Links & notes for this month

• • designswarm thoughts » Blog Archive » Rants I don’t have time to write
    "Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender."
    (tags: society interaction design architecture people communication )
  • Briefs: A Cocoa Touch Framework for Live Wireframes
    "Briefs is a framework for packaging concept screens & control schemes that run live on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This allows you to experience the feel of your concept without the expense of development." Ooh.
    (tags: iphone ui interaction design development prototyping )
  • rush
    "rush is a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax. Grep through files, find and kill processes, copy files - everything you do in the shell, now in Ruby." Equal parts "ooh" and "hunh?", I think.
    (tags: shell ruby unix commandline utility )
• • Matasano Security LLC - Chargen - Indie Software Security: A ~12 Step Program
    "...we roped in Nate McFeters, another local, and put together a security talk for indie Mac developers with no budget for security. What does a security talk for Mac developers look like? As it turns out, it’s very much like the talk we think every indie developer, Mac or not, should see, and it’s very much unlike the talk the rest of the security industry is giving." Good stuff: simple, clear, well-thought out, and very hard to argue with.
    (tags: online web development programming security )
• • GameSetWatch - Backup Your Files Before Playing Lose/Lose
    "Lose/Lose is a simple vertical-scrolling shoot'em up with a twist -- each alien appearing on your screen represents a random file on your computer. Thus, each time you kill an alien, the game will delete that sprite's associated file. If the aliens manage to destroy your ship, the Lose/Lose application is deleted." Way to make a point, but, you know, *blimey*.
    (tags: games security loselose data value )
• • russell davies: ruricomp
    "So much city thinking seems mad keen for a return to city states; autonomous islands, connected to each other through finance and fibre but not to land that surrounds them. It's a little bit collapsist; let's wrap the city around us while we still can. But maybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other. Perhaps all this brilliant city thinking could lift its eyes a little and look beyond the city walls - I'd love to see what we'd come up with then."
    (tags: ruricomp ubicomp urbancomputing urbanism cities architecture russelldavies planning )
  • Stacey, Simplified portfolios
    "Stacey is an easier way to create a portfolio site. No database setup or installation files, simply drop the application on a server and it runs. Your content is managed by creating folders and editing text files. No login screens, no ‘cms’." Elegant - perhaps even more so than some of the stripped-down Ruby static-site management tools I've seen.
    (tags: php cms simple )
• • The Escapist : News : Bobby Kotick Wants to Take the Fun Out of Making Games
    '"We have a real culture of thrift," [Kotick] said. "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games." And then, to ensure there was no confusion in his message, he added that he has tried to instill "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the economic downturn into the corporate culture at Activision. "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression," he said.' Bobby Kotick. What a guy. What a CEO. What a leader.
    (tags: bobbykotick asshat business ceo games activision soulsucking )
  • Arduino Tower Bridge on Vimeo
    "Designed by Oliver Rokison a teacher at St Paul's School. This project connects to the Tower Bridge twitter account and mimics the movements of the real tower bridge." Fun.
    (tags: towerbridge arduino hardware electronics internet )
  • Larva Labs - Intelligent Home Screen
    "Larva Labs proposes an intelligent home screen that creates a meaningful hierarchy out of a user’s information. Designed for an Android-based handset, our home screen is intended to appeal to Blackberry owners and people struggling with information overload." An interesting experiment; I like being able to vary the level of personalisation on the fly, but am not sure the screen is nearly dense enough for people with "information overload" - it only handles a couple of items in each category without drilling down. The Blackberry's appeal in part is due to its hyper-dense list of information.
    (tags: android phone interaction design mobile )
• • LRB · Roy Mayall: Diary
    "There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service. For most of the Royal Mail management – who rarely, if ever, come across the public – it is the first. To the delivery officer – to me, and people like me, the postmen who bring the mail to your door – it is more than likely the second." Excellent diary in the LRB from a Royal Mail postman, which at least helps explain a lot of the problems inside the postal system, as opposed to just the ones I experience outside it.
    (tags: postage post royalmail mail uk politics business communications diary lrb )
  • FuckYeahSubways
    "FuckYeahSubways is a tumblelog." And it does exactly what it says on the tin: pictures of subways and metro systems, inside and out, from around the world. Really good.
    (tags: subways underground transport architecture metro tumblelog )
  • The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future - Future metro - io9
    "Ah - The Big Meg, where at any moment on the mile-high Zipstrips you might be flattened by a rogue Boinger, set-upon by a Futsie and thrown down onto the skedways far below, offered an illicit bag of umpty-candy or stookie-glands and find yourself instantly at the mercy of the Judges. If you grew up on 2000AD like me, then your mind is probably now filled with a vivid picture of the biggest, toughest, weirdest future city there's ever been." Jones on future cities, collating and refining thoughts into a lovely piece of structure and rhetoric. Also, the sentence "wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit".
    (tags: cities comics mattjones colleagues design architecture futurism writing )
• • What do we mean when we say non-linear? « Digital Kicks
    "I’m not arrogant enough to believe these terms will catch on but I might start to use them just for shits and giggles. But perhaps the next time you hear someone mention that X title is linear or non-linear, before jumping down their throat ask yourself “What kind of linear are they actually talking about”."
    (tags: games interactivity nonlinear freedom openworld )
• • Joe Moran's blog
    Joe Moran (of Reading the Everday) has a blog. I did not know this. Subscribed!
    (tags: joemoran blog )
• • History Lesson: How Dad Used To Save Files | Cult of Mac
    "Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks." A lovely little video. I remember this well from the Mac Pluses at school, and even at seven or eight, it drove me nuts.
    (tags: history mac video computers disks floppydisks )
  • Yojimbo, and The Case for Anything Buckets – Shawn Blanc
    "On your computer exists your hobbies, your current and/or future career, and the rest of your daily life. You don’t own a snowboard, but you do have a blog, a Twitter, an RSS reader, and a pirated copy of Photoshop. You, my friend, need an Anything Bucket."
    (tags: yojimbo organisation osx application productivity software mac )
• • Post Position » Interactive Fiction Suggestions, Fall 2009
    "These are my suggestions for eager first-time IF players, organized by year of release:" A few ones here that are still new to me, and some reminders of thigns I need to get around to.
    (tags: games if interactivefiction textadventure )
  • The Undeniable Case For Pink Floyd: Rock Band | Edge Online
    "And if you the beat the game? An animation plays, showing Waters and Gilmour sitting at a pub, chatting like old mates. And as the screen fades to black, they share a little fist bump." Chris' column really is a lovely addition to Edge Online. This is a good one.
    (tags: beatlesrockband pinkfloyd music games chrisdahlen writing )