulted independently for a budding startup called Flat World Knowledge.

FWK is a website/web application that pays authors to write textbooks and makes those books available online for free for anyone to read. FWK also makes it possible to copy and then modify the textbooks, allowing people to create their own distinct, personalized version of a book. Books and study aids are produced via print on demand and can be purchased for a fraction of the cost of a typical textbook.

The end result is that textbooks are more financially and technically accessible to students, more personalized to specific classes, and the typical textbook market is disrupted.

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Submitting Protected Forms Programatically with Safe User Impersonation

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Note: This article was originally published on the Growing Venture Solutions website.

When a form protected by spam prevention measures such as captcha or Mollom is submitted with drupal_execute, validation can fail unless the spam protection is properly suppressed.

This blog post describes the background and solution to a bug that previously existed in the Signup Integration for Ubercart module (uc_signup), and explains the techniques used to fix the bug. It is written with developers and aspiring developers in mind, though other people interested in how Drupal works might also find it interesting.

drupal_execute is a function often used in data imports that allows a developer to take a collection of form values and submit them programatically.
A main reason to use drupal_execute over another technique such as user_save() is that with drupal_execute, Drupal calls the validation and submission functions for the form.

The Context: How uc_signup Uses drupal_execute

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Béla Fleck Brings the Banjo Back to Africa in New Film and Album

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Fleck to Answer Questions at Select Screenings (Heck yes)

Banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck recently released an album and companion film containing highlights from his six week trip around Africa where he played with musicians from Mali, Uganda, Tanzania, the Gambia, Madagascar, South Africa, Senegal, and Cameroon. The album, Throw Down your Heart: Africa Sessions contains 18 of the 40 tracks recorded on this trip, which had been an idea of Fleck's for years.

“I developed the suspicion that some of the greatest acoustic music on earth is hidden in the small villages in Africa. Somehow it didn't seem to be making it out into my world, and even when amazing field recordings were made, how could I find out about them?”

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Track of the Day: Let Me Ride - Staple Singers (1959)

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From the 1959 album "Uncloudy Day" which was re-released with "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" as one album in 1991. This is actually more like the "track of last Monday."

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