Links from 2010 (682 links)

Since HTML5 is getting more attention by way of marking up our new pages, and the only way to get IE to acknowledge the new elements, such as <article>, is to use the HTML5 shiv, I've quickly put together a mini script that enables all the new elements.

"There's a little-watched video on Maroon Five's YouTube channel which documents the torturous, tedious process of crafting an instantly forgettable mainstream radio hit. It's fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track (called Makes Me Wonder), and how it doesn't have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again. At one point, singer Adam Levine says: "I'm sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits." But that's exactly he proceeds to do."

In mid-December 2009 I set out to ask a few of my favorite record labels (including Ad Noiseam, Herb, Hidden Shoal, Highpoint Lowlife and n5MD) some general questions about their operation and uncovered responses that exceeded expectations. Find out some of the inner-workings of these imprints, how they view demo's, release material and relate to their roster of musical and visual talent.

Last Sunday, while checking into the Hill Street Cafe in Burbank using the foursquare iPhone app, I idly wondered, “Can I become the mayor of the North Pole?” So I tried checking into a nearby 7-Eleven. It worked. I tried the Griffith Observatory about 5 miles away. It worked. I tried Disneyland, which is about an hour away. It didn’t work, but I now had an afternoon hacking project.

All meetings should be like this. More at the NBGIiPhone channel.

It’s time for a CSS3 @font-face browser sup­port table. One that doc­u­ments spe­cific­ally how browsers act when either the whole font fam­ily is spe­cified (reg­u­lar, italic, bold, bold-italic & small-caps) or only the reg­u­lar ver­sion of the font is spe­cified.

Via paul.irish.

Before there were blogs we had websites. Beautiful, random websites that felt more like a zine — one page looking nothing like the one before or after it.

An unreliable water driven sequencing device

"The Python Module of the Week series, or PyMOTW, is a tour of the Python standard library through short examples." Nice.

A minimap plugin for TextMate.

Via askush.

Essential Tools for developing Javascript in TextMate

More than 30 of the most successful FontFont families are now available as Web FontFonts®, including FF DIN®, FF Meta®, FF Dax®, and FF Kievit®.

Provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement.

Akira Kiteshi – Ming The Merciless (Hexstatic video edit)

Occasionally I get asked how I have time to write a blog, a book and whatever ads need doing on a particular day. The short answer is that I just get up and, at some point, do them all.

In the second extract from his book Eating Animals, the novelist reveals how intensive rearing of sea animals in confinement is essentially underwater factory farming.

Code and configuration used in [Jacob Kaplan-Moss'] Django Deployment Workshop.

The Movement Method Cards are a collection of strategies gathered to inspire, guide, and elevate the creative process. Use the cards to spark ideas, facilitate conversations, categorize strategies, or for designing your own design processes.

Cat -> Pigeons.

A unique social networking website dedicated to travel overland and water by any means possible.

Because we are so fixated on what the next thing might be, we hurry to get the current thing out of the way, even if that means doing the minimum required rather than playing with style. In this sense, games’ standard strategies of motivation are strangely demotivating.

Swywths are those voices inside your head telling you want you want to hear. Send in your secret thoughts and we'll say them for you. They might even feature in an Radio 4 Afternoon Play.

I’m interested in looking at the loudness for the recordings of a number of artists to see how wide-spread this loudness war really is. To do this I used the Echo Nest remix API and a bit of Python to collect and plot loudness for a set of recordings. I did two experiments. First I looked at the loudness for music by some of my favorite or well known artists. Then I looked at loudness over a large collection of music.

Use this application to look at tempo plots for any song to see which bands have a machine controlling the heartbeat of the band. Type in the name of an artist and/or track and get a click plot of the track. If a machine is setting the beat for the song, the click plot will show only small deviations from the average tempo. A flat line means a machine is setting the beat.

Via paul.irish.

Lots of rather exciting music analysis APIs.

django-devserver provides a simple drop-in runserver replacement. It allows you to run a command, python manage.py rundevserver, and to get some additional information. As of writing, that additional information includes real-time SQL logging (aka mass query spam in your terminal), and a summary of cache calls.

Allows you to upload files using HTML5 Gears, Silverlight, Flash, BrowserPlus or normal forms, providing some unique features such as upload progress, image resizing and chunked uploads.

Arrange a meeting or event. Work out which day is good for everyone and keep track of who is coming

What differentiates this thesaurus from any other is that it is, as the title announces, historical: combining the data of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Thesaurus of Old English, it presents meanings in chronological order, noting when terms first appeared, often when they disappeared, or whether they were one-shots, lovely doomed coinages such as “moonling”.

Exciting!

"The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices." Overstating things somewhat but still a useful reminder.

In paleontology, a Lazarus taxon (plural taxa) is a taxon that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later.

Via paul.irish.

More money isn't one of them.

Cake or death?

These font-stacks are created after considering the font-share percentage on both Mac and Windows platforms and then checked in browser for x-height and other issues (like: readability).

Via tomtaylor.