Photos from earlier this week:
In a small room in CERN’s Data Center, an international group of nine developers is taking a plunge back in time to the beginnings of the World Wide Web. Their aim is to enable the whole world to experience what the web looked like viewed within the very first browser developed by Tim Berners-Lee.
PIctures of computers (of the human and machine varieties).
I love this idea of comparing human colour choices to those of a computer:
I decided to do two things: the top three most used colours of the photo decided by “a computer” and my hand picked choices. This method ended up revealing a couple of things about me.
I also love that this was the biggest obstacle to finding representative imagery:
I wanted this to be an exciting task but instead I only found repeated photos of my cat.
Craig’s slow walk away from Instagram:
I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best (have you noticed Instagram making the second photo in series appear first in the carousel?). And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is what these general algorithms seem to optimize for: things that are easily digestible, firmly on the scale of “fine, just fine.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more boring stuff we shove into our eyeballs, the more boring our taste becomes.
Flickr is removing anything over 1,000 photos on accounts that are not “pro” (paid for) in 2019. We highlight large and amazing accounts that could use a gift to go pro. We take nominations and track when these accounts are saved.
This is very, very good news. Following on from the recent announcement that a huge swathe of Flickr photos would soon be deleted, there’s now an update: any photos that are Creative Commons licensed won’t be deleted after all. Phew!
I wonder if I can get a refund for that pro account I just bought last week to keep my Creative Commons licensed Flickr pictures online.
I’ve got a lot of photos on Flickr (even though I don’t use it directly much these days) and I’ve paid up for a pro account to protect those photos, but I’m very worried about this:
Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos.
That in itself is fine, but any existing non-pro accounts with more than 1000 photos will have older photos deleted until the total comes down to 1000. This means that anyone linking to those photos (or embedding them in blog posts or articles) will have broken links and images.
Tears in the rain.
How mucking about in HTML and CSS can lead to some happy accidents.
‘Sfunny, people often mention the constraints and limitations of “designing in the browser”, but don’t recognise that every tool—including Sketch and Photoshop—comes with constraints and limitations. It’s just that those are constraints and limitations that we’ve internalised; we no longer even realise they’re there.
I’ve thought often of how our design and prototyping tools for the web are often not of the web. Tools like Photoshop and Sketch and Invision create approximations but need to walk the line between being a tool to build native apps and to build web apps. They do well in their ability to quickly validate designs but do little to validate technical approach.
If only our digital social networks were to exhibit this kind of faded grandeur when they no longer exist.
Peter looks into his crystal ball for 2018 and sees computers with eyes, computers with ears, and computers with brains.
Amber has been investigating which image formats make sense for which situations.
Choosing image format is only one step towards optimising images on the web. There are many, many other steps to consider, and so, so much to learn!
Time-shifted photographs of my hometown in Ireland.
Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.
Photos of analogue interfaces: switches, knobs, levers, dials, buttons, so many buttons.
If you enjoyed reading Marcin’s serendipitous story on Twitter, here are the pictures to accompany it.
A selection from an ongoing photography project—seven years and counting—leading up to the launch of the Orion project.
