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Do you play the lottery? Here's a little tool that will simulate playing a reasonably normal lottery for you, twice a week, for 10 years, so that you can see just how much money you're flushing down the toilet for what kind of reward.
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Most of you can safely skip this one, as it'll be incomprehensible tech bollocks. Unless you're interested in good coding practice when developing Javascript for other people to deploy of their websites. No, didn't think so.
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Have you ever complained (or thought about complaining, or generally just grumbled to yourself and your friends) when LJ, Facebook, Twitter, or any other large website you use changed something? Have you ever wondered "why didn't they give us the option to keep doing it the old way, if we wanted to?" Well here's a good post explaining why.
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Yeah, I know it sounds unlikely to the point of absurdity. But seriously, read this. I don't care if you don't give a shit about one of both of them are – unless you have no idea at all who both of them are (in which case, I congratulate you on waking from your 20 year coma, and welcome you to the future) they I promise you, you'll love it. It's absolutely brilliant.
Links For Tuesday 28th September 2010
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I'm not posting this as an Apple fan – Apple are a long, long way from being the only example of this kind pace of technology, and probably aren't even the best. But they're a well know, very recognisable one. As you look at this though, I invite you to consider the following: you didn't even notice that change happening, did you?
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Need to grab this and get it running somewhere – on the one hand, most of my stuff is inconsequential crap, on the other hand, I don't like not having my own copy of data I generate, so something that auto-archives my socialmeeja crap is handy, especially if it'll let me produce stats on it.
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Some data on the behaviour of users who were referred by to a site, split by the site that referred them – for example, users referred by BoingBoing stay longer, but read less extra pages that this initial linked one than those who arrive via Bleeding Cool or io9. I'd be cautious of putting reading *too* much into the data, but it's still interesting.
Links For Monday 27th September 2010
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A savage, brilliant deconstruction of the problems with the way science is reported in the press. Please note carefully the section toward the end (for maximum take-away, you understand) where fringe lunatics and cranks who don't understand how science works (or how to tie their own shoelaces, a lot of the time) are given their say.
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I loved Bagpuss. I also love this. The Thomas the Tank Engine (linked within) one is pretty good, too. Well, it made me laugh, anyway.
Links For Wednesday 22nd September 2010
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Even slime mould can make decisions, it turns out. Sounds like it may be smarter than some humans.
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Is there anyone in the US who I can paypal cash to, who would be willing to order to have them order one of these and post it on to me?
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Of interest to a few folk around here, I'd imagine – a day at The French Laundry, a look at how they work, and how their ever changing menus are put together.
The End Of Summer
Yes, OK, you can have a bit of time off the Sunsets. But don’t think I’m done yet. I’ve got more…
Links For Tuesday 21st September 2010
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This is food for thought. Key quote: "Storytelling is clearly an extremely important function of societies, but it's nonetheless unproven that to be human is to be a storytelling being. Even if it is the case that human beings are completely intrinsically storytelling animals, it doesn't follow that that's something to celebrate, any more than we should celebrate the fact that human beings are defecating animals."
There're a number of obvious counter-arguments, that can essentially be lumped in as "the power of art to bring about change" but it's still a point of view worth remembering.
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I think I'm going to have to pick this book up. A lot of the numbers around the environmental impact of livestock farming have seemed off to me particularly in relation to arguments about grain (because, well, what's wrong with grass-fed?) and water (because invariably, the numbers seem to assume that any water fed to a cow never leaves the cow, which is pretty self-evidently wrong). It's nice to see that someone's actually taken the numbers apart and proved them wrong/fallacious, and done so in a way that convinces even a big hippy like Monbiot.
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A clear and sensible statement about the need to decentralise services like Twitter, Facebook, and really, almost any service, if you want it around for the long (decade+) haul. Idle thought: Someday, someone will figure out how to massively decentralise search, and than things will get really interesting. (Google have, of course, effectively done this internally in that their search architecture is spread over cluster after cluster, but that's not the same as true decentralisation…)
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I really want this to succeed – once it's out of beta, and at the more-or-less easy to install stage, I'll probably put some time and cash, into setting up a Seed. I absolutely know that there are people I've lost touch with since leaving Facebook, and I know my social life has suffered for it. I've felt quite disconnected from many of my friends this year, and it's bugging me quite a lot of late. I'm not blaming anyone, you understand and I'm not going to be one of those arseholes who think that it's everyone else's fault – I knew what I was doing when I walked away from Farcebook – I'm just a little sad that people don't seem to use any other contact medium any more. So as soon as I can, I'll help offer a better alternative…
Sunset I
Told you there were a lot of sunsets coming. Hope you’re not too bored.
I’m about to wrench my arm patting myself on the back with this one. You see, the way I know that this is good shot is that I’ve just been through a massive variety of settings and balance tweaks to produce different versions, and aside from the obviously fucked options where I crank one slider up all the way and destroy the shot, there’s not one of them I don’t like – the shot shines through in all of them. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a highly original shot, but today, I care less about that than I do about having taken a really nice photo that brings me immense pleasure. I hope you like it, too.
This version’s my favourite, but I’m going to upload the unaltered original, too, so you can see what choices I’ve made in developing this. You can see the original here, if you’re curious.
Links For Monday 20th September 2010
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Applicable to just about any creative endeavour, and there are a number of things in here I could do with remembering more often.
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Mildly tempted by this, if they produce an iphone version. It's a bit deep geek, but that's never stopped me from doing anything before. (Not so much interested in it from a sharing-with-the-world POV, more as a personal outboard memory tool – the ability to clip the last 30 secs of my life is potentially useful in a number of contexts.)
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Reasonably trivial task, but once I'm going to have to do at work soon, I imagine. No sense re-inventing the wheel, and this looks like some decent code snippets to build into what we'll need.
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A listing of intentionally bad design patterns – tricks websites use to get you to do things that they want, or that cost you money. I'm happy to say that most of our clients don't ask us to do these, and those that do are usually dissuaded by us. But still, this is a good list of tricks to learn, so you can be aware when various sites might be trying to use them on you.
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I had been blaming the decade long rise of extremism and authoritarian clampdowns on some kind of post-millennial fallout – the calendar ticks over, and nothing changes, and all that pent up stress has to go somewhere – but the idea that a significant chunk of the population of the planet might actually be suffering from future shock hadn't occurred to me, but it's an idea worth acknowledging, I think. (And playing connect the dots with – qv. Clay Shirky's Gin and Sitcoms ideas about cognitive surplus as an exacerbating factor.)
Links For Sunday 19th September 2010
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Do you use your personal smartphone to get work email on, via Exchange? Here's an article that explains why you might want to stop doing this, and then confirm in person with your IT department that they can no long access your phone. However much I might trust my employers, there's no way I'd hand them the ability to do a remote wipe of my phone. After all, one day, I might want to leave, and they'd be justified in wiping my phone for security reasons. And bang would go my friends contact info, my photos, my SMS conversations, etc etc. (Absent a back up, of course. How often do you plug your personal phone into your home PC, and sync? I'm quite back-up conscious, and I still only do it once a fortnight or so, because 90% of the time, the data I need to have synced is already synced over the air.)
Home
Back from a week’s Holiday in Woolacombe, down on the North coast of Devon. A week of basically, doing bugger-all. Picnics, playing in the surf, and just chilling out – we deliberately didn’t avail ourselves of a car, so that we couldn’t go and Do Things – we were basically restricted to what was available within walking distance, which was a few places to eat, and some surf shops, and that was the lot. I have decided that as much as I like city breaks, where I have plenty to do, there really is a lot to be said for getting away from it all for a week.
We got a lot of really good sunsets, too, so expect a few more beach-at-sunset photos in the next while.