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"ClickToPlugin is a lightweight and highly customizable extension that prevents Safari from launching plug-ins automatically, resulting in faster browsing, reduced fan usage, and increased battery life. It replaces every plug-in object by an unobtrusive placeholder that can be clicked to load the embedded content. Further, it can replace many plug-in-based media players by Safari’s native HTML5 media player." Installed.
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Cape solves a surprisingly common problem: I have this big bunch of rake tasks; I'd like them to run on the server, which tends to mean writing cap tasks just to run the rake tasks. Cape makes it easy to just mirror them.
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"Sitting quietly on my kitchen table, it has already changed my radio behaviour: instead of sticking one channel on and leaving it for hours, I surf—but intelligently, discovering things I actually want to hear. Adding pictures to the radio: but just a single, little, useful one." Nice.
Gating In Action
29 November 2011
I went to see a promenade production of a few of Pinter’s political plays the other week, put on by Hydrocracker at Shoreditch Town Hall. When I got out of it, it reminded me a lot of the way first person videogames gate progress through staged encounters. I wrote a bit about this for the Hide&Seek blog:
The security guards weren’t just human gating tools; they were good gating tools because they were human. A marine in a doorway in Call of Duty has a couple of repeated “barks” to explain why you can’t pass him. But a human actor can improvise, responding sympathetically and organically to the situation in front of them. The gates feel much less forced when you can have a dialogue with them.