August 2008
“You see this printed dollar bill? It’s far more real than topsoil or...”
– Scarily, for a lot of people, that’s probably true, even though it’s money that’s the consensual hallucination and oxygen is real (albeit invisible). Bruce Sterling, in a great talk to librarians that, as Nat Torkington said, reads as if it’s from far more recently than 1992.
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The Bigger Picture
About a year ago, I toyed with the idea of starting a blog collecting together the best of the Day in Pictures photos that many sites run. (Here’s a small list with entries from both when I was compiling the list of possible sites to check.) Although part of what put me off was that I knew I wouldn’t keep it up to date, there was another problem- the low quality of the images and the...
App Engine vs EC2
Google App Engine is for developers. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is for ops people.
The thing is, these days, we’re all ops people.
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The Case For A Pause Button | 43 Folders →
Maybe this is the geek in me, but what you really want are filters. “If this Flickr photo is tagged ‘lunch’, or this tweet contains ‘blip.fm’ or tinyurl.com, then just don’t show it.”
Actually, something that suppressed tinyurls from twitter, but then showed them on a linklist with the URL expanded and the source and commentary would be nice. You could...
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A note on names
You may have noticed that the domain of this site has moved twice. Originally, it was at blech.tumblr.com, then tumblr.husk.org. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, as I was looking at Tom’s site, where he integrated a Tumblr-based log (and then made it a part of his homebrew, and rather nice, CMS) that the name stuck out. Unlike “words”, “links” and “photos”,...
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Domo nom nom - iPhone. Nom nom nom.. →
Genius template work there.
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Some thoughts on mobile reading
A couple of things to do with mobile devices and book reading came up in discussion yesterday that have cropped back up this morning, so instead of just posting a collection of links I’ll try and tie them together a bit more explicitly here.
A discussion on gadgets started with mention of an ebook reader (I suspect an Iliad), and turned to Amazon’s Kindle. Of course, this is still...
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Tumblr API gripes
As I mentioned a day or two ago, Tumblr support tags (both via the API and the theme engine), and there’s also a front-end method for tag filtering. This made me wondering about incoming feeds; I have a badly-publicised second Tumblr site which pulls in images from the craneporn Flickr pool and anything tagged appropriately on delicious, and I thought it could benefit from automatically...
New feature: Tag filtering | Tumblr Staff →
A bit navelgazey, this, but who knew you could actually do anything with tags? Now to find out if a) tag import works and b) if not if I can set them via the API.
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Laptops- the new desktops
Ars Technica posted a commentary piece over the weekend about how laptops will replace desktops, which provoked a certain amount of bafflement. That’s not because the argument’s bogus (it’s not), but instead because it’s pointing out the obvious, and the trend is well beyond the point where it’s worth commenting on. 2lmc are, admittedly, kind of leading edge in stuff...
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WatchThe BBC have a big site for Britain from Above, and an hour and a half of footage to add each week (an hour long main programme on BBC One, plus a half hour on BBC Two which is going to be regional; this week was London). While the iPlayer doesn’t let you embed it, there are bite-sized chunks there that do offer embedding, so here’s a segment on moving… stuff around the country,...
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Cloudy, hints of tags
Now that Moo have launched business cards, it seems the hot thing to do is to use Wordle to create a tag cloud for use on them (as seen here, by Edd Dumbill, perhaps the first person I know of to do so).
Now, I don’t have a deeply aggregated site, so my cards just use my delicious tags. However, Tom does, and his cards show one problem with the simplest approach to tags, namely, quantity...
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Housekeeping
I’ve changed the domain of this… well, whatever it is to notes.husk.org. Unfortunately for now tumblr.husk.org is hosed, but when it comes back it should point here.
Er. Right. Sorry about that and normal service should be resumed soon. I’m sure you can live without the random images for a few hours anyway.
WatchCrumbs. I’ve been a cheerleader for Finisterre, the love-letter documentary to London, since it came out, so I was pretty surprised to find out that you can now watch the whole thing on Vimeo, in full, for free. It’s definitely worth the hour it’ll take to watch it. Thanks to buzzandersen:
Saint Etienne’s “Finisterre” on Vimeo
Paper Trail
When describing the WSJ journalist who seemingly generated a story from just a Yahoo message board, in comparison to a putative fluff writer who may have done the same thing in the past, but with people buttonholed on the street, I used the phrase “paper trail” to describe the fact she’d left evidence on a server. Of course, there’s no paper involved anywhere, just as...
