December 30, 2003
Mini iPods - need I say more?
December 23, 2003
Address book poker - two players simultaeneously show contacts on their mobile, an adjudicator decides who has the most important/famous contact. The loser must delete the contact shown. God, I hope I don't remember this game at any point over Christmas.
December 22, 2003
Scotsman.com - The Internet Column - I don't really read the Scotsman now that none of my friends work there, so it was something of a surprise to find that a) they have an internet column and b) on the basis of this one it's really rather good.
A Look Back at 2003, and What's on the Horizon for the Online News Universe - an overview of online journalism, journalistic weblogging and citizen journalism, with predictions for 2004.
December 21, 2003
£1.8m lottery grant to restore Cottier Theatre's Art Deco interior
Gary Jules tops Christmas charts - yay!
petepage - the funniest moment in Simpsons history, the dance of Handsome Pete, has its own little webpage.
December 20, 2003
Walmart jump on the music downloads bandwagon. Undercutting the ITMS by 10¢, natch.
At Blogstakes, you can winCD Cases and fancy goods from The Onion. The best bit being that if you follow one of those links and enter the prize draw, I automatically get entered too, just by linking.
XFN - XHTML Friends Network - a set of keywords describing human relationships that can be added to the rel attribute. Explained well at xlab.
December 19, 2003
9/11 Attack Was Preventable - The chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented
Graph of the day (the first, and possibly last, in an occasional series): Life expectancy in the UK - Boys and girls born in 2002 could expect to live to 76 and 81 years of age respectively. This contrasts with the turn of the last century where boys born in 1901 could expect to live to 45, while girls could expect to live to 49.
Saatchi sets up junior art award - say what you like about his impact on art in the UK, but this is a good scheme.
Rangers bid to sell alcohol at Ibrox - yeah, brilliant idea that. Especially announcing it on the day a Rangers gets fifteen years for drunkenly killing a random Celtic supporter.
Martian landscape in an urban setting - Calum Stirling to build three-storey banner with images of Mars from the Pathfinder mission in Gorbals.
The latest version of NetNewsWire includes a very nifty new widescreen view.
mySociety.org launches new projects - the folk behind the superb FaxYourMP are taking things a step further with FaxYourReprasentative, and treading new ground with GiveItAway, a site that will let users connect with local charities to offer donations of unwanted goods. Excellent.
December 18, 2003
As well as announcing the winners of their blogging comp, the Guardian have gathered together all their blog coverage on one page. Could do with an RSS feed, no? And, once again, I've never heard of any of the prize-winning blogs, bar deserving winners LinkMachineGo and Pepys' Diary.
December 17, 2003
Images in liquid columns - interesting.
Noel Jackson is a talented web designer (and decent bloke) who re-worked one of Gawker Media's sites, Fleshbot, in valid XHTML and CSS as an excercise to show the benefits of designing with standards compliant code. Gawker stole his redesign, grudgingly gave him credit, and then proceeded to apply his stylesheets to their other sites, without credit, without asking Noel, and without paying him a penny. Which is wrong. Here's hoping they recant, and at least give Noel the credit he is due. Update: All is not as it first appeared. Blog in haste, repent at leisure, as they say.
BitTorrent + RSS = Decentralised Tivo? - Matt Jones picks up on an idea from Scott Raymond, and suggests that the BBC make content available via BitTorrent, distributing the .torrent files via RSS. A fine idea. I already watch US TV shows like this, but hunting .torrent files is a fairly time-consuming process (and illegal, obviously). Adding RSS to the mix, and Matt's imagined app to manage subscriptions and downloading, would mean I could finally chuck out my broken telly.
December 15, 2003
Diary of a Paedophile - er, as in really the diary of a paedophile, it would appear. One who publishes a PGP key for the attention any incredibly geeky underage girls happen upon his site.
Weapons of mass destruction found. No, no, not what you're thinking - just some sodium cyanide bombs, suitcases packed with explosives found in Noonday, Texas.
del.icio.us, php, mt, and caching - Web-graphics wiegh in with yet another technique for folding del.icio.us links into your site.
December 14, 2003
Useful resources and books for anyone who wants to learn PHP and mySQL
Plain English Campaign: Free guides: How to write in plain English
Final version of weblog definition - the first sentence is enough, really: A weblog, or *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first.
Only little Prince would have the balls to turn 'Red House' into 'Purple House' for a Hendrix tribute album. [via Anil Dash's Daily Links
Danceteria Flyers - fabulousness as a way of life, and death!
December 13, 2003
Publishing del.icio.us Links With Perl
My Audioscrobbler page - I only just found out that they now have an iTunes plugin. I've added it to my login items, so it should log everything I liten to on the computer. I wonder what music it will suggest - the (broken) stats page suggests a heavy indie/college rock bias.
December 12, 2003
Night of the Image Map - I don't know if it's a side-effect of the hiatus, but ALA seems to be on a serious roll at the moment.
December 11, 2003
Daring Fireball: Old Habits - the shortcuts for New Folder and New Finder Window were doing my head in too.
I hope Ask MetaFilter manages to stay on track - at the moment there are subtle signs that it's getting closer and closer to being a techy, American-slanted Notes & Queries. (Non-Grauniad readers note: the online version is a pale imitation of the print original)
MP3 downloads of songs played by John Peel [via Peter Lindberg]
Guide to Philosophy on the Internet [via MeFi]
Phone Post - a LiveJournal user gets her telephone taxed midway through making an audio post to her weblog. The .ogg file sounds like Merzbow noise to me, though, so I don't know if it'll be any use in catching the muggers.
December 10, 2003
The Harsh Divide - fine animated shorts illustrating the lives, and deaths, of South Africans with HIV/AIDS. Associated charity Treatment Action Campaign look deserving of a few quid, too.
ungreek and Text Generator both provide alternative texts to the usual greeking beginning Lorem ipsum. [via Etc.]
Yoz Grahame has knocked together a Comment-blogging bookmarklet. Handy if you want to adopt the Kottke-style aggregated web presence approach to weblogging, or if you have a terrible commenting habit and an equally terrible memory. It needs a little tweak so it only grabs the text of a comment instead of all the form fields, but otherwise works very well. You might want to add another field to the pop-up too: I'm using the Extended Entry field to generate links to the comments in context.
Drunk Men Work Here are providing a new service. Just sign up for a weblog, provide the software with a few clues to you interests, and it will blog on your behalf for evermore! Here's mine.
December 09, 2003
I really must stop reading weblogs based in New York City. Posts like this one, on rival pickle vendors, are too much to bear - my memory is awful, but I can easily call to mind every single meal I ate in New York when I visited three years ago. Sod all that culture business, I want to go back there and just eat for a week.
December 08, 2003
Turner prize goes to Perry - a joke, given that his work rests on one thin gag - the clash between traditional form and not-particularly-shocking content - and the supposedly satirical nature of that content is merely trite observation. And don't get me started on Perry's unspeakably twee alter-ego, Claire. Okay, so his faux-documentary photographic work is kind of almost interesting, but this looks like a bid to curry public favour by awarding the prize to the 'easiest' artist to me.
Further proof that the BBC's website is just plain bloody brilliant: BBC Training & Development has free online training course modules in various aspects of broadcast journalism, including the must-have, wonderfully concise BBC News Style Guide. See also: the fabulous 1928 edition of the Style-book of the Manchester Guardian (.pdf).
Machinista - Man and Machine: new interactions in art - the Artists Against Machinic Standards section looks most interesting - it involves breaking, destroying, hacking, unexpected (non-utilitarian?) usage of customary programs as an art experiment. I've been trying to make a sort of no-human-input aleatory music generating device with a certain degree of environmental input type-thingy from bits of a broken keyboard and some tiny speakers (as one does), so I should probably get it working and submit a proposal. See also the Russian sister festival.
Leslie Harpold has made a rather charming online advent calendar
I couldn't've cared less about the whole Elin Oxenhielm brouhaha in the beginning, but Peter Lindberg has turned it into a maths mystery. Start with his latest post on the matter, and work your way back.
December 07, 2003
Bochs 2.02 - interesting.
Howard 'sorry' for poll tax - It's a bit bloody late now. Who shepherded the poll tax through parliament? Who continued to defend the poll tax after the riots, even after Thatcher was ousted? You did. Cunt.
I'm not sure if I've linked to it before, but the National Statistics Online headlines feed is a gem. A depressing gem, most of the time, but a gem nonetheless.
Middle class 'dominates' universities - well, duh.
GAP - Global Attention Profiles a world map that shows what countries Associated Press Newswire is paying the most attention to today. Countries in deep red are experiencing the most attention, yielding more than 3.2% of the stories detected by GAP scrapers. As the red fades and blues deepen, countries are experiencing less and less media attention.
AppleInsider: Apple tweaking "Home on iPod" feature for release - Wondrously handy feature, but I bet it won't work for us pre-dock 'Pod owners.
Public debate urged on voting at 16 - seems like a good idea, although you do wonder about turnout.
Blocking Linking URLs - linked here as I can never remember how to do it.
MovableType to Blosxom conversion - I've thought about going Blosxom for ages. The tips here make it a (relatively) painless process, but even with a heavily tweaked Blosxom install it isn't as simple for other people to use. That said, at some point these Reading pages are liable to switch to being powered by a combination of del.icio.us, Bloxsom and its sister application Blagg.
Wikipedia: Shock site - a good entry on Goatse.cx, Tubgirl.com et al. The stylesheet I use to hide advertising online also highlights links to either, so I don't have to look at the bloody things ever again.
English Idioms - does what it says on the tin (which is an idiom much over-used here, but missing from this archive)
Abstract Dynamics: Silence Still Equals Death
December 06, 2003
Currently enjoying: the del.icio.us Recent feed.
Daring Fireball: PHP Syntax Checking in BBEdit
The Pinocchio Theory: Gilbert Simondon - fascinating stuff. Via Purse Lip Square Jaw, which has more context, and related links.
The Slow Death of American Slavery - interesting MetaFilter post on slavery in the US. People were still being prosecuted for keeping slaves until the 1940s, and there's an unsubstantiated claim of slavery in the 1960s.
LGF: Vote Against Kottke - Weblogging awards are silly, but I'll be voting for Jason Kottke now. For those who haven't seen either site: LGF is an easy place to loathe - the community is frequently racist, blindly anti-Islam, violently pro-American, unquestioningly pro-Israel to the point that they seem to consider all critical voices anti-Semitic. Kottke, meanwhile, is a harmless, if slightly poncey, web designer.
Pixies/Throwing Muses/Belly/Breeders Family Tree
December 04, 2003
Blog Tools - a good overview from PC Magazine, although rating LiveJournal over Blogger seems downright bizarre to me.
David Cronenburg appearing in Alias (1.8MB MP3) - now that's what I call geek crossover. Although, judging by this clip, he's no great shakes in the acting stakes.
What Should Be On The Cover of The Face? - well, this one, obviously.
Cantor Sets - To construct the Cantor set, take a line segment of finite length, say from 0 to 1, and take out the middle third. You are left with two segments of equal length (1/3), and a space in between. Now cut each of the two remaining segments into thirds, so you are left with 4 segments each of length 1/9. Do this forever, and the points you have left make up the Cantor set.
Mr Kipling advert accused of blasphemy - there are still people who phone in to complain about blasphemous cakevertising?
December 03, 2003
The Brusse - a resource for Scottish people who live in Brussels (I think). Republishing something off my old TypePad Beta weblog, in any case.
Moby to appear at LA Apple Store on Thursday - part of the Made on a Mac (by My Engineer After I Handed Him Some DATs of Archived Blues Recordings and Some Loops) series. I wonder how many potential switchers the Moby association drives away...
Social Design Notes: Bombing Iraq - the rise of graffiti in post-invasion Iraq.
December 02, 2003
GWB's daughter hangs out with... Pansy Division. The mind boggles. And then some.
Mac OS X Hints - including Pick Multiple Genres for iTunes Songs. God, I wish I'd known about that sooner. Also a tip on disabling autocomplete in Safari - I wonder if I can work out how to apply that to iTunes too. When you're correcting ID3 tags created by illiterates who insist on lower case everything, the autocomplete makes me very, very angry.
Use Command-N to create new folders
More Accurate (but, Admittedly, Less Sensational) Alternative Stencil Slogans for the 'Neistat Brothers' - they really did make tits out of themselves, didn't they?
December 01, 2003
Harper's Magazine gets Ftrained. It's pig ugly, but - good Lord! - the multiplicity of semantic-tastic navigational modes rocks quite hard.
Nice Titles revised - an improved version of the script to simulate Safari's tasteful link-drag look for tooltips.
Selectutorial: CSS selectors - another fine tutorial from Max Design.
Bluechalking - the new Warchalking? - advertising the proximity of Bluetooth-enabled devices. My phone is called "Jack Shit," and my main computer is called "The White One" - Bluetooth is always on, should you happen to be outside my front door and want to send me a message. Although I'd prefer you to make use of my clever Entrance-request Audio Alert System (aka 'The doorbell').