Link archive: December, 2013

The Pastry Box Project, Wednesday, 25 December 2013

I like Erin’s list.

Windows of New York | A weekly illustrated atlas

Lovely little graphics inspired by New York architecture.

furbo.org · The Origin of Tweet

A fascinating bit of linguistic spelunking from Craig Hockenberry, in which he tracks down the earliest usage of “tweet” as a verb relating to Twitter.

Basically, it’s all Blaine’s fault.

The Console Living Room : Free Software : Download

Here’s a nice Christmas gift from Jason and the archinauts at the Internet Archive: tons of games for living room consoles of the early ’80s, all playable in your browser, thanks to emulation in JavaScript.

Frank Chimero × Blog × Homesteading 2014

I’m with Frank. He’s going Indie Web for 2014:

I’m returning to a personal site, which flips everything on its head. Rather than teasing things apart into silos, I can fuse different kinds of content together.

Homesteading instead of sharecropping:

So, I’m doubling down on my personal site in 2014.

WarGames Magazine Identified By Michael Walden

Now this is what I call research:

Through the use of my knowledge of computer magazines, my sharp eyes, and other technical knowledge, I have overcome the limited amount of information available in the video content of WarGames and with complete certainty identified the exact name and issue number of the magazine read on screen by David L. Lightman in WarGames.

Neave’s Notes — Why I create for the web

Follow this link to receive a love letter to the humble hyperlink.

About Variables in CSS and Abstractions in Web Languages | CSS-Tricks

Chris has a written a response to my post (which was itself inspired by his excellent An Event Apart presentation) all about CSS, variables, and abstractions.

I love this kind of old-school blog-to-blog discussion.

Spimes: A Happy Birthday Story « optional.is/required

Expanding on an exercise from last year’s Hackfarm, Brian and Mike have written a deliciously dystopian near-future short story.

Happy 17th Birthday CSS | Web Directions

A lovely history lesson on CSS from John.

Myth - CSS the way it was imagined.

This looks interesting: a CSS postprocessor that polyfills support for perfectly cromulent styles.

Earth wind map

A beautiful real-time visualisation of winds on our planet.

Salter Cane: Sorrow by rozeink on deviantART

Wow …somebody has a tattoo of Salter Cane cover artwork.

Ted Nelson’s Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart - YouTube

A searing, angry, heartfelt eulogy.

xkcd: Syllable Planning

This is called expletive infixation.

I’ll always remember the “Phila-fucking-delphia” example from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct:

If you said “Philadel-fucking-phia”, you’d be laughed out of the pool hall.

rem : fullfrontalconf2013 on Huffduffer

Get these down your earholes!

Remy has huffduffed all the audio from this year’s Full Frontal conference.

The Creation Engine No. 2: Osprey Therian

I was going to say that this is a really lovely post from Jim about Second Life, but it’s no actually about Second Life at all: it’s about a person.

Time - YouTube

The video of my closing talk at this year’s Full Frontal conference, right here in Brighton.

I had a lot of fun with this, although I was surprisingly nervous before I started: I think it was because I didn’t want to let Remy down.

Brian Aldiss: ‘These days I don’t read any science fiction. I only read Tolstoy’ | Books | The Guardian

A profile of Brian Aldiss in The Guardian.

I still can’t quite believe I managed to get him for last year’s Brighton SF.

Flickr: The British Library’s Photostream

This is a wonderful addition to the already-wonderful Flickr Commons: over one million pictures from the British Library, available with liberal licensing.

Y’know, I’m worried about what will happen to my own photos when Flickr inevitably goes down the tubes (there are still some good people there fighting the good fight, but they’re in the minority and they’re battling against the douchiest of Silicon Valley managerial types who have been brought in to increase “engagement” by stripping away everything that makes Flickr special) …but what really worries me is what’s going to happen to Flickr Commons. It’s an unbelievably important and valuable resource.

300ms tap delay, gone away - HTML5Rocks Updates

I think Chrome is doing the right thing by removing the 300 millisecond tap delay on sites that set width=device-width — it’s certainly better than only doing it on sites that set user-scalable=no, which felt like rewarding bad behaviour.

This is a Website – Jeffrey Zeldman

I had a lovely dinner last night with Jeffrey, Tantek, Cindy and Daniel. A combination of nostalgia and indie web chatter prompted Jeffrey to pen this beautiful ode to independent publishing.

We were struggling, whether we knew it or not, to found a more fluid society. A place where everyone, not just appointed apologists for the status quo, could be heard. That dream need not die. It matters more now than ever.

OriDomi - origami for the web

A fun little JavaScript library for folding the DOM like paper. The annotated source is really nicely documented.

Type Rendering Mix

I got excited when Tim Brown announced this at An Event Apart today: a small JavaScript tool for detecting what kind of rasterising and anti-aliasing a browser is using, and adding the appropriate classes to the root element (in much the same way that Web Font Loader does).

Alas, it turns out that it’s reliant on user-agent string sniffing. I guess that’s to be expected: this isn’t something that can be detected directly. Still, it feels a little fragile: whenever you use any user-agent sniffing tool you are entering an arms race that requires you to keep your code constantly updated.

Why I’m turning JavaScript off by default

Another good ol’ rant from Tom. It’s a bit extreme but the underlying lamentation with the abandonment of progressive enhancement is well founded.

Toward A People Focused Mobile Communication Experience - Tantek

Some good brainstorming from Tantek that follows on nicely from Anne’s recent manifesto.

Dinosaurs! WTF?

A blog covering the conservative dinosaur readiness movement.

Hackfarm- One Week, a Dozen Projects, 20 “Lefties”

Ant—the latest super-smart addition to the Clearleft team—describes this year’s Hackfarm, which happened a couple of weeks ago.

It was Ant’s first week. Or, as he described it when we were wrapping up all the hacking, “Best first week at a job ever!”

An Hour of Code spawns hours of coding

Here’s a heartwarming tale. It starts out as a description of processing.js project for Code Club (which is already a great story) and then morphs into a description of how anyone can contribute to make a codebase better …resulting in a lovely pull request on Github.

Poll Results: “Sites” vs “Apps” | CSS-Tricks

Some excellent research from Chris, canvassing opinions on whether there’s a difference between web “apps” and web “sites”. His conclusion:

Almost none of the points above ring true for me. All I see are exceptions and gray area.

If nothing else, the fact that none of the proposed distinctions agree with one another show how pointless the phrase “web app” is—if people have completely differing ideas on what a phrase means, it is completely useless in furthering discussion …the very definition of a buzzword.

This leads me to think perhaps the “web app” moniker (certainly the newer of the two) is simply just a fashionable term. We like the sound of it, so we use it, regardless if it truly means anything.

But all of this is, I think, missing the more important point: why? Why would you want to separate the cornucopia of the web into two simplistic buckets? What purpose does it serve? That’s the question that really needs be answered.

If we could pin down a super accurate definition that we agreed on, even then it might not be particularly useful. And since we can’t, I argue it’s even less useful.

The most accurate (and damning) definition of a “web app” that I’ve heard so far is: a web site that requires JavaScript to work.

Chloe Weil — Hipster

Chloe is going all in on the Indie Web. Here, she outlines how she’s posting to Twitter from her own site with a POSSE system (Post to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).

200 Geeks, 24 Hours: Science Hack Day in San Francisco

This is a wonderful, wonderful round-up by KQED of the most recent Science Hack Day in San Francisco …a truly marvellous event.

Be sure to watch the accompanying video—it brought a tear to my eye.

Anatomy of a failed rendition | booktwo.org

A superb bit of sleuthing by James:

From London to the Mediterranean, to Malta and back again, over multiple countries and jurisdictions, through airspace and legal space. The contortions of G-WIRG’s flight path mirror the ethical labyrinth the British Government finds itself in when, against all better judgements, it insists on punishing individuals as an example to others, using every weasel justification in its well-funded legal war chest. Using a combination of dirty laws and private technologies to transform and transmit people from one jurisidiction, one legal condition and category, to another: this is the meaning of the verb “to render”.

The (other) Web we lost

John shares his concerns about the increasing complexity involved in developing for the web.

The Pastry Box Project | 2 December 2013, baked by Anne van Kesteren

Coming from anyone else, this glorious vision might seem far-fetched, but Anne is working to make it a reality.

The Business of Responsive Design by Mark Boulton

The transcript of Mark’s talk from last week’s Handheld conference in Cardiff.

There are mountains.

An Open Letter - Handheld 2013

This was my favourite moment from the Handheld conference in Cardiff.