The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy) | NCZOnline I would absolutely kill to be certain that from 1:30 to 5:30pm I would not be interrupted by anyone, and could just get on with work. If I could implement just one recommendation from this (very resonant) article at my company, this would be it. Hack days, meeting free days, these would be lovely, but the really big one would be interruption free time.
LeakedIn: Is your password safe? Here's a good tool that will let you check if your password was among those exposed by linked.in earlier this week. FWIW, even if your password is not in the leaked lot, I would suggest changing it anyway, as linked.in have been recently proved unsafe.
6.46 million hashed LinkedIn passwords reportedly leaked online | The Verge Pay attention, this one's very very important: if you use linked.in, then you need to change your password, *right now*. And they you need to change the password on any accounts you have on any other online sites that use the same password, because it's just been made public, paired with your email address.
The world’s worst password requirements list Some of these are mind-blowing. Security is a compromise between usability and safety, whch is why you get password requirements like "must contain mixed case and a number" of things like that, but most of these decrease usability without increasing safety.
Limerence – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "An involuntary state of mind which seems to result from a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one's feelings reciprocated"
EightMedia/hammer.js · GitHub JS library to handle multi-touch inputs on mobile devices. Oh look, you've all gone to sleep. Don't care this'll be be handy for work.
UNDO DEL IUMA « ASCII by Jason Scott The Internet Underground Music Archive is back. It's, ah, a bit trial and error, but basically, there's this absolutely vast pile of free music out there again. If you can't find something in here that you like, I'll eat my socks.
Half of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out as City Shrinks – Bloomberg Light as an architecture of control. Creepy as fuck – "we're just going to let poor people sit in the dark, in the hope that making their neighbourhoods less safe will make them move" is, well, not the subtext here, but the outright *text*.
Germany sets new solar power record, institute says | Reuters Just in case you can't be arsed to click though: Germany met 50% of it's national energy needs with completely clean energy at peak sunshine hours on Friday and Saturday. This doesn't mean that we're quite ready to get rid of other power sources yet, but seriously, if this is possible now, perhaps it's time for us to spend a bit more cash (read: any) developing solar power systems? Who knows how fast we might get to the point where many nations could power themselves with solar energy?
Griot The next time I meet a pagan wanging on about bards and druids and their sacred oral traditions, I'm going to slap them in their boringly white middle class face. The phenomena is far from unique, and what they're spouting about "Celtic Tradition" in Britain it's mostly made up bullshit anyway.
UI design in the Avengers Detail shots of what are clearly some very cleverly thought out bits of UI design for fictional ultra-tech. This sort of thing is fascinating, both from an ideas point of view, and as an illustration of the level of thought and attention to detail that goes into even fleeting details in the background of a movie.
London Underground Tube Diary – Going Underground’s Blog A chance to take a steam train on the tube! (OK, not actually, you know, underground, but that's OK, because it'll be pretty!) Yes, I will obviously have to go. I would also like to make it clear that I thought steam trains were cool *before* the goth scene discovered the colour brown.