Adactio: Links

scificorridorarchive.com by Serafín Álvarez, 2013

Corridors in science fiction films.

Request Quest

A terrific quiz about browser performance from Jake. I had the pleasure of watching him present this in a bar in Amsterdam—he was like a circus carny hoodwinking the assembled geeks.

I guarantee you won’t get all of this right, and that’s a good thing: you’ll learn something. If you do get them all right, either you are Jake or you are very, very sad.

Inclusive Design: Where Accessibility Meets Usability

I’ll be speaking at this event in London on Thursday. It would be lovely if you could come along. It’s free!

In The Name of Willie Clancy « Arbutus Yarns

A really nice short film about the Willie Clancy Summer School. It makes me want to get back to Miltown Malbay this July.

The Death of Upcoming.org - Waxy.org

Heartbreaking and angry-making.

The Worst Things For Sale » The Internet’s most horrible items. A daily blog.

These are like chindogu, but they’re all available from Amazon with accompanying reviews.

Fictive Kin, The Joke’s On Us?

The story of one site’s disgraceful handling of acquisition and shutdown (Punchfork, acquired by Pinterest) and how its owner actively tried to block efforts to preserve user’s data.

Abandonedography

Armchair travelling to Ballardian locations.

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.

Write The Future by Tom Hunter — Kickstarter

Now this looks like my kind of event:

A new micro-conference on science, technology, communication and fiction, organised by the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

The Creeping Garden

I, for one, welcome our slime mould overlords.

The slime mould is being used to explore biological-inspired design, emergence theory, unconventional computing and robot controllers, much of which borders on the world of science fiction.

On layout and web performance by Kelly Norton

This is handy: a look at which DOM properties and methods cause layout thrashing (reflows).

On the styling of forms by Bruce Lawson

Bruce takes a look at the tricky issue of styling native form controls. Help us, Shadow DOM, you’re our only hope!

The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 by Troy Hunt

A good explanation of the litany of woes that comes from Internet Explorer 8 being the highest that users of Windows XP can upgrade to. It’s a particularly woeful situation if you are a web developer attempting to provide parity. But there is hope on the horizon:

2013 will see the culmination of all these issues; support for IE 8 will drop of rapidly, users of XP will find an increasingly broken web, the cost of building software in XP organisations will increase.

The paradoxes of time travel by David Lewis

A well-written white paper on time travel. Alas, it relies a bit too much on semantic nitpickery to offer any real insight.

Tapeworm logic by Charles Stross

The Fermi paradox as applied to tapeworms.

‘Sfunny; just yesterday I was revisiting this classic tapeworm tale on Fray.

Olaf Stapledon

The out-of-copyright books of Olaf Stapledon are available to download from the University of Adelaide. Be sure to grab Starmaker and First And Last Men.

Front-end London - A New London Based Meetup for Front-end Developers, hosted by Made by Many

This looks like being an excellent (free) event in London featuring three talks related to front-end web development.

The inaugural event this month features a talk on responsive design, a talk on data visualisation, and a talk on accessibility.

The Useless Web

Don’t do it. Don’t click that button just one more time. Don’t.

An alternate universe – Marco.org

There is an elephant in the Microsoft store.

Just Solve the Problem Month 2012: Nitty Gritty « ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason goes into detail describing the File Format problem that he and others are going to tackle in the effort known as Just Solve The Problem.

Dough Globe - Your little living world

My last shipment from the Quaterly contained everything I need to get a sourdough starter going (thanks to Alexis Madrigal). I think I might have to get me one of these cute sourdough globes: “It’s like a Tamagotchi, but actually alive.”

Be sure to check out the the blog documenting the design and development.

IE10 Snap Mode and Responsive Design - TimKadlec.com

Useful advice from Tim on preparing your responsive site for IE10’s new “snap mode”. Don’t worry: it doesn’t involve adding any proprietary crap …quite the opposite, in fact.

Responsive Sausage Dog

The Boston Globe’s got nothing on this!

Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks

I like this skewering of the cult of so-called-neuroscience; the self-help book equivalent of eye-tracking.

Shadow is now Adobe Edge Inspect | Adobe Edge Inspect Team Blog

Oh, dear. Adobe Shadow gets a new name and a hefty price tag. Yesterday it was free. Today it is $119.88 per year. It’s useful but it’s not that useful.

So, lazy web, who’s working on an open-source alternative?

DOM Enlightenment

This looks great! It’s a CC-licensed book by Cody Lindley (whose work I’ve admired for many years) aimed at teaching DOM Scripting for modern browsers. You can read the whole thing online or wait for the paper version from O’Reilly.

If all your JavaScript currently consists of writing jQuery plugins, I highly recommend you read this.

The 64 Digital Super dooper device testing station

There’s a communal testing lab just outside London and they’ve got a very nifty set-up for their devices.

Twitter conversation with ftrain

Lance Arthur uses a tweet from Paul Ford as a starting point for a text adventure.

The Kitschies present… Beukes, Miéville and Ness

An evening with Lauren Beukes, China Miéville and Patrick Ness in London the week after dConstruct. Sounds like fun!

London Device Library

London now has its own device lab (at the Mozilla offices).

If you’re in London and you have an old phone you could contribute, please, please add it to the contribution.

A Ship Aground

This is how London looked on my birthday, as recorded by the stationary meatspace protrusion of James’s Ship Adrift.

Anna Debenham: Using the Nintendo DSi browser

Anna reports on her experience testing on a device we don’t often think about: the Nintendo DS …very popular with the young ‘uns.

Jessica Hische’s Doodle Blog

Jessica’s doodles are quite lovely.

Deutsch Doodles

These lovely doodles from Carla give me Fernweh for Germany.

From Print to iPad: Designing a Reading Experience

Harry’s 15 minute case-study presentation at UX London was excellent. He says the lesson is that we shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes, but there’s another lesson here too: testing with users will save your ass.

10 questions about web performance – Jeremy Keith at Clearleft

I had a chat with the guys from Pingdom about performance’n’stuff. If I sound incoherent, that’s because this is a direct transcription of a Skype call, where, like, apparently I don’t, y’know, talk in complete sentences and yeah.

Maureen Johnson, THE ADVENTURE OF THE RANDOM HOUSE

There’s a chain of hotels, one of which is in Brighton, called “My Hotel.” I bet they have stories like this one.

Climbing a Shard of Glass | Place Hacking

Sneaking in to climb the Shard at night.

ADrink.at

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

What’s in a Name? | The Intercom Blog

The hitherto unnoticed connection between the names of Android phones and the names of condoms.

Pingdom Tools

A handy performance testing tool from Pingdom, similar to Google’s offering.

It’s a bookmark. But it’s also a magazine.

It’s a blog. It’s a bookmark. It’s a magazine.

Of Austin Fame and Marches | Dolls for Friends

I am the proud custodian of one of these cute Zeldolls …I may have even nabbed a second one.

HTML5 nurse

Sometimes the good folk at HTML5doctor.com get asked questions that might be better suited for a real, medical doctor. These are those questions.

Adobe Shadow | preview mobile web - Adobe Labs

Adobe have launched their version of Weinre, the tool that allows you to refresh and debug iOS and Android browser views from your desktop computer.

Responsive Summit • London 23rd Feb 2012

Typical! I leave the country and this excellent gathering gets organised while I’m away. I wish I could be there.

Let them know in advance if you have any responsive-related questions they should tackle.

Clear for iPhone (Coming Soon!) on Vimeo

Nik demos the neat interactions in Realmac’s latest piece of iOS software in this cute little video.

Why I love Twitter and the Internet | Kevin Ebaugh

I love this little story of small pieces of the internet loosely joining together: NPR, Twitter, Downcast and Huffduffer.

Sirens | Aaron Mentele

Some very interesting results from testing background image downloads contained within media queries or overridden with media queries: it turns out that, in iOS at least, the browser is getting smarter and smarter.

The Restart Page - Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems

Wallow in nerd nostalgia and experience the Proustian rush of rebooting old operating systems.

Vanilla JavaScript FTW

I’ve found myself using jQuery less and less recently. Partly to avoid the extra download and file size but also—as shown here—when it comes to DOM manipulation, there’s a lot you can do straight out of the box.

Jeremy Keith: One Web — Update 2011 - YouTube

My short talk from Aral’s Update conference in Brighton last September. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. If I only I had a handheld mic—then I could’ve done a microphone drop at the end.

Confusion over HTML5 & WAI-ARIA | Karl Groves

This helps to clarify the difference between native semantics and ARIA additions.

InstaCSS | Instant CSS Documentation Search

A fantastically useful resource! Don’t let the name fool you: this provides instant access to documentation for CSS and HTML and JavaScript!

Put this one on speed dial.

Little Printer | BERG Cloud

This evolution of Tom Taylor’s microprinter looks like it’s going to be absolutely wonderful (and packed full of personality). Watch this space.

Biochemies :: DNA Molecule Plush Dolls

With magnetic hydrogen bonds!

This Is Why I’m Broke

To quote Jessica: “Seems stupid but it’s kind of a good idea.”

Dive into HTML5… on HTML5 Doctor | HTML5 Doctor

The HTML5 doctors are hosting a copy Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 at http://diveinto.html5doctor.com/ and they plan to keep it updated via Github.

James Burke Classic : The Famous Rocket Takeoff Scene - YouTube

This remains one of the greatest pieces of documentary footage ever filmed.

Bringing the London Bus Network home – Blog – BERG

This is an excellent use of the Kindle as an undemanding screen. Really lovely!

Big question: what do you think of Adobe Edge? | Feature | .net magazine

This is worth reading just for Andy Budd’s answer alone. Priceless.

I think I’m having a flashback and am in need of a bit of a lie down. Wake me up when 1998 is over. I didn’t like it much the first time around, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to suck now.

Web Standards Hoedown (Full HD / Radio Edit) - YouTube

It’s Opera …but it’s folk.

Events - The Future of the Past of the Web | Digital Preservation Coalition

I’m going to try to make it along to this event in London next month.

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.

Beautiful People - home

A documentary about the weekly session in Dempsey’s pub in Manhattan.

#rorschmap

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

Muff Diving Donegal Ireland Scuba Diving Ireland

Fnar, fnar, and indeed, fnar.

Why not become a lifetime member of the Muff Diving Club? Makes a perfect gift as you will get a Muff Diving Club membership card posted out to proove that you’re an official Muff diver.

YouTube - ‪The Loving Trap‬‏

Pitch-perfect parody of Adam Curtis’s particular style of documentary guff.

Markdownify: The HTML to Markdown converter for PHP

This could be handy for the editing process in my home-grown blogging system: a PHP script to convert HTML back to Markdown.

Book of Speed

An online book about website performance by Stoyan Steganov, released into the public domain. Excellent!

resizeMyBrowser

A handy little tool for testing responsive designs by automatically changing your browser viewport size.

Camptown News Greasemonkey Script — doo-dah, doo-dah « Tom Scott

Tom’s Greasemonkey script turns any seven-syllable headline into a verse of Camptown Races.

Why I Don’t Self-Host Anymore | romkey.com

A comprehensive look at some of the problems with taking self-hosting to its logical conclusion: running your own web server.

the html5 switch | the 200ok weblog

Ben Buchanan has a nice round-up of some of the options available when you’re switching over to HTML5.

Red Plaques

Even more historic significance than blue plaques.

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.

Do Lectures - Ideas that inspire action

The redesign of the Do Lectures site is gorgeous (and responsive).

Letters of Note: I think I no how to make people or animals alive

This is why, when a child posits something ridiculous-sounding, you should encourage them.

Tom Morris - .tel, .xxx and .mobi are all pointless and idiotic

If I were an American, I’d now be saying something like “ICANN have jumped the shark”. Instead, I’m British, so I’ll say “ICANN are fucking useless twats who need a firm kick in the bollocks”.

HTML5 — Edition for Web Developers

A beautifully readable subset of the HTML spec, with an emphasis on writing web apps (and with information intended for browser makers has been removed). Very handy indeed!

Demo: CSS drop-shadows without images – Nicolas Gallagher

Some nice drop-shadow effects. Generated content is the key.

I Have Seen the Future and I Am Opposed - Core77

Don Norman bemoans the seemingly-inevitable direction that the internet is taking; from an open system of exchange to a closed, controlled broadcast channel. I share his fear.

Main Articles: ‘Domesday Redux: The rescue of the BBC Domesday Project videodiscs’, Ariadne Issue 36

The fascinating story of the BBC Domesday Project and its subsequent fate.

The purpose of the CAMiLEON project was to demonstrate the value of emulation in preserving not only the data stored in obsolete systems but the behaviour of the systems themselves - in this case one of the very first interactive multi-media systems. The aim was to reproduce the original user experience as accurately as possible, and the CAMiLEON team argued that the slight faults in images as displayed from the analogue discs were a part of that experience, and should not be cleaned up as Andy proposed to do. Our aim was different - we wanted to preserve the data with the highest quality available consistent with longevity.

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