- 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.
Bookmarks for November 24, 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.
Bookmarks for November 14, 2011
- 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.
- Sycorax: Bring Fictional Characters to Life on Twitter
Yes, I can see uses for this that would massively enhance a present-day tech based game, or just because it looks like a fun little narrative engine.
Bookmarks for November 11, 2011
- Node.js on Dreamhost | respectTheCode
Handy tutorial for getting node.js running on one of my webhosts.
- A Simple Blog with CouchDB, Bogart, and Node.js – How To Node – NodeJS
This is a bundle of technologies that I've been meaning to put a little time into learning for a while now. So I should sit down and implement this somewhere, when I get a little time.
- [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.
Links for Tuesday November 8th 2011 through Wednesday November 9th 2011
- 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.
- Custom input types for edit in place
I think I'm about to fall down a JS hole. This, specific, JS hole. Lucky me.
Bookmarks for November 8, 2011
- 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.
Bookmarks for November 4, 2011
- Video: London From A Bus Window | Londonist
This is a very pretty video, and worth 5 minutes of your time.
Bookmarks for November 3, 2011
- Up by Jawbone | Band + App Inspires Healthy Living
Reasonably unobtrusive activity/sleep monitor for use with iPhone. May have to get one in the new year.
Bookmarks for October 28, 2011
- ASHES: A graphic novel by Alex de Campi & Jimmy Broxton
Been meaning to link to this all week. Old chum Alex de Campi, who you may recall did the rather excellent comic SMOKE some years back, is looking for backing to produce a sequel, with art by the superb Jimmy Broxton. I can confidently predict that this will be absolutely brilliant, and you should fork over your cash at once. (I would have already done so, but Kickstarter hates me, and will not let me pledge. So I encourage you all to do so instead, because I really want to read this.)