- Favorite Typefaces from 2011 « Opinionated Type
Some absolutely beautiful choices in here. - Start 2012 By Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions
A really good idea – a list of popular web apps, with links that will let you manage what other web apps have permissions to use them. - scrollorama
Jquery scrolling effects plugin. Might be handy at work. - Bullshit – Marco.org
"Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you're willing to tolerate." Spot on.
2012
OK, the end is nigh. Now we’ve got that bit out of the way, it’s time to think about the coming year. I actually wrote this back in mid December, but then life took a sharp turn sideways, and I’ve only had the time to get back to it now. In my ususal tradition of this sort of bollocks, half of what I’m currently planning won’t happen, because I’ll get distracted by something newer and shinier, but that’s OK.
So this year’s list:
- New LARP. The experimental (read: small) LARP of the last couple of years taught me quite a lot. So now it’s time to apply what I’ve learned to something a bit larger.
- Finish that novel. I’ve had to set it aside for the last couple of months, just because of the level of prep work I’ve needed to do for the new LARP, but I’m looking forward to getting back to it in February. Before you ask: no. It’s drivel. I’m writing it for the sake of writing it, at the moment. I’ll see about turning it into not-drivel once I’m done. Then, maybe. More likely, I shall simply get on with writing #2, and hoping it’s slightly less like drivel.
- I need a few new projects. Thinking about a “cook one new recipe a week and blog about it” sort of thing. Would certainly like to cook more, and do new things. May or may not blog about it.
- I’ve been saying I’ll do it for years, but I really would like to learn Objective-C/Cocoa so I can make apps for Mac/iOS. Maybe this year will be the year I finally do.
- I want to do a course, or a class of some kind. I’d like to pick up some new skills. Not sure what.
- Lifting up heavy things, then setting them down again. I’ve been out of the exercise habit for a while now. I’d like to get back into it. This means sorting myself out a program, and sticking to it.
That’ll do for now. Come back in a year, if we don’t all perish in fire, and we’ll see how I did.
Happy Holidays
Just wishing everyone a very happy mid-winter festival of choice, and to those who don’t celebrate anything at all, I hope you’re enjoying however you’ve chosen to spend the period, and that the rest of us haven’t been too annoying this year.
Links for Friday December 9th 2011
- Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
I've never thought of myself as someone who lived in the past, but apparently I am. Bugger. - My Occupy LA Arrest, by Patrick Meighan: My Occupy LA Arrest, by Patrick Meighan
Many of you will have seen this already. If you haven't, go and look.
Links for Wednesday December 7th 2011
- Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis
Clay Shirky on the newspaper business, and the nature of institutions.
Links for Tuesday December 6th 2011
- 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.
Links for Thursday December 1st 2011
- 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.
Links for Tuesday November 29th 2011
- 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. - Hidden habits of ineffective people by Chris Wake – Quora
There are a couple of things in here that I should really work on, mostly 1 and 3, but they're all good advice.
Links for Thursday November 24th 2011
- 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.)
Braindump
This will make sense to no-one but me – I can’t seem to find the time to expand this collection of other people thoughts into a coherent post, for which I apologise. But here are a few insights by other people I’ve picked up in the last couple of weeks. Some of them aren’t anything you won’t have seen a variation before on here, but they’re something in their phrasing sparked a few new ideas in me.
I worked on TapLynx for about two years, and this meant working closely with a variety of publishers. And most had these things in common:
No money.
No idea where the money’s going to come from.
An unswerving faith in the supreme value of analytics.
A willingness to try anything as long as it’s cheap or free and has analytics. Unless they’re paranoid and afraid for their jobs, which they almost always are, given #1 and #2.
– Brent Simmons “The Pummeling Pages“
We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action.
– Maciej Cegłowski “The Social Graph is Neither“
(Context for the above, and despite the quote, and my usual habits, I’m not just singling out Google and Facebook here: We consider corporations immortal persons, and, having granted them immortality, we then allow them to indulge in behaviours that would get a human locked up. Not exactly a shattering insight, but I wonder if there’s something in a model of corporate behaviour that is simply to require them to be sane.)
We’ve moved from a world that is “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort.”
– danah boyd “Debating Privacy in a Networked World for the WSJ“
Fingers crossed I’ll have time at some future point to come back and tie this lot together and add a few thoughts of my own, but I just want to make sure I didn’t loose the quoted bits in the interim.