Links (11,732 links)

I’m being cyberstalked by a paranoid existentialist chalkboard.

Ouch. "My first piece of advice is to avoid using @font-face unless it’s critical to the page. The primary reason for this advice is that font files block rendering of the entire page in IE until they’re done downloading. Stylesheets also have this problem. But stylesheets provide styling for all aspects of the entire page, whereas font files only add one thing - a custom font."

Bottom line: the font sucks. This should not be a surprise. Most free fonts do. Don’t get me wrong. There are a few great free fonts out there. But 98% of free fonts suck badly, and maybe about 20% of typically-priced retail fonts suck badly, so set your expectations appropriately.

Second-hand furniture shops in and around Hackney.

A workshop and performance. It involves people from all walks of life making electronic sounds with one another, out in the world and in the open air.

If One & Other is an image of British democratic life in our time, it is a pessimistic one. It is a portrait of a society in which people will try anything to get their voices heard, even stand on a plinth, but where no one can hear what they're saying.

"Last month, stretches of the river Lee were included on the list of 117 "bodies of water" across England and Wales that, according a new European rating system, are now classified as "bad". In total, just five of the 6,114 rivers surveyed received the "pristine" classification; three-quarters failed to attain the "good" grading."

"A unit testing framework/tool for cascading stylesheets that allows you to write tests for you webpages to pass." Early days.

Far from delivering the look BoingBoing was going for, @font-face fell flat on its face; when the changes went live Tuesday, not only were the fonts Boing Boing wanted to use not legally available for the web, the font it settled on — specifically BPreplay — ended up looking terrible for most users.

Django, 5 weeks, 30k pages of content transitioned. Impressive.

Just like modular synthesizers, people connect with each other in order to achieve diverse objectives. In Voltage, robots, half-human and half-synthesizer, powered by a huge amount of energy, connect to each other in an electric and chaotic trance.

Today's big news is that Amazon are going to start selling Kindle ebook readers world-wide. Let me explain why I think this is very bad news for writers.

"[Imaginary Landscape] performed a comparison of an 11-field Contact Us form with a 4-field Contact Us form. They found contact form conversions increased 120% when the number of fields was reduced from 11 to 4 (a 64% decrease)." Not surprising but metrics are useful.

What if there was some shift in emphasis from designing for the building, to designing for the community, or the wider urban space? If everyone could agree just to turn the lighting down a bit, or even a lot, night-time city centres could become much less competitive, noisy places in terms of ambient light.

Wheel of Stars

“A musical clock made of stars. To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things. I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock – it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate.”

"All 10 mobile WebKits I’ve identified so far are subtly or wildly different." Bugger.

A TubeSat is designed to function as a Basic Satellite Bus or as a simple stand-alone satellite. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite's structural components, safety hardware, solar panels, batteries, power management hardware and software, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer, and the required programming tools. With these components alone, the builder can construct a satellite that puts out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver.

"How big an impact does performance optimization have on the business metrics of a typical media or e-commerce site?" Potentially quite a lot, which is why we keep banging on about it.

This is a quick augmented reality demo showing live Pachube data displayed in realtime ‘on top’ of Arduino sensor boxes. This could provide an easy way to inspect rooms (or streets) full of environment and sensor data via a camera (e.g. iPhone) or even AR goggles!

Provides a method for a web interface to use SVG images as icons, while being loaded from a single file. This reduces the amount of HTTP requests, offering the same kind of benefit available with CSS sprites.

As well as realtime spriting, Aptimize are using data: URIs in their Website Accelerator tool and doing so for >IE7 using an MHTML workaround. Clever.

"Deron Beal and the US Network made no comment." Says it all, really.

More on OOCSS. "The cascade is a poker game, but we've been playing our cards all wrong. Here Nicole suggests we stop trying to play to win to prevent code bloat, and simplify the cascade, using the order of the rulesets to allow overrides."

The GitHub Pages feature allows you to publish content to the web by simply pushing content to one of your GitHub hosted repositories.

Helps you easily make interactive arts and craft. You can quickly make a bracelet that changes color when shaken, a pet collar that blinks in the dark, or a dress that twinkles when you get a phone call. Weave it into tapestry, or make a custom bike light.

Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas (All brands are impersonated. Badly.) that hopefully push the advertising into being more useful or interesting.

Using Changes app with svn, git etc.

Set TextMate as default git editor

Lots of caveats but useful under certain circumstances.

Covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing - and will change - human beings in fundamental ways.

An Open Source (GPL 3) video player. Highly skinnable and extendable.

Good memory jogger.

Ugly but useful.

Hurl makes HTTP requests. Enter a URL, set some headers, view the response, then share it with others. Perfect for demoing and debugging APIs.

Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities."

"In 1996 Brian Eno released the title "Generative Music 1" with SSEYO Koan Software. In so doing he popularised the term "generative music", describing music that is ever-different & changing, created by a system."

A talk delivered in San Francisco, June 8, 1996

"The British Library launches the ICA Talks from the 1980s online [...] The recordings feature a kaleidoscopic range of leading cultural figures debating the social and artistic currents of the 1980s". Salman Rushdie, Steve Reich, Richard Dawkins, Alan Moore...