- musicForProgramming();
Ambient music mixes compose to provide background noise to work to – enhacing productivity without distracting from the work. I shall to give a few of these a whirl.
- EssayTyper
Plagarism a-go-go!
Tag: essay
Bookmarks for September 30, 2010
- Murray 4 Mayor
Because Toronto deserves something nice. There are a number of Torontonians around these parts. I urge you all to vote Murray, in the strongest, tenderest possible terms.
- Newly discovered planet may be first truly habitable exoplanet – UC Santa Cruz
And yet we're still not funding space travel properly. What's up with that?
- 50 years of cyborgs: I have not the words. | Quinn Said
This ones doing the rounds, and with excellent reason. A bit of writing on posthumanity that encompasses all the usual stuff and cyborgs and tool using and modern infrastructure, and goes to some fascinating and non-generally considered places beyond that. For example: "a cyborg revolution was happening the same year Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the term. A hostile environment was being tamed by a newly and artificially capable people. It escaped notice and critique though, because the modified weren’t men, and then environment wasn’t space. The modified were women, and the environment was men. The women of the 60s were the first to modify and control their uteruses."
- The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism, By Jonathan Lethem (Harper's Magazine)
An absolutely superb essay on influence, creativity, and copyright. The absolute best writing I have read on this subject, anywhere. And with a truly superb sting in the tail…
- Subtraction.com: The Only Thing a Router Is Good For
This is one of those "so simple it's obvious" things, that clearly, no-one has ever thought of. I have one (semi-)regular physical interaction with my internet router, and I bet it's the same one you do. I turn it off and on again. That's the only thing I ever do with it. And yet, the switch to do that is hidden at the back, and there is absolutely no reason why this should be so. No reason at all.
Bookmarks for March 4, 2009
- The SSD Project | EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project
Your one stop primer on controlling your relationship with Big Brother.
- 55 Free and beautiful WordPress themes | OpenSourceHunter
There are a few truly beautiful grunge-look themes in here, and I've been thinking about switching to a grunge look for at least one, maybe two of my blogs, just to get away from the very formal look, and mark them out as obviously personal. I'll try a few out, and see what I think.
- Relevant History: Thoughts on design + futures
"we need to learn to talk about the future through things"
- Corpus Chronophage
This is a dozen kinds of cool. Made slightly less so by a particularly rubbish website, but take the time to watch the video, because it's sodding ace.
- twistori
Pretty, interesting, and faintly voyeuristic.
- Back to My Mac through iChat » All Forces
I can see this being a useful thing to be able to do.
- Open the Future: The End of Long-Term Thinking
Jamais Cascio on the difference a change in language may make when dicussing the many vast problems that are heading our way over the next generation or two.
- city benches by adriano design
Someone has finally taken a look at the design of the park bench, realised that it's signiificantly sub-optimal for modern uses, and come up with an alternative design. Ace!
Bookmarks for March 10, 2008
- Google Contacts API
A safer means of allowing websites to access your contacts/addressbook data without having to give them your gmail password. Not that I know anyone who’d be stupid enough to do that, right?
- 3753 Cruithne – Wikipedia
Wikipedia article on “Earth’s second moon”. I was dimly aware that earth had more than one satellite, but this is so much cooler than I had first thought when I heard about it…
- @ETech: Matt Webb’s Tour of a Fictional Solar System
I love his perspective on the world, and really, really must get to a talk by him at some point.
- File this one under holy crap! It starts with (kottke.org)
OK, you can’t draw an exact cause-and-effect line, but that line to a history of “Hallelujah” that I posted the other week did the rounds (I think I got it off Waxy), and suddenly, Jeff Buckley’s version of the song is the top selling track on iTunes.
- ‘I fell in love with a female assassin’
An astonishing account of a photojournalist that did, well, exactly what he says, while covering a story in Colombia. Utterly compelling and thought provoking.
- Photon – High performance Mac OS photo browser, sorter and viewer
I love Lightroom for working on images and library mangement, but it doesn’t half take ages to impport stuff. If I can use this for a first-pass step, it might be quicker…
- Curvy Cross Processing in Photoshop CS3 | Layers Magazine
I suspect this will also work in Lightroom, which is handy, because the current cross-processing filter I have in LR is for shit, so instead, I shall build my own.
Bookmarks for March 7, 2008
- Hallelujah
A short cultural history of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. If, like most people, you think it’s always been a relentlessly sad song, you should probably read this.
Bookmarks for February 6, 2008
- Movement (Schulze & Webb)
S&W talk about movement as a metaphor for the web, and in the process, introduce a means of syndicating form-type actions via a modified RSS protocol they’re calling Snap. Potentially a huge change in the way people will interact with websites, here.
- What makes a great portrait?
A number of big name photographers answer the question. I’ve only skimmed this right now, because I’m barely awake, but it looks interesing enough to come back to when I can get more then 2 neurons to fire at once.