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Hadn't encountered this – interesting tool for sketching/prototyping type selections.
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Likelihood of needing this advice = quite high.
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"It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.
It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."
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List of all 58 fonts now in iOS, mainly for reference. (Although, eesh, Zapfino AND Papyrus? Really?)
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Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.
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"And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both." Seriously, Vimeo need to sort this out: it's embarrassing, and contrary to the messages they send out.
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"I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with both the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place."
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"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.
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"Q: I don't imagine that a design meeting with Takahashi is a typical PowerPoint affair.
A: He has singlehandedly invented the animated GIF as the design spec. It's fucking hilarious." Animated GIF as design spec. Superb. (And: nice interview with Stuart Butterfield about Glitch).
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"Instead of aiming to elevate the medium by making games that are more socially responsible – which by my estimation reduces quickly down to a feature driven approach that ultimately offers little more than cheap didactic moralizing, our aim should be instead to empower our creative visionaries to explore the human condition through their work." In a nutshell: rather than explicitly trying to make 'worthy' games, why not just let people make games about, you know, the human condition – ie, what every other artform does – than just about shooting dudes? (Disclaimer: sometimes, shooting dudes is fun. But I like Clint.)
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Very simple; very effective.
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"Golden Hook is an innovative fashion brand which allows you to create made-to-order beanies by choosing your beanie style, material, and color. You also choose the authentic grandmother who will knit your beanie from our gallery of grandma photos." Awesome.
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Some of these are very nice; many are likely to end up on posters for dubstep nights in Shoreditch soon, I fear.
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"Need a little excitement? Snap into a little Flickr game I just discovered called Noticings!" Noticings is on the internet telly.
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"Over the weekend, I wrote a web application that takes advantage of the new [EchoNest] APIs to make it easy to get a click plot for just about any track. Just type in the name of the artist and track and you’ll get the click plot – you don’t have to find the audio or upload it or wrestle with python or gnuplot." Echonest is bloody magic.
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"Flogr shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose." Which is something I've been looking for for a while. Glad I didn't have to write it, now.
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"NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files."
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"Fortunately, modern displays can display characters that look exactly like this without special circuitry used in the original DEC terminals and there is free software that can be used to create a usable outline font out of a PNG image." Recreating VT220 terminal fonts in software, and from thence into Truetype.
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"LimeChat is an IRC client for Mac OS X written on RubyCocoa." I did not know about this. It looks nice.
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"Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows." Which is hard, and it is nice to know someone else has done the work.
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"Do you like cities? Do you like architecture? Do you like speaking at conferences?" I think this has sewn up the 2010-11 circuit.
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""Who amongst us will write the Building as Contacts and Related Goodness blog post?" It's worth remembering, I think, that he [Dan Catt] already has."
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I am not an expert in these matters, but that is rather lovely.
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That performance of Billie Jean. But with a Giant White Glove. Brilliant.
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"On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively." This is amazing. And what it leads to is even better.
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Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.
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"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.
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"Peter Newman's Skystation is a circular sculpture inspired by the form of Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue which encourages the user to lie down and contemplate the vast expanse of space above and beyond." I rather like that. Doesn't look comfortable, but I agree with the sentiment.
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"After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites." Hur hur hur.
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"YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE… I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle." All of Milton Glaser's points are worth thinking on, but this one feels particularly acute.
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"So there seems to have developed a general consensus in the iPhone development community that if you’re planning to develop a sprite-based game, the cocos2d-iphone framework that we mentioned waaaaaay back when and a bit later on is the way to go. So since we’re planning on doing exactly that, here’s a roundup of resources for your cocos2d development!"
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"Here’s a round-up of the top 10 readily-available monospace fonts for your coding enjoyment, with descriptions, visual examples and samples, and download links for each." I think I roughly agree with Dan on these.
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"Get over your ridiculous programming-language prejudices and stop endorsing real prejudices. It's this crazy little microcosm/macrocosm mirror effect. You never find bigotry in people with options. It's true in programming and it's true in real life as well, and it looks as if it's true in both places at the same time and for the same people." Giles is right, and the idiots who reached for their retweet button are definitely wrong. Less of this, please.
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"No. That would be your mother." Valve drop the next "Meet The…" video, and it's perhaps the best yet – certainly in terms of editing and choreography. And I love how the other characters – especially the Soldier – are still being developed in this.
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"This is a mod. And that’s kind of relevant, for two reasons. Firstly, we don’t want to pay for this kind of thing. Hell, look at The Path: people are upset that even exists, let alone that its developers had the guts to charge seven quid for their remarkable efforts. But this is the sort of thing I’d love to pay for. It seems illogical that we’ll all happily splash out fifty pounds for the same old story of science-fiction revenge, yet aggressively avoid anything that encourages us to engage our brains and challenge ourselves a little."
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"What’s fascinating about Grifball is how well it emulates a sport (or rather a sport game.) Like basketball or hockey, players must alternately think offensively and defensively as the bomb changes possession. Movement suddenly trumps aiming, as players must gauge distance for successful attacks and create openings to score. The best players are the ones who can move in tricky, unpredictable ways and psych out their opponents. In terms of skill and strategy, Grifball has much more in common with virtual rugby than it does a shooter." Matthew Gallant on Grifball, and more forms of consensual play.
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"…after careful consideration [the editors in charge of style guidelines at the NYT] decided to alter our style. As of now, the spelling whisky will be used not only for Scotch but for Canadian liquor as well. The spelling whiskey will be used for all appropriate liquors from other sources." As it should be.
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"…using these guidelines, and building on the experience of much more knowledgeable type gurus, I have compiled a list of font stacks that will both open up more font possibilities for web designers, and hopefully offer more appropriate substitutes:" That's interesting; not sure how appropriate it is, but they're good uses of the cascade, by and large.
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"Toine Manders, the Dutch liberal MEP who drafted the report, said: "Video games are in most cases not dangerous. We heard evidence from experts on computer games and psychologists from France, the US, Germany and the Netherlands and they told us that video games have a positive contribution to make to the education of minors."" Etcetera.
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A page full of prettiness, and it fills itself up as you go. Art, graphic design, sci-fi book covers; it's all here.
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"It’s a scrolling arcade beat ‘em up in the Final Fight-style based within the Watchmen universe. Just like Alan would have wanted." I know, I know. But: it has charm, it's LittleLoud, and it's not like it's setting out to be canon narrative! It's pretending to be a passable arcade game from a long while ago. So I'm going to give it a break (unlike that horrible 3D beat-em-up that's coming out, that looks like it's trying to be Like The Movie).
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Music video actively exploiting compression artefacts. The transitions are striking; the reaction to something looking this supposedly broken is peculiarly visceral. Digital patina.
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"i have made an "electronic" 8bit calculator (not "mechanical" calculator) with the Beta LBP demo.it do decimal/binary conversions and it can do Add and Sub… computation take clearly less that a half second. this calculator use: – 610 magnetic switches – 500 Wires – 430 pistons – 70 emitters and others stuff…" Amazing – especially the pan-out to the whole contraption.
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"The big dilemma is that needs are different. I’m normally on Mobile Google Maps when I’m frantically trying to find a place, often the hotel I’ve booked. I’m lost, I want to sleep – I’m not exploring the possibility space, and I don’t want to wade through marketing garbage. Note that this doesn’t make sense for these kinds of advertisers either: I’ve booked already, and I don’t want alternatives." Once again, the problems of the mobile context (rather than the mobile technology) rear their heads.
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"On April 1, 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page “special report” about San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of this obscure nation." Wonderful
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Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).
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"The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order – jugglers and prostitutes for example – and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." Wow. I did not know that.
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"When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?" Amazing.