October 2010
6 tags
4 tags
6 tags
The Beauty Of Power Lines
The broadcast of BBC Four’s Secret History of the National Grid has, as you may have noticed, regenerated my interest in electricity pylons (partly aided by Joe Moran).
In Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows Of Work, there’s an entire chapter on transmission infrastructure. In it, he mentions two notable books. One is apparently a Korean guide to pylons around the world,...
5 tags
8 tags
6 tags
“We just launched a project called lanyrd, which is a play on lanyard. We partly...”
– Simon Willison answering a question on Quora: Why do so many Internet sites end with the letter ‘r’ (but not ‘er’)?
5 tags
“I haven’t been able to pick up a copy of the Independent’s new mini-paper, i. I...”
– Swiss Cheese and Bullets on i. The whole thing is worth a read.
9 tags
5 tags
8 tags
“There are a lot of Mac users who’ve never known the joy of using an Adobe...”
– John Gruber: Apple Is No Longer Bundling Flash Player With Mac OS X. Nice dry wit there.
4 tags
3 tags
“[Bourne] hasn’t been to Amsterdam yet, because government-trained-killing...”
– Rocío in Ye Olde Amsterdam. I previously wittered about Amsterdam’s cyclists.
7 tags
“More people need to do stupid shit. I mean that from the bottom of my heart....”
– Zack Holmen, author of Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0. Or, as I’d put it: In Praise Of Hobby Programming.
9 tags
iPhoto '11 and Letterpress Printing
styledeficit:
iPhoto 11 prints letterpress cards
Which is kind of weird.
What i think they mean is that they have a bunch of pre-letterpresed cards, printed with a design which you can slot your photo into. Your photo is then digitally printed over the top of the letterpressed card. Not sure how they could scale it otherwise…
Anyone? Bueller?
If you watch the video of the keynote, about...
6 tags
“I don’t yet have the balls to walk into an Apple store with my kitchen scale.”
– Marco Arment in a footnote about glass vs plastic screens on the 15” MacBook Pros, in his commentary on the new MacBook Air.
7 tags
8 tags
10 tags
7 tags
6 tags
“I’m still bummed that I failed to talk you in to making...”
– jwz in a comment on his post about JavaScript and numbers, - Every day I learn something new… and stupid.
8 tags
6 tags
“There’s no convention for whether “previous” means “items from the past” or...”
– Daily Meh: How about earlier/later, past/future?
He’s right, and websites are all over the place. It’s worth reading the whole post, for his (correctly) noting Tumblr’s internally inconsistent template language.
As a reply to this post (which seems to be invisible) noted, the...
6 tags
7 tags
“Although porcelain is very robust, the enthusiastic interaction of visitors has...”
– A spokesman for Tate Modern, which has stopped visitors trampling on Sunflower Seeds, as quoted in The Guardian.
5 tags
8 tags
8 tags
WatchChurch and 30th St. San Francisco MUNI Construction (by Ken Murphy)
Impressive stuff. It helps to pique my interest that this is not far down the road from my new flat. I kind of regret not going down to have a look (although the view wouldn’t have been as good as this and it would just have been noisy, probably).
6 tags
3 tags
5 tags
6 tags
7 tags
“I love this work. It is a world in a hundred million objects. It is also a...”
– Adrian Searle waxes rhapsodic about Tate Modern’s sunflower seeds: the world in the palm of your hand in his five-star review for the Guardian. The whole thing is worth a read.
7 tags
“If I was in the audience I would definitely want to take a seed. But for the...”
– Ai Weiwei, talking about his installation Sunflower Seeds in The Guardian.
8 tags
6 tags
5 tags
6 tags
“Ai, 53, said the work was designed to reflect the concepts of individualism,...”
– A Reuters article on “Sunflower Seeds”, this year’s Unilever Series artwork in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, by Ai Weiwei.
6 tags
“Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under...”
– Charlie Stross in Accelerando, describing a post-conservative. Not bad, as prediction extrapolation goes.
7 tags
Incompetence, Malice and ereading
I’ve been meaning to write about URLs, text and non-web online publishing for a while, but now I don’t have to, because Craig Mod has, and he did it better than I could have done. (He’s also going to get more attention, which is great, because it’s more likely things will change.)
Some choice quotes (although you should read the whole thing):
Am I reading text? If the...
6 tags
On Short Domains
There’s been a fair bit of commentary today after Ben Metcalfe’s post about the removal of vb.ly by its domain registrar.
As others have noted, the potential unreliability of Libya as a host for such domains was noticed a year or so ago. This is probably why bit.ly, probably the leading URL shortening service, now also uses j.mp and bitly.com (and supports the use of IDs from any of...
7 tags
