Link archive: December, 2010

The Year in Pictures: Passages — USA TODAY

A really nice example of responsive web design from an unexpected source.

FUMSI Article: Microformats: Digging Deeper into the Web

A nice, neat, short introduction to microformats from Ben.

Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die | Magazine

Wired Magazine break with tradition by publishing a halfway interesting article (though you’ll still need Readability or Instapaper to make the experience of reading it bearable).

URL Design — Warpspire

An excellent collection of best practices for designing URLs. I found myself nodding vigorously along with each suggestion.

YouTube - GET OUT OF THERE!

Acceptable variations include “Get the hell out of there!” and “Get him/her/them out of there!”

Bulkr - Download Flickr photos in batches (Mac, Windows & Linux)

This looks like it could be a handy tool for backing up Flickr photos.

GELLED!

Paul has created a site for tracking usage of the BBC’s GEL (Global Experience Language) visual design language. Nice’n’responsive it is too.

Radi

A Mac app for creating animations with canvas and video.

ASCII by Jason Scott / Yahoo!locaust

A viciously accurate assessment of Yahoo’s scorched earth policy towards our online collective culture:

All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.

MODERN TIMES on Vimeo

A gorgeous sci-fi short film with some fine interface porn.

Modifiable Futures: Science Fiction at the Bench by Colin Milburn

The influence of science on science-fiction and the influence of science-fiction on science. Or rather, how science-fiction mods science, and how science (and software) mods science-fiction.

Yet even as it has become ever more familiar and commonplace, this mash‐up of the word “science” with the word “fiction” still seems to insist on a certain internal incoherence, as if the tiny typographic space inside the label of “science fiction” were to signify a vast chasm, a void between alien worlds.

notes.husk.org. The Post-Delicious World.

Paul has some further thoughts on self-hosting bookmarks while trying to retain the social aspect.

My Pummelvision on Vimeo

My last 2,000 pictures on Flickr, assembled courtesy of pummelvision.com

Huffduff it - Chrome Web Store

A Huffduffer extension for Chrome — thanks to Jeremy Carbaugh.

I’ll be adding a link to this from the footer of Huffduffer for Chrome users.

San Francisco Rainbow over the Bay Bridge | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

A photograph so beautiful, it doesn’t look real.

Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Designing Fiction in Volume Q.

Julian Bleecker explains design fiction in the context of science fiction using the examples of gestural interfaces and virtual reality.

YouTube - paleofuture.tv [episode 00000: food]

The Paleofuture blog, that excellent trove of past visions of the future, has a corresponding video channel. The first episode is all about food.

YouTube - Yogi Bear Parody: “Booboo Kills Yogi” ending

The Assassination Of Yogi Bear By The Coward Boo-Boo.

End of 2010 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Matt Webb on photography.

You don’t see comments on like this on Facebook.

Law and the Multiverse | Superheroes, supervillains, and the law

Two lawyers attempt to answer the legal questions raised by the fictional conceits of superheroes. What is Superman’s immigration status? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?

No More Sharecropping!

A site dedicated to the principle of homesteading your data.

YouTube - Why the other line is likely to move faster

This is exactly why I always choose the combined queue in Waitrose even if it looks longer than the queue for a single till.

adaptive path » making design principles stick

Kate Rutter on the importance of keeping design principles out in the open.

750 Words

An intriguing writing exercise. If I weren’t such a procrastinator, I would try it out.

Shanzai! (Wired UK)

Bobbie documents the work of Jan Chipchase, currently looking into the design decisions behind counterfeit goods on sale in Shanghai.

Comic Sans Criminal - There’s help available for people like you!

A somewhat condescending piece of work about Comic Sans …from a designer who uses the oh-so-passé Museo on his personal site.

Live by the judgemental sword, die by the judgemental sword.

9 hours (9h) Designer Capsule Hotel Review - Kyoto, Japan

A fascinating look at the experience design of the 9h brand of capsule hotel. I like the consistent use of colour, light and iconography.

The Blast Shack

Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and the unintended consequences of cypherpunk.

oh yeah, paper!

Immanentizing the papernet.

Song To The Siren by Salter Cane on Huffduffer

A cover version of a cover version: Salter Cane do This Mortal Coil doing Tim Buckley. All in one take.

A Starry Night on Vimeo

A very cute Christmas message from Torchbox.

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com

Solving the city.

Requiring email and passwords for new accounts - Instapaper Blog

A fascinating explanation of why Instapaper is migrating away from its passwordless sign-up.

pixeldiva - Beautiful Design for Everyone

The notes and slides from the talk Ann gave at the London Web Standards meetup in May.

A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist - Speakeasy - WSJ

A great piece of reasoned explanation by Ricky Gervais.

YouTube - Filmography 2010

A montage of this year’s films.

notes.husk.org. Sticking With Delicious.

Paul explains why he won’t be moving from Delicious: the social network is too valuable.

..about validating

An oldie but a goodie. This is why we have standards.

Archive Fever: a love letter to the post real-time web | mattogle.com

Matt encapsulates a lot of what I've been thinking about recently: the real-time web is all well and good, but let's not forsake the enormous potential for fulfilment in archives.

Planet Hunters

Another great Zooniverse project: find planets by looking for tell-tale signs of light distortion from distant stars.

audio.js

A handy shim for audio: it uses the native implementation where possible and Flash as a fallback.

CHEESE PEOPLE

Cheeses Christ!

Unlicense.org » Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free

A handy template for releasing code into the public domain.

Ampersand · The Web Typography Conference

If you're at all interested in web typography, be in Brighton on June 17th, 2011.

SimpleBits / On Speaking

Some good tips on public speaking from Dan.

filamentgroup/Responsive-Images - GitHub

Some very smart ideas here for responsively enhancing image requests.

Wikileaks is not about secret information; it’s about insiders versus outsiders | technosociology

Much like the Umberto Eco piece I linked to recently, Zeynep Tufecki describes how Wikileaks exposed what so many in the media already knew.

What's your bag? | Bagcheck

Luke unveils his new service: a way for people to share their collections of things.

New Statesman - Inside the Parliament Square kettle

A well-written account of a disgraceful situation. "We all go down together, horses looming above us, baton blows still coming down on our heads and shoulders. I am genuinely afraid that I might be about to die, and begin to thumb in my parents' mobile numbers on my phone to send them a message of love."

You Must Learn JavaScript — Article — The Nerdary

Kenny Meyers on the ubiquity of JavaScript.

Not such wicked leaks | Presseurop – English

A great piece by Umberto Eco on the real effect of Wikileaks: not in exposing dangerous secrets, but in exposing what we already knew anyway.

Amazon.co.uk: Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store

Amazon will now pay you for your old video games. Good move.

Support Web Standards: More information about Web Standards, why they're important, and how you can support them.

A one-stop link shop for resources on web standards.

Culture Hack Day

There's going to be a Culture Hack Day in January, the weekend before History Hack Day. They're like buses; you wait for ages for one to come along and then two show up at once.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2010 — Page 8

How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?

Stubbornella » Blog Archive » The hacktastic zoom fix

Nicole proposes an interesting way of clearing floats with a combination of display:table-cell and generated content.

Twitter Knitter

Send a tweet and get it knitted into a scarf that will then be given to someone who really needs it this Christmas.

Bobbie Johnson dot org : Ian Hickson on HTML5: “The W3C lost sight of the fact that they have no power”

Bobbie is publishing the interviews he conducted with various HTML5 bods when he was researching his Technology Review article. First up: Hixie.

Fillerati - Faux Latin is a Dead Language

The best alternative to lorem ipsum yet.

The Milky Way Project

The latest Zooniverse project is a beauty: you can help spot bubbles in infra-red images of nebulae.

Styleguides for the Web — Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul gives an excellent and thorough explanation of why systems thinking is important in web design.

Time Zones

A very handy tool for planning intercontinental communication.

41Latitude - Google Maps & Label Readability

An examination into the legibility of labels on online mapping services.

Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera

A blog documenting printed visions of space exploration in the form of children's books.

Dead Drops Database

London has its first data dead drop. Time to put Brighton on the map methinks.

BUY THIS SATELLITE - Connect Everyone.

This is an excellent idea: buy up a communications satellite and use it to provide free internet. I kinda wish it were a Kickstarter project though.

Seth's Blog: The inevitable decline due to clutter

I firmly believe that this is very relevant to visual design on the web.

Ben the Bodyguard. Coming soon to iPhone® and iPod touch®

An interesting way of using scrolling to tell a story.

Dangerous Minds | Deconstructing ‘Gimme Shelter’: Listen to the isolated tracks of the Rolling Stones in the studio

A track-by-track deconstruction of Gimme Shelter. What a song!

The 24 Ways Annual 2010 | Five Simple Steps

All of this year's 24Ways articles are available as an £8 book with all the proceeds going to UNICEF.

Spacelog

This is a truly excellent project: transcribing and archiving the transmissions of historic space missions. Excellent!