Links from 2014 (497 links)

A friendly wrapper for launchctl

Despite its irreverent name and precarious form, the lobotomized owl selector is no mere thought experiment for me. It is the result of ongoing experimentation into automating the layout of flow content. The owl selector is an “axiomatic” selector with a voracious purview.

Reinventing music theory for the modern electronic musician

Music theory learning resource (by Ukkonen, shh).

Via monospaced.

If you’ve got anything in /usr/local Your Yosemite upgrade may take many hours.

We add some metadata to exported SVG files, to make it easier to re-import them in Sketch. However, if you are sure you won't import them, you can disable the saving of metadata by running this into your Terminal.app: `defaults write com.bohemiancoding.sketch3 exportCompactSVG -bool yes`

More than 60 percent of the world’s population remains offline. Without removing crucial deterrents to Internet adoption, little will change—and more than 4 billion people may be left behind.

An SVG webfont full of main payment system icons

English Exporting assets from your designs is a common task. You start by creating and preparing your graphics, then you choose the export format, set its…

Nnng.

So we need supermarkets. The problem is, we really don’t need the kind of supermarkets we’ve got. By giving too small a set of companies a free run at too much of the retail food economy, we have put at risk our future food security. We used to be well over 70% self-sufficient in food in the UK. Now it’s below 60%, and when you look at the proportion of food we consume that’s produced here, it’s 50%.

Via ttscoff.

A bookmarklet to create a front-end performance heatmap of resources loaded in the browser using the Resource Timing API.

Not that flexible, but better than fixed partials.

Also sneaky.

Via jamesholloway.

Enhanced "wrap lines" command for Sublime Text 2 or 3.

Via torrez.

If you're a front end web developer, alert boxes and confirmation dialogs are an important tool. This is a fast, good-looking way to ditch `alert()` without much effort.

Via ttscoff.

List of response image services from @grigs

Parallax scrolling

Via ttscoff.

Performance testing tool for Responsive web designs.

Trying to imagine a tech conference that would embody an alternative viewpoint — a more “socialist / social democratic” alternative — actually seems like a good way in. I don’t have to imagine a whole new society and economic model, but only try to imagine what kinds of topics might be talked about at a conference along those lines. Some topics I quickly wrote down...

Ach, schedule change, this today: gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-e…

Remembered that London has lots of free lunchtime lectures. Hurrah. Douglas Coupland yesterday, this today: gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-e…

You don’t need to know all of the use cases, but you do need to know the difference between the two most common use cases in order to know which part of the picture specification will solve your problems. The two common use cases are [...] Resolution switching [and] Art direction.

Alcatel is an embodiment of the new Western neural condition, and at the same time is its mirror. It is transnational, decentralised and emotionally neutral. It feeds on information, has a perpetual urge to upgrade and is always dissatisfied with the present. It exists purely to go forward. It demands and fosters ever more speed; ever more information saturation; and, especially, ever more networks.

Via tomtaylor.

An excellent dissection of Scrum...

In other words, in its best-case scenario, Scrum's a dog-and-pony show. But that best-case scenario is rare. In the much more common case, Scrum covers up the inability to recruit (or even recognize) engineering talent, which is currently one of the most valuable things in the world, with a process for managing engineers as if they were cogs in a machine, all of equal value.

And one of the most interesting things about Scrum is that it tries to enhance the accountability of a field of work where both failure and success are obvious to the naked eye - yet I've never encountered any similarly elaborate system of rituals whose major purpose is to enhance the accountability of fields which have actual accountability problems.