MakeUseOf: How to Use Your iPhone as a Webcam: 5 Methods That Work. “Did you know it’s possible to use your iPhone as a webcam? It’s never going to quite mimic a webcam in the traditional sense, but there are a few apps that’ll record the phone’s camera and send it to a Mac, a Windows PC, another mobile device, or even to the web.”
smartphones
The Verge: Why NASA wants you to point your smartphone at trees
The Verge: Why NASA wants you to point your smartphone at trees. “NASA would like you to take a picture of a tree, please. The space agency’s ICESat-2 satellite estimates the height of trees from space, and NASA has created a new tool for citizen scientists that can help check those measurements from the ground. All it takes is a smartphone, the app, an optional tape measure, and a tree.”
Taking local news to the really local level: Using location data to deliver relevant local news (Nieman Lab)
Nieman Lab: Taking local news to the really local level: Using location data to deliver relevant local news. “Our way of exploring the issue was to test an app that sends people local news stories about where they actually are. Unlike national or international newsrooms that are incentivized to send or organize stories by continent, country, state, or city — local newsrooms can organize stories about neighborhoods, wards, counties, and towns. They write about block-level issues, and if technology lets us deliver stories by block now, the chances that a nearby local story will be relevant to someone increases significantly.”
TechCrunch: New privacy assistant Jumbo fixes your Facebook & Twitter settings
TechCrunch: New privacy assistant Jumbo fixes your Facebook & Twitter settings . “Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa history, with clean-up features for Instagram and Tinder in the works. The startup emerges from stealth today to launch its Jumbo privacy assistant app on iPhone (Android coming soon). What could take a ton of time and research to do manually can be properly handled by Jumbo with a few taps.”
CNET: Library services get digital, testing privacy values
CNET: Library services get digital, testing privacy values. “Librarians stood up to the US government over requirements in the 2001 USA Patriot Act to share records with law enforcement. They designed policies that require that records of the books you’ve checked out are deleted as soon as you return them. And they’ve pushed every US state to adopt protections for patron records. E-books and audiobooks, now standard at libraries, make protecting privacy harder. Titles are usually provided through private companies, which can access your data. And today’s software can create more comprehensive records about you than a simple list of the books you checked out.”
Catalyst NZ: Christchurch Memories Preserved with New Red Zone App
Catalyst NZ: Christchurch Memories Preserved with New Red Zone App. “Catalyst – South Island, is proud to have partnered with the University of Canterbury Arts Digital Lab to develop the ‘Red Zone Stories’ application. This application will crowdsource and preserve the memories of the neighbourhood that were lost after the February 2011 quake.”
University Affairs: How apps and online databases are helping conservation science to thrive
University Affairs: How apps and online databases are helping conservation science to thrive. “Science is not always done by experts cloistered in ivory towers. Increasingly, ordinary people are getting involved in gathering data – on local birds, insects, plants, climate and more – through citizen science initiatives. Enlisting the public in these schemes allows researchers to reach much further afield in their data collection efforts, and the spread of digital apps and online platforms is extending the reach of conservation scientists more than ever.”
