- Warren Ellis » GUEST INFORMANT: Jess Nevins
Jess Nevins does a guest stint on Warren's site, and, in the process, teaches us all something about the history of fandom. I imagine a good number of you will have seen this already, but if you're someone with a connection to fandom who doesn't read Warren's blog in some format, I commend this particular post to your attention. Don't you want to know what Byron thought of about fandom?
Author: Alasdair
Bookmarks for September 2, 2011
- Monsters of Grok: fake band t-shirts for history's greatest thinkers by Jeremy Kalgreen
I just need to decide which of these to buy.
- It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
This is an excellent summary of how to run an effective daily stand-up meeting, and how to fix problems with it, should they arise.
Bookmarks for September 1, 2011
- Take 5 Minutes to Make WordPress 10 Times More Secure
If you're using wordpress, you should probably do these things. None of them are hard, and all of them will help.
Bookmarks for August 28, 2011
- Cardboard Children: Heroquest & More.. | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
An extraordinarily fine bit of writing on tabletop gaming.
Bookmarks for August 24, 2011
- New Android spyware answers incoming calls – SC Magazine US
Anyone want to bet me that there was a governmental intelligence agency involved in the development of this, at some point?
- Home – Readmill
I've just signed up for the beta of this service. Will dump books across to it in the next day or so, and give it a go. The app certainly looks nice, just as a shame apple don't expose an API to pull books out of the iBooks app, meaning I'm going to wind up with (quite a lot of) duplicate data on my iPad.
- FOSS Patents: Samsung cites Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' movie as prior art against iPad design patent
This one is really interesting, and I kind of hope they succeed, just so sci-fi writers all over American can get really litigious with big corporations going around turning all their ideas into reality.
- What Does Google Mean By “Evil?” (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
This has been on my mind lately, and it's an interesting perspective. Swartz is suggesting that Google's definition of "evil" is "not making things worse for users in order to make more money". It's not a bad suggestion, and if it's accurate, it's still more than many companies even attempt, but (as is probably obvious if you've listened to me bang on for a while) I think it's perfectly possible to be "evil" and still hew to that definition. (I also don't agree that the G+/real names nonsense passes that definition of "evil", but that's another thing.)
Links for Friday August 19th 2011 through Monday August 22nd 2011
- rentzsch.tumblr.com: HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack
If you are running the LAMP stack on your websites, and not doing all this, you need to do some work.
- Bootstrap, from Twitter
Here's a nice framework for building web-app interfaces. I can see myself using this to put stuff together.
- 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World
I wish I'd been that clever when I was 13. Hell, I wish I was that clever now.
Bookmarks for August 19, 2011
- 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World
I wish I'd been that clever when I was 13. Hell, I wish I was that clever now.
I’d Sell Your Heart To The Junkman Baby
This has made my morning 382% better. Absolutely superb editing.
Bookmarks for August 18, 2011
- Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby – Hyperpolyglot
Likely of no interest to non-webdev-nerds, but potentially of enormous value to me, in terms of learning new languages. I sort of vaguely know Ruby, but this direct translation from PHP to Ruby would speed what little ruby hacking I do.
- It's Sexy A-Levels!
A blog exploring the hypothesis that UK newspapers believe that only attractive girls in low cut tops do A-Levels.
- fleet street fox: More pictures like this, please.
A counter-argument: it is excellent that at A-level results time, the papers fill up with photos of attractive young women. Less sexist that you think.
- Tetrapharmakos – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I stumbled across this set of 4 simple maxims for a happy life, and really like it.
- Up, up and away into near-space in a beautiful bloon
Statement of intent: I will do this before I die.
- Special ed student raped by classmate, forced by school to apologize to him, then raped again, lawsuit claims (UPDATED) – Boing Boing
I wanted to link to this not because it's directly relevant to me (other than, y'know, as a human being with an ounce of compassion somewhere under a rock in here), or even because it's an exceptionally horrible story (it is, but the plain truth is that worse things happen every day, and I don't link to news about them), but just because it strikes me as a very, very stark reminder of how, even in the "developed" world, we still have such a very very long way to go before we can call ourselves civilised.
Links for Tuesday August 16th 2011 through Wednesday August 17th 2011
- OMG Posters! » “Wish You Were Here” Art Print by Dan McCarthy
This is an absolutely brilliant print. You wouldn't believe that glow-in-the-dark paint could actually move you, but you only have to look at this to realise that yes, yes it can.
- Your awful dates, in 140 characters – storify.com
Rhodri Marsden has been collecting people's dreadful 1st date stories. Read them if you want to feel better about your dating life (no matter how bad you think it's been, I promise you, it isn't as bad as these stories) or even if you just want a few cheap laughs.
- England riots: pair jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder | UK news | guardian.co.uk
There has to be more to this than there seems, right? I mean, we don't jail people for most of fours years for writing things on the internet now, do we? Particularly when those things don't result in riots? I mean, that's what they do in Egypt and all those other barbaric regiemes.
- The Daily Mail knowingly and commercially used a bloggers photos despite the blogger denying them permission. – Wonderland
This short of shitty behaviour probably isn't a surprise to anyone any more, particularly not from the Daily Fail, but still, I'd be fucking livid and instructing a solicitor, were it me, so y'know…