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Via Denise. Useful reminders.
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That looks like a good overview of flexbox to me.
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Darius Kazemi on writing aphorism detection; if nothing, it's a lovely insight into how he thinks about problems, as well as some neat code examples.
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A nice talk on type, with some great faces referenced in it; Brandon Grotesque is a stunner.
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"Reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, get a digest with what everyone on the team got done." As a management style, I like that.
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"If there is a bigger Splinter Cell fan than myself, I haven't yet met them; but in their zeal to promote the newest iteration, Ubisoft has caused Sam Fisher to tweet. And I don't mean they've made him chirp, which would be preferable. They've given him a Twitter account where he tweets in a supremely earnest way about how tormented his shit is.<br />
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*No.*" Oh dear. -
"A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving." Oh boy. That's quite a thing (and: quite a sentence!)
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"I've been using Copy with Style command, which I took from this blog post. It copies text selection as RTF so when the code is pasted into Keynote, it looks exactly the same as it looked in TextMate, including font style, size and colors. Code can be then modified in Keynote, while the style is preserved." Useful!
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Jones has the keys to the helicarrier: "in summary: Schulze is spending the week in zero-g combat training, Tom is playing with an orangutan genome that he got from some guy in Zurich and I’m building a laser-harp."
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Really rather good, from what I've read so far, especially for prototyping.
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Really excellent presentation on the basics of SPARQL – lots of good examples, lots of hands-on stuff, and clear. Worth going back to.
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"Designed by London architect Julian Hakes, the Mojito shoe is made of carbon fiber—to give it strength and spring—and laminated with rubber on the bottom and leather—from furniture manufacturers in High Wycombe, England—on top." Gorgeous.
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"Here is a needlework sampler I’ve made based on the tradition of needlework samplers and the processes used by producers to create contemporary musical compositions."
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"It may be a little hidden but Git actually comes with auto completion, you just have to set it up." I did not know that. Useful!
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"The program seeks to accommodate up to 15 students who are considered "at-risk for dropping out or poor performance in core classes", focusing on themes such as literacy and writing, mathematics, 21st-Century technology skills, leadership, and more. The site argues that students who are considered "at-risk" usually haven't reached that point because they lack the capacity to learn, but because school no longer holds any relevance to them or it bores them…" …and so it uses WoW to provide them with relevant usage-examples of the subjects they need to get better at. Not entirely convinced, but interesting that they're using a wiki to collate lesson ideas/plans.
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"In the case of European Air War, what management wanted was a very cool game to sell that customers would love. What the lead programmer did was present it to them so that they could see, clearly, that this was exactly what they had on their hands already. They, too, were having trouble digging through all those details and seeing the big picture." Lovely story about the importance of presentation on any kind of project.
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"Being a light-hearted look at the world of story and writing in games." Written by Richard Cobbett, it's quite a lot of fun. And he's played Realms of the Haunting, too. Awesome.
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"So, is it possible to mix segments and querystring?" Sort of, maybe, seems to be the answer.
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"The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you’ve done a couple of presentations, you’re going to want more." Rands drops some Keynote science, and I learn at least one new thing.
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Even if it's got a long way to go, there's so much promise and potential here – and it's interesting to see how refined some of the puzzle ideas are. And: mind-bending in the way the best puzzle games are.
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"I'm looking forward to working with new, clever people and getting my hands dirty again. I'm charged with leading the Open Library into fresh, fun territory; to enlist many hands to make "a page on the web for every book ever published" a great resource. I'm thrilled to be working with Brewster Kahle and his crack team in an important time for books on the web." What a perfect hire. Can't wait to see what George brings to it.
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This is epic and brilliant and has so many jumping-off points I need to read it again, and again, and again.
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"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""
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Pop band from Bristol, made good singles, got a deal, rather than touring recorded an album, album got shelved by label that had wanted them to tour, band broke up, album now sees light of day from SVC, for three quid. Phew!
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Clint Hocking's presentation materials – talk, slides, short mpeg – from his GDC09 lecture, "Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation". It's meaty and weighty and it's really, really, really good, and covers lots of bases and I'll need to read it again. Lots of dense stuff about the balances between Far Cry 2's gameplay systems, designing systems for improvisation, and rebalancing games to what they want to be. My mancrush is not abated, sadly.
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"…removing the screws made it clear that the magnetic zones serve a second function. When my screwdriver slipped, the screw didn’t fall into the depths of the case. Instead, it flew right over to the magnet, and I was spared the pain of extracting a three-millimeter needle from an expensive electronic haystack."
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James Box on interaction design as behavioural modifier. I really enjoyed this – mainly for its thoughts on architecture, branding, marketing, copywriting, rather than just on pure IXD. Some interesting products in there, too. Worth another look.
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"I think there's a lesson here: doing something in hardware isn't automatically cool, particularly for kids. It's harder to make things happen, so we veteran geeks get a thrill from it. We think that because it's physical, real, and a Robot, kids will automatically be excited. But for kids who are learning, and who don't appreciate the significance of the challenge, it's just hard and unrewarding."
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This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about around a year ago – the value of bespoke, beautiful UI to interact with mundane code; people aren't just paying for software here, they're paying for interaction design.
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"…these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I'd take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like." A nice, simple piece of amateur informatics that is a good wake-up call.
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Margaret's slides from GDC2009. Even without the notes, there's clearly some great meat here, and "Stop Wasting My Time And Your Money" has some stonkingly good moments – notably, the discussion of the HL2 lambda, and a great, great Sam Beckett gag.
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"With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way." Oh. Now that looks interesting.
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"See, you're doing that zany goofball routine, but Xander and Wash never made sex slaves, so it kind of doesn't work." Seriously, this is the most accurate summary of Dollhouse you can imagine. If I'd been playing the drinking game, my liver would be dead by now.
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"…or the past and future of practical city magic". Jones drops the presentation bomb and it's really very very good; it doesn't feel "weird" as he suggests at all; instead, it's all one great big joined-up mishmash of coherent thought and a dash of wonder.
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It's a Roguelike, running on a Meggy Jr – the microcontroller-powered console with an 8×8 LED display. Looking good so far!
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"F.lux fixes this: it makes your computer's lighting adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better." Perhaps not right for things that need to be color-managed… but might be good for everything else. And healthier.