Link archive: March, 2011

Flyer beware; real cost of flying Ryanair « Alan Colville

Superb in-depth analysis of Ryanair’s website dark patterns and nasty brand strategy.

Announcing Typo.js: Client-side JavaScript Spellchecking

This could be a handy: a client-side spellchecker. The dictionary files are a bit big of course—maybe local storage could help.

Adam Greenfield at Cognitive Cities Conference on Vimeo

On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City.

Tell-all telephone | Data Protection | Digital | ZEIT ONLINE

A dataviz demo of creepiness: displaying the movements of Malte Spitz by correlating her phone activity and web usage.

Use Huffduffer directly in Google Reader and on your Android Phone | Frankie – Award winning Art Director

How cool is this‽ You can create your own custom “huffduff it” link for items in Google Reader.

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.

HTTP Archive

This is wonderful stuff: a long-term project to track the performance of high-traffic sites over time: oodles of lovely data and some quite shocking stats.

This Place is Not a Place of Honor on Vimeo

A demo reel for the proposed solution to a very, very, very long term problem.

Madmanimation

Andy just debuted this at An Event Apart—lovely stuff.

Everything I’ve learned about podcasting over the last four years | fortuitous

A very handy “how to” for recording your own podcast.

Safety Maps: A Do Project

A handy papernet tool for emergency situations. “Zombie apocalypse” is not, alas, one of the default options.

StartUpBritain done better

Apparently I’m the anti- David Cameron. I’ll take that.

Story Matters

Magazine creators share their experiences of going digital.

text-align: centaur;

I am easily amused.

this, is boomerang

This code could be useful in determining a user’s bandwidth.

Weekend Reading: Responsive Web Design and Mobile Context « Cloud Four

Jason Grigsby pulls together a bunch of links related to responsive design, mobile web and that tricky context problem.

Cheese or Font

Clearly my knowledge of cheese and fonts is way worse than I realised.

Dig the new breed | Stuff and Nonsense

Like Malarkey, I welcome our future responsive design progeny overlords.

Touching Strangers

The premise of this work is simple: I meet two or more people on the street who are strangers to each other, and to me. I ask them if they will pose for a photograph together with the stipulation that they must touch each other in some manner. Frequently, I instruct or coach the subjects how to touch. Just as often, I let their tentative physical exploration play out before my camera with no interference.

Toffee-nosed. — Unstoppable Robot Ninja

A superb explanation of rhetorical devices by Ethan.

“When It’s Not Your Turn”: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire” « The Hooded Utilitarian

What if the Wire were a serialised Dickensian story? …which, let’s face it, it kinda is.

A Richer Canvas: Mark Boulton

An excellent statement of intent from Mark. You can either read this now and start creating websites the right way, or you can scrabble to catch up further down the line; I recommend reading this now.

Embrace the fluidity of the web. Design layouts and systems that can cope to whatever environment they may find themselves in. But the only way we can do any of this is to shed ways of thinking that have been shackles around our necks. They’re holding us back.

Start designing from the content out, rather than the canvas in.

Starpunk | booktwo.org

James Bridle is my favourite Blogpunk author.

Famous Objects from Classic Movies

Match the MacGuffin to the movie. Like Hangman for films.

Tidy Street electricity usage | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I really like this idea: one street in Brighton is openly displaying its electricity usage over time.

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”.

A History of the Future in 100 Objects | Mssv

Adrian Hon’s Kickstarter project has already reached its goal. I can’t wait for the podcasting to start.

The nourishing wake — Satellite — Craig Mod

I cried.

JAMES FACE - OLI ALEX

Cruel in a subtle sort of way: re-posting slightly tweaked Facebook photos of one poor guy.

IMG_3937 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

There’s a Kubrickian quality to this picture Tantek snapped of me asking a question during his microformats panel.

Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage’ : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR

An astonishing story from the Soviet side of the space race that is equal parts stupidity and sacrifice.

Brian Eno - The Big Here and the Long Now | DIGITALSOULS.COM | New Media Art | Philosophy | Culture

Brian Eno’s original essay on the origins of The Long Now Foundation. It is ten years old—a long time on the web and 1% of a millennium.

Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” , he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently – as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real.

YouTube - Vader

We want the finest Star Wars parodies known to man—we want them here and we want them now!

Change Proposal for ISSUE-140 - WHATWG Wiki

An excellent zero-edit counter-proposal from Anne detailing why version numbers are unnecessary and undesirable for HTML.

YouTube - Magnum v. Solo, sequence comparison

When you see Craig’s Han Solo PI side by side with the original title sequence of Magnum PI, the genius shines through.

Made by One – Huffduffer

In which I answer some questions about the making of Huffduffer.

Geek Ninja Battle Night | Stuff and Nonsense

Andy hammers home the benefit of a long-term format like HTML compared to the brittle, fleeting shininess of an ephemeral platform-specific app.

iPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing | Techinch

Y’know, I think this comparison actually makes a lot of sense.

finding baby sciences and new moons (17 Mar., 2011, at Interconnected)

Matt casts around for new areas of scientific research.

Ribot - interface innovation

Fellow Brightonians, the brothers Ribot and co., launch an excellently responsive company site.

A Memory of Webs Past - IEEE Spectrum

A detailed look at how French archivists go about preserving websites.

Showcase: Pop-Up Book in HTML and CSS | eleqtriq

A cute’n’nifty demonstration of transforms and animations in CSS that works a treat in Webkit.

F*ck Yeah Headlines

Each weekday I find a headline on a major news site, and illustrate it without reading a word of the story.

Read ePub ebooks online : Bookworm ePub reader

A browser-based ePub reader. ‘Cause it’s (X)HTML all the way down, baby.

The State of HTML5 Audio - PhobosLab

A rather vicious evaluation of browser support for the audio element and the audio API. It is divided up into:

• Browsers From Companies That Actually Care About HTML5 Audio
• Browsers From Companies That Hate the Web Enough to Not Support Ogg/Vorbis, but do Have an Audio Tag So They Can Say They Have an Audio Tag (Seriously, Fuck You)
• Browsers That Say They Support HTML5 Audio But Actually Don’t Support HTML5 Audio

mezzoblue § Serendipity

The web demonstrates its loosely-joined nature yet again; a photo of mine from a science hack/design fiction exhibit results in Dave discovering his family crest.

Shady Characters

The secret life of punctuation.

You are listening to Los Angeles

Ambient LA.

YouTube - Harvard Humanists Stephen Fry 2 22 2011 Chapter 10 Molly Lewis

If I had the right biological equipment, I think I too might offer to bear Stephen Fry’s children …in a song.

The Pod F. Tompkast, episode 1 on Huffduffer

The Google voicemail transcript, which begins at 11 minutes in, cracked me up.

Jon Rafman

Some of the more unusual moments in time that have been captured by Google Street View. There’s something very Gibsonian about this.

Home - Brighton Open Kitchen Project

This looks like an excellent project for Brighton:

We would like to create a community cooking space in the heart of the city, for people with a passion for food. This will give people access to a commercial kitchen space from which they can learn, share and improve skills while potentially starting food-related ventures.

a world of tweets

A very pretty visualisation of tweets on a map using canvas.

Sad Star Trek

Life isn’t always happy and jolly in The Future.

yepnope.js | A Conditional Loader For Your Polyfills!

A nice’n’small lazy loader that should make life easier when it comes to pollyfilling browser support for nifty HTML5 or CSS3 features.

YouTube - How To Be South By South Best (SXSW Video Guide)

Southby is something of an easy target for ridicule, but this is still mildly amusing.

Blush°° Bespoke

If you’d like to place your cup of tea on one of these lovely Fontdeck coasters, make sure you get a ticket for the Ampersand conference.

W3C HTML5 Chinese Interest Group

Some excellent cross-polination between HTML5 and internationalisation — remember the other two Ws that come before Web in WWW.

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi on Vimeo

Timo Arnall has some fun mapping WiFi signal strength with long exposure photos.