- Designersgotoheaven.com by @andreirobu How the Dead Live
Absolutely brilliant cover design for an absolutely excellent book.
- Imaginawesome
This is brilliant – kids drawings, redone by a professional illustrator. Absolutely superb.
Tag: books
Links for Wednesday June 22nd 2011 through Monday June 27th 2011
- Hoban Cards – Letterpress Printed Calling Cards
Oooh, tempting! Very lovely letterpress business cards.
- Contact Us – Conversion University Help
I need to understand google analytics much better. Please kill me.
- F.B.I. Seizes Web Servers, Knocking Sites Offline – NYTimes.com
Seriously, at some point, someone needs to start running training seminars for law enforcement agencies, explain what technology actually *is*. I have no doubt that they employ many people who know, but it's be useful if the people doing the physical work weren't half bright morons hopped on fake authority. Because while knocking a few sites off the intertubes isn't the end of the world, it still is neither right nor fair that innocent third parties like pinboard.in, or Instapaper should be knocked off the internet, and their paying customers deprived of their service (and therefore their money) by government incompetence just because they happen to be in the same room as a computer someone might have used once to do something wrong. This sort of thing makes me disproportionately angry, not for what it is, but for the principle it represents: that the government can screw people for no reason, any time it likes, and receive no comebacks, not even be required to make an apology. Power and stupidity and no accountability. How do we stop this, exactly?
- Adramelech Books
Here is where you can order C.J. Lines new short short collection, Cold Mirrors. You should do this, pretty much right now. I routinely describe his previous novel as one of the most gleefully horrible things I've ever read, and if you like horror, and haven't read it, you've missed a treat. This short story collection promises to be superb, so seriously, make with the clicky and the shopping.
- WordPress › Passwords Reset
The WordPress main repository got hack the other day, and several popular plugins were modified to carry malicious code. Long strong short: if you are running a WordPress blog, and have updated your plugins in the last few days, then you should probably check to see if there are new updates available. Most plugins are unaffected, but a few of those that are are very common. The new updates will fix the problem.
Bookmarks for January 13, 2011
- A List Apart: Articles: A Simpler Page
Discussion of laying out text for ipads (or similar) on the web, and a library to to the rendering. Particularly like the three modes – bed, knee and breakfast pretty neatly describe all the ways I use my device.
- Come out of your comfort zone, disability living allowance cuts are relevant to all | Society | guardian.co.uk
An excellent article on the cuts to DLA. Cannot quite believe that even this government of utter shits would essentially say "one in five people who have previously been assessed as needing help now won't get it". And yet they are. There's no suggestion that the previous tests were flawed. There's no (credible) suggestion that fully one in five of disabled people are OK, really, and just scrounging. They're hiding behind "we can't afford it". Which makes my blood boil. Surely, even in a time of national austerity, the one thing we should bend over backwards to afford, the one thing we should scrap all manner of other things to pay for, is caring for the most vulnerable members of our society.
Bookmarks for December 10, 2010
- Help: Twelve Tales of Healing
Your second stock-filler recommendation for the day! What are you waiting for? Go! Get shopping! Buy my friend's fine literary product and help make the world a better place!
- Invaders from Mars – Charlie's Diary
I know Stross is one of my regular linkees, and I'm sure a lot of you glide over him at this point, but I thought this was a particularly interesting read, and I commend it to anyone who is feeling frustrated by the apparently lack of ability for members of the public to influence anything in the wake of stuff like Wikileaks and the student fees protests. It won't tell you how to change things, but it provides an interesting perspective on the whys of the current situation, that lead to some interesting thoughts on how one might affect change in the medium-term future.
- The Fast Fiction Challenge – Volume 2 by Lee Barnett
Budgie's Fast Fiction Challenge, now in its second volume. I commend it to your attention as a perfect stocking filler.
- standpoint gallery
Reverting to Type: exhibition. Must go see.
- Havasu: a material exploration of conversational interfaces – Blog – BERG
Interested mostly into the insights into conversational interface, rather than the actual product here. For consideration: pair a more general use version of this with some voice recognition software, and it won't be long before all those SF voice-activated computers become a reality.
Bookmarks for December 6, 2010
- Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian’s Digital Death Not Moving People – DesignTAXI.com
On the one hand: I'm sorry that the fundraising hasn't been as as successful as they hoped, because it is a good cause, on the other, surely a child of six might have thought that while people *like* having celebrity drivel as part of their Twitter/Farcebook experience, it's not something people would actively *miss* if it went away – whichever marketroid through the campaign up is clearly not very good at their job, especially as the campaign ensures it's own silence – they can't remind people that they're not there in order to drive donations without violating their pledge. (No, I'm not donating via said campaign. Show me a cause where I can get celebrities to stop Twittering/Facebooking for good by pledging, and I'll get the chequebook out.)
- Falling out of love (Phil Gyford’s website)
More grist to my mill in re: getting rid of books as physical objects: cheap POD books, which is where we're heading for book-as-physical-object (unless you want current bestsellers, which I almost never do) tend to be shoddier things. A good POD book is just as good as a regular book, but I've seen some very shoddy examples in the past, where I would definitely rather have had the ebook.
Bookmarks for December 2, 2010
- I, Reader by Alexander Chee – The Morning News
This is a really really good personal summary of an obsessive book collector's relationship with his new e-readers. If you're a bibliophile who is wondering if there's a place for e-readers in your life, I suggest you read this.
- How Lieberman Got Amazon To Drop Wikileaks | TPMMuckraker
This is idiotic rubbish on the part of Lieberman, and worse, Amazon. It isn't at all clear that Wikileaks has done anything illegal, and presuming they have just because powerful people don't like it is exactly the wrong response, and sends all sorts of hideous messages about society.
- After secrets: Missing the point of WikiLeaks | The Economist
And of course, as this makes clear, Lieberman and Amazon are very much missing the point. This is not a problem that can be fixed by attacking Wikileaks, or any similar service.
Bookmarks for October 26, 2010
- Bespoke Editions
This is a superb idea, and I would love to see it extended to cover *any* texts. Most of the books I own, I would be happy to ditch, and replace with digital copies. But there are a maybe a dozen or so that I would pay small fortunes to have in truly beautiful bespoke editions, so that the physical object truly reflected the importance of the text to me.
Bookmarks for August 12, 2010
- What Happened to Yahoo
Yahoo was somewhere that, ten years ago, I would have love to have worked. I would have loved to have worked at some of the companies they've since bought. But I wouldn't have taken a job there any time in the last six years or so – I'm sure it would have been, y'know, fine, but it wouldn't have been what I really wanted in working for a internet company. This article does a pretty good job of explaining why.
- Words on Devour.com
Watch this. It will be the best three minutes you spend all day.
- Smart Swarm: popular science book on emergence meets business-advice book – Boing Boing
Reminder to self to pick this book up.
- YouTube – Nathan Barley
The complete Nathan Barley on the YouTubes. I imagine that some of you might like this.
Bookmarks for July 22, 2010
- Why it's never too late to be a lesbian | Life and style | The Guardian
Fascinating article on the fluidity of sexuality – the idea that people, particularly women, can, in fact, switch from hetero- to homo-sexuality in different phases of their life – that it's possible to be sincerely heterosexual, and then later, sincerely homosexual without ever being bisexual, and without devaluing one's previous sexuality.
- America's Joyous Future
I laughed like a drain.
- Bookshelf Porn
I love my iPad – I'm carrying so many books around with me these days, and it is very liberating. But I also love my bookshelves. One day, I hope to have space for my books, but I accept that this may be a fools dream, and I may have to resign myself to an iPad-based future. In the meantime, I shall stare at this with envy.
- danah boyd | apophenia » MySpace and Facebook: How Racist Language Frames Social Media (and Why You Should Care)
I've been following boyd's research for a few years now, and have been particularly interested in her data regarding class/race/gender divides in social media use, and I really hope the rallying cry that she's putting out here has some effect, because I would really like to see people stop arguing over the scope the problem, and start talking about what can be done about it. "On the internet, no-one knows you're a dog" is both a triumph *and* a tragedy, and we need to start addressing that.
Bookmarks for April 13, 2010
- YouTube – Alice for the iPad
Let's see the Kindle do this. Kids are going to love reading this….