Link archive: February, 2011

{placekitten}

I may have to start using this for placeholder images—it won’t be distracting, right?

YouTube - “Smack My Bitch Up” performed by The Beatles

Live footage from Shea Stadium in an alternate universe.

Digitale data in gevaar! - Datanews.be

If you speak Flemish, you might enjoy this article based on a chat I had with a Belgium journalist.

If you don’t speak Flemish, well, just move along.

Wikipedia:List of articles with doomed BBC links - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Read it and weep. Here are the articles on Wikipedia that reference URLs that are getting axed as part of the BBC’s upcoming cull.

The Mobile context

Yes! Yes! Yes! Mark nails it: just because someone visits a site with a certain kind of device doesn’t mean you can make assumptions about their intentions.

• Mobile != low download speed
• Context != intent

James Bridle on Phare Conference on Vimeo

Everything is worth preserving and protecting.

Jeremy Keith on Phare Conference on Vimeo

I answered a few questions right after giving my talk at the Phare conference in Ghent.

YouTube - TOC 2011: James Bridle, “The Condition of Music”

James’s talk from Tools Of Change. Great stuff!

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!

HTML5 Accessibility Chops: the placeholder attribute | The Paciello Group Blog

A nice succinct description of the placeholder attribute, with an emphasis on accessibility.

YouTube - A Day Made of Glass… Made possible by Corning.

There are two things I’d like to see after watching this video:

1. A slew of parodies to highlight the unintended consequences of this marketeer’s panopticon,
2. The Paleofuture blog post in 100 years looking back at this.

Alex Payne — Content-Centric Networks and the Future of the Internet

A brave and probably unpopular stance; could it be that the fundamental technological bedrock of the internet needs to change to avoid the seemingly-inevitable rise of walled gardens?

Wired 9.03: Founding Father

Here’s a gem from the past: a thoroughly fascinating and gripping interview with Paul Baran by Stewart Brand. It’s thrilling stuff—I got goosebumps.

Publishing Experiences | booktwo.org

I wish I could’ve attended James’s talk at Tools of Change. It sounds like it was great.

Long Bets - The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

This is my prediction. If you think it’s wrong, challenge it. We shall then partake in a wager.

100 Little Robots (by) Anton Peck (in) Journal

I love watching an artist at work. Right after watching the accompanying video, I ordered a robot postcard from Anton.

Microformats | weblog | Facebook Adds hCalendar and hCard Microformats to Millions of Events

As of today, every single public event on Facebook is marked up using hCalendar. Take the Great British Booze-up, for example…

ifttt / About ifttt

This intrigues me. “If this, then that” sounds like a good approach to loosely joining some small pieces.

YouTube - Report Finds Troubling Rise In Teen Uranium Enrichment

Well, y’know, you never think it’s your kid whose gonna go sell enriched uranium to a rogue nation.

Layer Tennis Season 3 Recap on Vimeo

A short recap of last season’s Layer Tennis, including the Olly Moss vs. Tom Whalen match I commentated on.

Demo: CSS drop-shadows without images – Nicolas Gallagher

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

Safe-keeping - Preoccupations

I wish I had a teacher like David when I was in school.

URLs, permalinks, archives … preservation. It all matters so very much.

I’m a designer who learned Django and launched her first webapp in 6 weeks | Limedaring.com

I love hearing stories like this. Anything that breaks down the perceived designer/developer divide is a good thing, in my opinion.

YouTube - Why I LOVE My 3D Printer

This may be one of the best pecha kuch— I mean, Ignite presentations I’ve ever seen.

The Birth of Low-Rise on Vimeo

Building a city with staples in thirty hours.

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.

Who Is Arcade Fire??!!?

Oh, dear. It seems that some people have not been notified.

BACK TO THE FUTURE : Irina Werning - Photographer

Revisiting and recreating old family photos.

Swiss Fort Knox

This is the stuff James Bond stories are made of. Except in this case, the fortress exists to store data rather than criminal masterminds.

TIME CAPSULE ..::HOME::..

On 18 May 2010, the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) Project deposited a time capsule in the vaults of datacenter, Swiss Fort Knox, in Saanen, Switzerland. It contained the decoding information for five digital file formats on media ranging from paper, microfilm and floppy discs to CDs, DVDs and USB sticks.

Open Planets Foundation | digital, forever

This consortium of institutions and universities came together “to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation.”

PLANETS stands for Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services.

HUGE 24x36 Complete Set Steampunk Rock Star Scientist by meganlee

Want.

[Citation Needed]

What a wonderful idea for a blog: “Collecting Wikipedia’s finest [citation needed] prose.”

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.

ID card database destroyed - a set on Flickr

For once, I’m happy to see data being destroyed.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Broken Links

Tim Bray calmly explains why hash-bang URLs are a very bad idea.

This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.

Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food - New York Times

A tour of the Global Seed Bank in Svalbard.

Damn Interesting • This Place is Not a Place of Honor

Trying to design a warning message for future generations, without relying on language, writing or current semiotics.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

Thinking about the HTML and XML

Some musings from Norman Walsh. I have to say, I’m still not entirely sure why the HTML/XML Task Force exists. The “use cases” described here are vague and handwavey.

YouTube - Playmobil Stop Motion - Joy Division - Transmission

Hooky never looked so good.

isolani - Javascript: Breaking the Web with hash-bangs

Excellent, excellent analysis of how URLs based on fragment identifier (a la Twitter/Gawker/Lifehawker) expose an unstable tottering edifice that crumbles at the first JavaScript error.

So why use a hash-bang if it’s an artificial URL, and a URL that needs to be reformatted before it points to a proper URL that actually returns content?

Out of all the reasons, the strongest one is “Because it’s cool”. I said strongest not strong.

Maria Fischer · Portfolio · Traumgedanken

What a brilliant idea! This book on dreams uses physical threads as hyperlinks. The result is a gorgeous object.

It’s About People, Not Devices | UX Booth

An excellent article from Bryan, hammering home the point that there is no sharp dividing line between desktop and mobile.

Remember as well that the most ubiquitous of technologies, the common thread throughout many connected devices, is the browser. Browser-based experiences may not always be as sexy, but they are often far more capable of adapting to different contexts. In times of rapid change, adaptability—rather than features—may be your product’s greatest ally.

Honor Harger on Lift 11: Geneva

Honor gives a tour of sound from space.

3quarksdaily

An argument against skeuomorphic design. The Windows Mobile 7 design vocabulary is rightly praised for its no-nonsense beauty.

Forever Future | Sascha Pohflepp

The intriguing tale of a fictional archivist, storing past visions of the future in a storage facility that acts as a space ark.

He has put money in the bank which will pay for the space well beyond his lifetime. Each year he collects technological predictions that had been made for that year and conserves the ones that didn’t come true in the form of 35mm slides. The ship itself consists of a refrigeration unit to help preserve the slides, a slide projector and light box in case these technologies have become extinct by the time of its recovery, and a system to get power from the outside. In an annual ritual on April 11th Walker adds another box to the mission.

The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator

This is kind of mean, but it made me laugh. Out loud.

Constant Setting

This URL displays a picture of a sunset (from Flickr) taken wherever the sun is setting right now.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop on Vimeo

One potential nightmare vision of the future …that looks kind of cool.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 on Vimeo

Part two of Kirby Ferguson’s series focuses on films. Creation requires influence.

Link Rot « The Bygone Bureau

Brilliant; just brilliant. Connor O’Brien remains skeptical about the abstract permanence of “the cloud.” The observations are sharp and the tone is spot-on.

If your only photo album is Facebook, ask yourself: since when did a gratis web service ever demonstrate giving a flying fuck about holding onto the past?

Space stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation. - By Neal Stephenson - Slate Magazine

An excellent historical overview of rocketry by Neal Stephenson.

The New Bulletproof Font-Face Syntax | Fontspring

Syntax for @font-face that’s more bulletproof than the techniques previously considered bulletproof …’till an even more bulletproof syntax comes along.

Pulling the plug on the BBC’s internet history « 853

The BBC’s decision to actively delete old content (rather than simply allowing it to take up some space on a server) really gets my blood boiling.

The BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006…” and five years later some suit decided to bin them.

My Father’s Final Gift « Aza on Design

The beautifully-written and moving story of a father’s last gift to his son. The father is Jef Raskin; the son is Aza Raskin.