Waldo Jaquith – On the impracticality of a cheeseburger. One of those things that no-one stops to think about. We think about how the world changes in ways that make things that were impossible into possible, but we don't think about the ways that we are given new ways to combine the already-possible. A century ago, we had tomatoes, lettuce, beef, cheese and bread, but it's not until recently that we could combine them with any kind of practicality.
Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Phones Logging Everything | Threat Level | Wired.com Got an Android phone? Or a Nokia, or a Blackberry? Then you may find that third parties are watching, or at least have the option to watch, most of what you do on it, inlcuding what is supposed to be secure communication. Bad news: at the moment, your solution appears to be to root the phone, which is well beyond most people's knowledge or ability. At the very least, until you know whether you're affected, I wouldn't log into anything that requires you to type a password on your phone.
Little Printer | BERG Cloud There are a bunch of things that interest me about this. The physicalisation of internet-sourced data. The just-enough and just-in-time approach. The social angle. And most of all, the suggestion that this is the first of a range of tools to bring the virtual and physical closer together. I want one, and I want the developer documentation for this "bergcloud" or which they speak, because I imagine I can have fun with them.
Ugh. God. Why Is Apple Making Everything Look Like an Ugly Wild West? I could not agree more. I utterly loathe the currently look of iCal, and aside from the creepy intrusiveness which is my real reason for not using it, I would be very unlikely to use Find My Friends, either, just because it's so fucking ugly. I've never liked the yellow notes app, or stickies, or the page turn in ibooks, either.
Google Analytics A Potential Threat to Anonymous Bloggers – Waxy.org Useful set of thought on how it might be possible to deal with abusive commenters, even if they're trying to hide. (Also, a warning to those who have a legitimate reason to blog anonymously: you may not be as anonymous as you think.)
Danielle Sucher › Jailbreak the Patriarchy: my first Chrome extension A Chrome plugin that does its best to gender-swap the internet. For some it'll be eye opening. For some, it'' raise blood pressure. For others, it might even lower it. In any event, it's an interesting experience – go play.
[this is aaronland] the unbearable finality of pixel space If this matures a little, I'll be a happy man. Right now, it's a complete pain to get working out of the box, unless you're starting from a position of installing everything from scratch on an Ubuntu box, but if someone turns out a quick version that'll run on a basic PHP/MYSQL/Apache install on my webhost, I'll be a happy man. (Yes, I could spend a day or two making it run myself, but my photos are already well backed-up, ta, so my incentive to do it is limited. I quite want an easy minimalist portfolio site, but not enough to spend days building it.)
A List of Things That Plugins Don’t Work With Look seriously, if you're building a website, and thinking "Hey, I know, we'll do this bit with a plugin" – and it doesn't matter which one – Flash, Sliverlight, fuck, even Quicktime – then really stop, and think again. They're broken, and they don't do anything you can't do with modern web-standards based technology.
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design This is utterly brilliant. It very neatly skewers several big flaws in that Microsoft vision-of-the-future thing, and actually suggests several interesting possibilities for transformative technologies, if anyone can figure out how to do them. It also makes me think of a whole new spectrum of problems for people with certain disabilities that will need solving. If you give even a little shit about how you interact with the technology around you, this is a must read.
Apple Exiles A Security Researcher From Its Developer Program For Proof-of-Concept Exploit App – Forbes This is, frankly, idiotic. Yes, he violated Apple's TOS, but there is no evidence that he did it with malicious intent, beyond proving that it's possible to get a dangerous app onto the App Store. I expect the security flaw he's exposed to be patched relatively swiftly, but the deeper issue of shooting the messenger is what really needs addressing here.