Adactio: Links

Code Club Queens Park

Josh has been teaching HTML and CSS schoolkids. I love the pages that they’ve made. I really mean it. I genuinely think these are wonderful!

The Secure Transport of Light on booktwo.org

A beautiful piece by James on the history of light as a material for communication …and its political overtones in today’s world.

What is light when it is information rather than illumination? What is it when it is not perceived by the human eye? Deep beneath the streets and oceans, what is illuminated by the machines, and how are we changed by this illumination?

Abandonedography

Armchair travelling to Ballardian locations.

Ten tips guaranteed to improve your startup success by Anil Dash

It’s a big ask, but if you can action these ten tips from Anil, your startup will crush it.

The Secret Door - Step Through To The Unknown… | Safestyle UK

Prepare to lose yourself for hours as you keep hitting “take me somewhere else” through these most bizarre and wonderful Google street view locations.

Strassenblickfernweh indeed.

Map Projection Transitions

A lovely way of demonstrating the differences between map projections. Drag for extra fun.

Brett Jankord – Active development on Categorizr has come to an end

I think it’s a bit of a shame that Brett is canning his mobile-first device-detection library, but I totally understand (and agree with) his reasons.

There is a consensual hallucination in the market, that we can silo devices into set categories like mobile, tablet, and desktop, yet the reality is drawing these lines in the sand is not an easy task.

inessential.com: Why I love RSS and You Do Too

Brent Simmons pens a love-letter to RSS, a technology that you use every day, whether you realise it or not.

Support Scrunchup

If you’re coming along to the Responsive Day Out and you’ve got some tech books you no longer need, bring them along. We’ll collect them and distribute them to schools.

Submarine Cable Map

This year’s TeleGeography map of the undersea network looks beautiful—inspired by old maps. I love the way that latency between countries is shown as inset constellations.

Stratocam

Communal satellite eyes. A Mac screensaver is also available.

“The Post-PSD Era: A problem of expectations,” an article by Dan Mall

I really like Dan’s take on using Photoshop (or Fireworks) as part of today’s web design process. The problem is not with the tool; the problem is with the expectations set by showing comps to clients.

By default, presenting a full comp says to your client, “This is how everyone will see your site.” In our multi-device world, we’re quickly moving towards, “This is how some people will see your site,” but we’re not doing a great job of communicating that.

Mercator Puzzle!

This is fun. Drag the red country outlines around and slot them into place on the map. Sounds easy, right? But the distorting effect of the Mercator projection makes it a lot tougher than it looks.

Snapshot Serengeti

The latest project from Zooniverse is, as you would expect, an extremely enjoyable and useful way to spend your time: classifying animals that have captured in camera trap images.

The opening tutorial is a lesson in how to do “on-boarding” right.

Street Mogs

A part-time postman documents all the cats he meets on his round:

Includes long haired mogs, short haired mogs, lazy mogs, active mogs, bashful mogs, brash mogs, brushed mogs, grand mogs, great mogs, wee mogs, twee mogs, affable mogs, unsociable mogs, mean mogs, clean mogs, smelly mogs, incarcerated mogs, liberated mogs, liberal mogs, loud mogs and quiet mogs.

Johnny Cash has been everywhere (man!)

A nifty little mashup from Music Hack Day London 2012.

Hacking the Future: Clare Sutcliffe at TEDxBrighton - YouTube

A great short talk from Clare about Code Club.

Dronestagram

A new project from James, keeping track of the sites of illegal drone strikes.

TEDxToronto 2012 Talk - Ryan Henson Creighton

And this is why Code Club is such a great initiative.

Solita: This is rude

Let’s be polite. Especially when starting relationships.

Guardian Truncation Team

Celebrating the work of the tireless men and women who shorten headlines so they’ll fit on your iPhone.

Sight on Vimeo

A well-executed sci-fi short film on augmented reality and gamification.

Max CSS

I like this suggestion. If you’re using minified CSS in production, it would be a nice gesture to have an easily-discoverable unminified version for people to view source on.

dConstruct 2012: the alternative theme was Education - andrewjohns.net

I like this! Andrew Johns found a thread in this year’s dConstruct that ran parallel to its official tagline of “Playing With The Future”: Education.

Improving Reality 2012 : Joanne Mcneil

Note’s from Joanne’s presentation at Improving Reality.

Infovore » ghostcar

Tom describes his Foursquare ghost.

This is now!

A thoroughly addictive use of the Instagram API (along with Node.js and Socket.io): see a montage of images being taken in a city right now.

blogging: Beautiful people

It’s worth remembering sometimes just how amazing Twitter can be.

People who don’t know us wanted to send their friendship to a 15 year old learning-disabled girl who was sad. For no reason other than their own humanity. This is a beautiful thing.

Satellite Eyes

A nifty little Mac app from Tom: it changes your desktop wallpaper to a satellite view of your current location.

Alas, it requires Lion, an operating system I’ve been trying to avoid installing.

Home - fieldpapers.org

Stamen have extended Walking Papers into Field Papers: a virtuous cycle of mapping in the real world and online.

JS Hotline: (877) 300-2187

I love this! A volunteer-run hotline for answering JavaScript questions (set up by the awesome Garann Means, who literally wrote the book on Node.js).

I think I might volunteer my services.

Movie Mimic

Recreations of movie stills at filming locations around the world (like I did in Sydney for The Matrix). There’s something quite addictive about looking through these.

Creating a Mobile-First Responsive Web Design - HTML5 Rocks

A great step-by-step tutorial from Brad on developing a responsive site with a Content First mindset.

Code Club

This is an excellent idea: get a whole bunch of after-school code clubs going to teach kids how to code in Scratch.

THE MEW AESTHETIC

You can’t have a zeitgeisty internet meme without cats.

Obscura Day 2012 on April 28th | An International Celebration of Unusual Places

A day devoted to exploring unusual places all over the world. I couldn’t find anything for Brighton but it looks like there will be some stuff happening in London.

ADrink.at

A genuinely useful service for people in different parts of London who want to meet up for a pint.

Localgram

I like this simple idea, nicely executed: see Instagram photos taken near you.

maps.stamen.com

Beautiful new map tiles from Stamen for use with OpenStreetMap data. The “watercolor” tiles are particularly pretty.

Earth Station: The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

The wonderful story of an odd place:

The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse.

The Perpetual, Invisible Window Into Your Gmail Inbox - Waxy.org

Andy sounds a cautionary note: the password anti-pattern may be dying, but OAuth permission-granting shouldn’t be blasé. This is why granular permissions are so important.

Clean up ALL Your Applications Privacy Settings in 2 Minutes

A one-stop-shop with links to the authentication settings of various online services. Take the time to do a little Spring cleaning.

The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth

Re-examining Von Neumann probes, reconciling their apparent scarcity with the Fermi paradox.

College Misery: Henchminion Sends In the Tale of “The Magna Carta Essay!”

A trojan horse for plagiarised college papers, much like the fakery on maps (“Lie Close”, “Arlington”) and in dictionaries; traps to be sprung on the hapless copy’n’paster.

The Future of Open Fabrication

A thorough hypertext report from those good folks at the Institute For The Future on our fabrication overlords.

ExtendNY - New York City Extended

Sheer brilliance: taking the street grid of Manhattan and extending it to cover the entire world. For the record, I live near the intersection of east 11,303rd avenue and 63,475th street.

The trouble with font classifications | Clagnut § Design thinking · Typography

Richard would like your help. Take a few minutes to run through a card-sorting exercise to help classify fonts in a more meaningful way.

Brighton Brains

This is great idea! A website for putting the digital makers of Brighton in contact with the city’s student population.

Authentical: Random factoids I’ve encountered in authentication user research so far

Dana has put together an excellent grab-bag of data on people’s password habits.

Louis vs. Rick

IM conversations between a cat and its so-called owner.

How Responsive Web Design becomes Responsive Web Publishing - AQ » Blog

Some interesting questions (and one or two answers) about how responsive design affects publishing on the web.

School surveillance: how big brother spies on pupils | UK news | The Guardian

Having just seen Anna Debenham’s superb but scary presentation at Update about the shocking state of UK schools, this is a timely piece of journalism.

Weightshift — Memo: The New Design

Naz shares his advice for up-and-coming designers …and the institutions that educate them.

spin.js

An ingenious loading indicator that uses JavaScript instead of an animated .gif.

Ian Bogost - Gamification is Bullshit

This is not as linkbaity as the title might suggest.

I’ve suggested the term “exploitationware” as a more accurate name for gamification’s true purpose…

#rorschmap

Another beautiful piece of work from James: a kaleidoscope made from Google maps.

See something or say something - a set on Flickr

These lovely visualisations of geotagged photos and tweets are almost indistinguishable from aerial views of cities at night.

Dear Photograph

Atemporality can be very moving.

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - The Reith Lectures

The entire archive of the Reith lectures is now online for your huffduffing pleasure.

ISS-Notify by Nathan Bergey — Kickstarter

I want one! An ambient signifier (in lamp form) to let you know when the ISS is flying overhead. Geekgasm!

Yes! It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub

Testing James Joyce: this is like the Seven Bridges of Königsberg puzzle but with Guinness.

Developing the OAuth user experience at Twitter

Ben documents the improvements in Twitter’s OAuth flow. Maybe this will help to stop people blindly giving permission to dodgy third-party sites to update their Twitter stream.

Samantha Warren’s Web Design Blog | Design ~ Web Typography ~ Inspiration

An excellent design technique from Samantha that allows you to nail down a visual vocabulary without using something as wishy-washy as a mood board or as rigid as a fully-blown comp. Brilliant!

The style tile is not a literal translation of what the website is going to be, but a starting point for the designer and the client to have a conversation and establish a common visual language.

BLDGBLOG: Islands at the Speed of Light

Freaky stuff. If you’ve seen Kevin Slavin or James Bridle talking about the increase in property prices on Wall Street as the buildings get closer to the network hub …that’s nothing—these are the new centres of world power; places where the speed of light interferes least with the speed of transactions.

Tags: cat

More information

About this site

Customise

Search

Subscribe