Link archive: January, 2011

The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero — Kickstarter

Frank Chimero is funding his book through Kickstarter. Definitely a worthwhile investment.

MTA.ME

The New York subway schedule converted into sound by treating each line as a string.

The Magical Mystical Ley Line Locator « Tom Scott

This was one of my favourite hacks at History Hack Day: enter a location anywhere in England to find out if it’s located on a ley line of mystical magical energy, man!

The Universal magazine - Google Books

A proto-wikipedia from January 1749.

YouTube - Tracking 18th-century “social network” through letters

Visualising the Republic of Letters.

City Crawlers Berlin

This looks like it could be a good book: a collaborative project to find patterns and stories in the data of one city.

Oh, and the site is lovely and responsive.

Tom Armitage on Vimeo

Things Rules Do is twenty minutes that looks at games of all forms, and the rules and systems that make their skeleton. It’s about the weird things that rules can do, beyond “tell you how to play”, such as inspire mastery, encourage deviance, and tell stories.

Dark Star, sweded

A production of the Brighton Speculative Fiction group. It was simply wonderful.

Emoji Dick

Melville’s masterpiece, translated into Japanese emoticons. All 6438 sentences. Made possible with Kickstarter and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

LONDON WEB - Sept 2010 - The Progressive Web - Andy Hume on Vimeo

A great presentation by Andy on the use of progressive enhancement at Clearleft.

Dead Drops ‘How to’ - NYC on Vimeo

I should get out there and make a few drops in Brighton.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds on Vimeo

A gorgeous visualisation of Wikipedia data from History Hack Day. Watch the shape of the world emerge over time.

Media Queries

A curated collection of responsive web designs.

Victorian Infographics - a set on Flickr

Some beautiful pieces of data visualisation.

Matter Battle! - there is a lot to say, of this we are sure

The difference between software and hardware; the digital and the instantiated.

Lost Bomber – Techbelly

Using data to help put a single death in the family into a wider perspective.

YouTube - BBC Horizon (1964) with Arthur C. Clarke (Part 1 of 2)

Past predictions of the future.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A 12-Year-Old Explains the Information Age’s Facts of Life to Her Mother.

Cute.

Ben Bashford - Notebook of Things - Emoticomp

How does an object’s character and/or behaviour tie in with communicating its purpose in life, how it looks and how it should be used?

Bletchley Park and History Hackday Request | Amplified

Let’s make the Bletchley Park data machine-readable so we can start mining the stories they contain (like Old Weather).

Bletchley Park need help to catalogue and create a proper archive of these decrypts.

I want in!

HTML(5) and text-level semantics — CSS Wizardry—CSS, Web Standards, Typography, and Grids by Harry Roberts

A great round-up of some of the humbler new elements in HTML.

Tropo - Cloud API for Voice, SMS, and Instant Messaging Services

This could be an interesting tool for building a voice or SMS interface onto Huffduffer.

New W3C HTML5 Logo: Looks Ok But Inconsistent, Fire W3C Communications Person Who Led Messaging - Tantek

Tantek is as disappointed as I am with the buzzword-compliant definition of HTML5 being pushed by the W3C.

Instead of providing precision and clarity, they’ve muddied the definition of HTML5 further with yet another “here’s our bucket of things we like which we’re going to call ‘HTML5’” message.

Responsive Web Design fun and experimentation | Handcrafted Pixels | Pixel Creation

A nice little test page for responsive design techniques.

LukeW | Device Classes

Luke points to the sweet spot between creating endpoints for classes of devices, and using responsive design to allow them to adapt.

The WHATWG Blog — HTML is the new HTML5

The spec previously known as HTML5 is now simply HTML. Good. The W3C are now free to abuse the term “HTML5” to mean everything under the sun.

Exquisite Tweets from @candicecbailey, @TreborFlow, @HannahLisaGreen, @kellymortlock, @gpcrc, @Pheebie, @helenium, @jameswarfield, @katieraby, @gromitski, @melstrutt, @racheljanejones, @LucindaGos, @davidstripinis, @LionessOfficial, @garretkeogh, @allieke

When fashion photography goes bad.

Beautiful Element Creation with jQuery — Article — The Nerdary

Good advice for generating markup with jQuery. As usual, there’s more than one way to do it.

This W3C/HTML5 logo reminds me of something… | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

The new HTML5 logo is quite versatile.

W3C’s new logo promotes HTML5—and more | Deep Tech - CNET News

Curiously, though, the standards group—the very people one might expect to have the narrowest interpretation of what exactly HTML5 means—instead say it stands for a swath of new Web technologies extending well beyond the next version of Hypertext Markup Language.

HTML5 Gains Logo, Loses Meaning | Webmonkey | Wired.com

Lumping everything together is as silly as a carpenter referring to every tool in their toolkit as “a hammer.”

My Huffduffer UX Tag Bundle - Hidden Gems

It turns out my Boolean URL tag hacking in Huffduffer is answering a real need: Will Myddelton had already put the same functionality together using Yahoo Pipes.

The browser is always behind - QuirksBlog

PPK on the circle of life when it comes to online technology advances; innovation happens fast in proprietary platforms, but the good stuff ends up being natively supported in browsers. It’s a pretty good ecosystem, all in all.

Outline of a Digital Preservation System (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)

Aaron Swartz gets technical about online digital preservation.

Carlos Bueno: A Paper Internet

Preserving the papernet.

We Didn’t Stop The Fire. – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Jeffrey points out another point of failure in our online storage: the willingness of site owners to sell their product (and your data) to a big company for a quick payout.

Forever / from a working library

Mandy writes about digital preservation:

The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills; sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient.

Repurposing the Hash Sign for the New Web

Documenting the use and abuse of fragment identifiers.

YouTube - Die Hard - Music Video - NEW 4th Verse!

“And the terrorists were over-zealous, but it was sweet when they killed Ellis…”

Stephen Caver

A beautiful responsive design, within the confines of Tumblr.

YouTube - Hudsucker Proxy - Mailroom Orientation

“Sam! LOWERY!”

YouTube - Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) - Ministry of Information

“Lowery? Has anyone seen Sam Lowery?”

All Eyes on Dad | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Starring Rob Weychert as Mr. Maplegate.

1991 - The Year Punk Broke

The classic documentary is online in its entirety, including some footage from a gig I was at: Sonic Youth supported by Nirvana at Sir Henry’s in Cork. Ah, nostalgia!

Notabilia – Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia

Visualisations of the history of controversial Wikipedia articles.

Anna Debenham

Anna’s redesign is beautiful, no matter what browser or device you’re using.

Home - LOCKSS

Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe — a digital preservation initiative based at Stanford.

Brendan Dawes - FOTB2010 on Vimeo

Brendan giving one of the “inspired sessions” at last year’s Flash On The Beach one evening in the Brighton Dome.

Kod

This code editor for OS X looks interesting.

accessifyhtml5.js at master from yatil’s accessifyhtml5.js - GitHub

A great little jQuery script to automatically assign ARIA roles to HTML5 elements with the corresponding semantics.

Cyberspace When You’re Dead - NYTimes.com

An accurately-downbeat look at digital preservation.

Facebook hype will fade - CNN.com

Douglas Rushkoff on the repeating circle of life that all big online companies live through.

YouTube - Il était une fois… les technologies du passé.

French schoolchildren are given technological tools that are less than thirty years old and asked to describe what they do.

Scripting News: Upcoming: The minimal blogging tool

Dave Winer is putting together technology to battle share-cropping and enable the Pembertonisation of your content: you host the canonical copy and distribute to third-party services.

There is no Mobile Web | The Haystack.

Steven nails exactly why I’m so excited about the increasing diversity of devices accessing the web; not so that we can build more silos, but so that we can sure our content is robust enough for the multitude of different devices:

To be honest, I can think of a few, but not many use cases of web sites or apps which are or should be exclusively mobile. It seems like the Mobile Web allows us to revisit all of the talk of inclusion, progressive enhancement and accessibility from years ago.

DOY100 | The Duke Of York’s 100 Project

A nice website for Brighton’s own Duke of York’s cinema, which will celebrate its 100th year of continuous operation.

Getting to work with new web technologies

This is the webpage of a great presentation on HTML5 and CSS3. It is also the presentation itself.

adactio, this time last year.

This is a lovely little piece of work from Mike: see a Flickr picture of yours from a year ago.

No comment - QuirksBlog

PPK has switched off comments for much the same reason that I hardly ever have comments on adactio.com: our sites are places for us to broadcast rather than have a conversation.

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)

An excellent piece of writing on the fundamental question of the web: Why Wasn’t I Consulted?

Speaker Deck - Share Presentations without the Mess

This presentation-sharing site looks like it could be a good alternative to Slideshare (which has become distinctly more cluttered and crappy over time).

The Super Awesome Music Blog Finder Thingy ™ - exfm labs

An excellent little service: give it your Last.fm username and it finds music blogs you’ll probably like. I’ve found a treasure trove of Huffduffer sources through this.

300 Songs

David Lowery is chronicling the history of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, song by song …with accompanying MP3s. It seems too wonderful to be true

If You Didn’t Blog It, It Didn’t Happen - Anil Dash

A thoughtful piece on how Twitter can complement blogging, but is far too often used as an impermanent substitute.

…if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen. In fact, I first wrote about this idea a bit on Twitter a few years ago. See if you can find it.

wordmark.it

A handy browser-based way of previewing the fonts installed on your computer.

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Stuart McMillen - cartoon Recombinant Records

Pitching Orwell against Huxley in an argument that is ironically shallow: it only holds up if you accept the premise that activities involving the web, television and video games are inherently “bad” and anti-social: a pathetically, narrow-minded and condescending worldview.

Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis | Magazine

Could it be that the current penchant for quick, real-time bursts of content could actually be beneficial for more thoughtful, long-form content?

FuturICT: FuturIcT

An attempt to turn psychohistory into reality using a “Knowledge Accelerator.”

Selectivizr - CSS3 pseudo-class and attribute selectors for IE 6-8

Adding CSS3 support to legacy versions of Internet Explorer using JavaScript. I like the fact that, although it requires a JavaScript library, it works with multiple libraries.

Bug 578967 – Remove feed/RSS button from top-level GUI for Firefox 4 (move to bookmarks menu)

A heated discussion around the decision in Firefox 4 to remove the RSS icon from the address bar.

CssUserAgent (cssua.js)

This script adds user-agent information in class names to the document’s root element so that those user agents can be targeted with CSS. It could be useful, but only in direst need.

Our Future in the Cosmos—Space

A speech given by Isaac Asimov on the future of humanity in space.

Nanotechnology and Space

Implications of Molecular Nanotechnology Technical Performance Parameters on Previously Defined Space System Architectures.

This paper, delivered at the 1995 Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology (sponsored by Apple Computers) shows the practical applications of diamondoid and fullerene materials not just in constructing a space elevator, but in the subsequent construction of orbital colonies

Nanotechnology - Foresight Institute

There’s still plenty of room at the bottom.

Foresight Institute’s mission is to ensure the beneficial implementation of nanotechnology.

A space elevator, for example.

SSI Sample Slides | Space Studies Institute

The dream of SSI is of a humanity free of the constraints of the Earth. In expanding outward into space, we can not only help to preserve our present biosphere, we can also seed other independent biospheres elsewhere, ensuring the continued survival of life despite any kind of planetary disaster.

SYMBIOTIC HOUSEHOLDS on Vimeo

Design fictional biohacking.

RORY HYDE PROJECTS / BLOG » Blog Archive » ‘Know No Boundaries’: an interview with Matt Webb of BERG London

Matt is, as usual, eloquent and inspiring.

How to Survive a 35,000-Foot Fall - Plane Crash Survival Guide - Popular Mechanics

Science, suspense, humour and horror combined into one truly superbly-written article.