July 2010
7 posts
4 tags
Aphex Twin’s ‘Alberto Balsalm’ arranged for...
(via MetaFilter)
4 tags
The Artist and the Computer
More about Lillian Schwartz.
3 tags
Boney M. — ‘Rasputin’
3 tags
Joe Dassin — « Les Champs-Élysées »
Recently rewatched The Darjeeling Limited.
2 tags
The Stranglers — ‘Waiting for the Meninblack’
See also: ‘Waltzinblack’; The Gospel According
to the Meninblack.
3 tags
Giorgio Moroder — ‘From Here to Eternity’
3 tags
Super Furry Animals — ‘Juxtaposed with U’
June 2010
2 posts
20 tags
Music, Videos
Klippa — ‘Space Dog’
Eric Xodik — ‘Ix’
Refused — ‘New Noise’ (The Shape of Punk to Come)
Refused — ‘Rather be Dead’ (Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent)
Paul Simon — ‘You Can Call Me Al’ (Graceland)
Christina Aguilera — ‘Ain’t No Other Man’ (Back to Basics)
Iron & Wine — ‘Boy with a Coin’ (The Shepherd’s Dog)
M. Ward — ‘Requiem’ (Post-War)
...
3 tags
jQuery-style options hash in Ruby
A common idiom in jQuery plugins is passing a named hash of options that’s
merged in with defaults:
(function ($) {
$.fn.plugin_name = function (options) {
var settings = {};
var defaults = {
thing1: "foo",
thing2: 20
};
if (options) {
settings = $.extend(defaults, options);
} else {
settings = defaults;
}
…
The settings are then accessed...
May 2010
1 post
5 tags
pagering update
It’s been a while since I last published anything about my pagering
project — and a while since I last worked on it. But over the past few days
I’ve put in some time and made some major changes.
The most significant change is that pagering has been rewritten as a jQuery
plugin. This comes with a number of benefits; primarily, it’s now generalized
for use outside the example page. The use of...
April 2010
1 post
3 tags
Curtis Youngblood
(via MetaFilter)
February 2010
1 post
8 tags
Music, videos
Guy — ‘Groove Me’ (Guy)
The Newbeats — ‘Bread and Butter’
The Kills — ‘Cheap and Cheerful’ (Midnight Boom)
Apes & Androids — ‘Golden Prize’ (Blood Moon)
Césaria Évora — ‘Cabo Verde’ (Mar Azul)
Ruff Sqwad — ‘Xtra’ (Guns & Roses Vol. 2)
January 2010
14 posts
6 tags
Fictional interface: Star Trek Generations;...
Behind-the-scenes:
6 tags
Fictional interface: Mag+ →
Hi-res captures.
6 tags
Fictional interface: iPhone home screen →
Effectively a lifestream on your phone.
5 tags
Fictional interfaces: redesigned Bloomberg... →
Of primary interest is IDEO’s
vision.
5 tags
Fictional interfaces: CSI: Miami →
5 tags
Fictional interfaces: Minority Report →
The obvious one.
5 tags
Fictional interfaces: Iron Man
Videos
Interview
Interview with Kent Seki of
Pixel Liberation Front, which
created various interfaces for the film.
Another thing that Jon Favreau was very keen on was this notion
of the HUD being in a dialogue. Sometimes,
Tony Stark is asking for information. He’s calling for it to come to him.
Other times, it’s Jarvis saying, “What about this? Have you...
5 tags
Fictional interfaces: Quantum of Solace →
5 tags
Fictional interfaces: R.U.S.E. trailer →
5 tags
Fictional interfaces: Dead Space →
1 tag
Current Git Branch in Bash Prompt →
Good trick; saves typing git status or git branch so often. Note:
it’s not very clear from the article, but the code for the prompt goes in
~/.bashrc.
I wasn’t interested in colors, and I’m fairly happy with Terminal’s standard
prompt (\h:\w \u\$), so I ended up with something pretty close to the
default:
parse_git_branch() {
git name-rev HEAD 2> /dev/null | sed 's#HEAD\...
5 tags
Polaroid SX-70 promotional video →
Produced by Charles and
Ray Eames for
Polaroid in 01972.
You can look at technology as a living tree, a trunk bearing branches, the branches leafing out. Or you can see it as a net, knots tying up threads from many sides. But the human reality is more intricate than either one.
We have been looking at one invention which began pretty purely out of the conception of a need — the hope...
6 tags
AJAX in WordPress
Note: ‘AJAX’ simply meaning ‘getting data
via JavaScript’, not Jesse James Garrett’s
more holistic approach.
For a project I’ve been working on I needed a way to easily grab data from
the backend without reloading the page. I didn’t want to fight with any of
the big AJAX plugins, as the
ones I looked into seemed to have their own complicated approaches involving
magic markup or pre-formatted...
1 tag
Simplified WordPress post loop
The built-in WordPress theme has a lot of redundancy in the various
entry-viewing templates (index.php, archives.php, category.php,
search.php). Because I dislike repetition and don’t want to worry about
whether I’ve kept the markup in sync across multiple files, I ended up with
the following approach.
Each of the noted files is reset to the following code:
<?php get_header() ?>
<div...
December 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Pinboard now supports multiple tags
Quoting from the blog, which has no apparent entry permalinks:
Tag Intersections
You can now filter by combinations of tags using the syntax
/u:username/t:apples/t:oranges/. Up to three tags can be combined this way.
For the moment, this only works on the user+tag pages, and not in the global
tag page nor any of the RSS feeds.
This makes me happy, as it was one of the features...
3 tags
Today’s Markup Changes
Switch to ‘asynchronous tracking’, which should improve load times.
Move profile URI from <head> to
a <link> — HTML5
breaks the old approach.
Use value-class pattern for hCard dates. My datestamps are still
unusable, though, because I can’t get a timezone from Tumblr custom
themes — either as offsets from UTC or conversions to it — meaning I can’t
represent an ISO 8601...
November 2009
2 posts
4 tags
Corrections to Auto-print Regex
Several months ago I published a regular expression that would strip
auto-print links from webpages. Unfortunately, the regex doesn’t
actually catch everything, so here’s a corrected version:
replace(/((window|self)\.print(\(\))?|print\(\));?/ig, "");
This will catch all the following:
print()
print();
self.print
self.print()
self.print();
window.print
window.print()
window.print();
...
4 tags
Some Changes Around the Site
Last night I made some adjustments to the theme/design:
I changed my markup to be more in line with HTML5,
primarily as a result of Mark Pilgrim’s
Dive Into HTML5
chapter on the changed semantics. It’s not yet clear how microformats
will be affected, so I’ve largely left the existing classes intact.
Of note:
I had to add a CSS rule to make
HTML5 elements display as intended:
article,...
September 2009
3 posts
5 tags
“Apple Tablet to Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks... →
Brian Lam reports that the rumored
Apple tablet will be launched with a variety of
multimedia-enhanced text sources. If correct,
iTunes LP and iTunes Extras are merely
the first steps in an envisioned world of enhanced digital formats.
Would such formats be open to anyone other than Apple?
iTunes LP is, but Lam writes:
The logic here is that textbooks are sold new at a few hundred dollars,...
3 tags
A way to download shared Anki decks
Today I downloaded Anki as a result of a discussion at Hacker
News. When I attempted to download a deck (none are built-in), I
consistently got errors — complaints about bad ZIP files, file problems, and so
on. After some digging, I found a techy workaround.
Find an interesting deck using Anki’s shared deck list.
Load http://anki.ichi2.net/file/search in your browser.
Search for the name of...
7 tags
“None Dare Call It Conspiracy”
Note: What follows is a transcript of Scott Anderson’s article for this month’s edition of GQ regarding the Russian apartment bombings in 01999. This article has been carefully surpressed:
Jerry Birenz ordered that the article could not be posted to the magazine’s Web site. No copies of the American edition of the magazine could be sent to Russia or shown in any country to Russian...
August 2009
3 posts
1 tag
Why is nonsense like this still happening?
As previously noted, I had been watching
Castle reruns on
TV. This was going well until
ABC simply decided to stop after
six of ten episodes. I had previously seen episode seven, but this still left
me with episodes eight through ten. ‘Aha!’, I thought — ‘thanks to the magic of
the internet I can simply watch this online!’. Turns out that both Hulu and
ABC’s own player only offer episodes 1–6...
4 tags
Quick Tip: Stop Auto-printing with GlimmerBlocker
As part of my high-volume web reading habits, I click through to the print
versions of articles whenever possible. Annoyingly, sites will often use
JavaScript to automatically make the page print. Here’s a simple way to stop
it.
Download and install GlimmerBlocker.
Create a new Filter group (top left of preference pane).
Add a new Rule.
Set the Action to “Whitelist URL, optionally
modifying...
4 tags
Tasteful
Four years ago when I was in college I’d regularly play the radio while driving
to and from campus, primarily listening to oldies (which had already shifted to
mean ’70s and ’80s rock) or the local NPR
affiliate. When I liked a song that had played, I’d make a note of the defining
lyrics, a necessity as DJs seldom report track
titles and my memory is rather poor. Note-taking was accomplished by...
July 2009
7 posts
2 tags
Microformatting
For some time now I’ve been using rel-license; today I added
hAtom and hCard. hCard was easy; I decided to just drop the
url and fn attributes into a link around my name. hAtom, however, was a bit
more difficult.
Things started out well thanks to
Emily Lewis’ helpful guide, but
Optimus microformat validator kept insisting that I was missing the
author attribute. The guide addresses this, noting...
3 tags
‘Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch’ →
Michael Pollan takes on food porn.
3 tags
‘Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?’ →
The story of how De Beers (with help from
advertising firm N.W.
Ayer) created the romantic ‘diamonds are forever’ mythos.
See also: ‘The New Diamond Age’
5 tags
Reboot the News #16 →
I’ve recently begun listening to Reboot the News after steadily ignoring it. I was particularly taken by this episode’s discussion of the authoritative cloak journalists put on, and whether they truly deserve it.
1 tag
Television, Summer 02009
This summer has seen a dramatic leap in the amount of television I
watch — previously it was NFL (regular season
onward) and a very rare ‘plop on the couch’; now I’ve begun regularly watching
as much as twenty-two programs each week. I’d say the primary factor is my
computer trouble, as I’ve mostly swapped time in front of a laptop for time in
front of a TV.
My present schedule is composed of...
2 tags
‘Fever and the Future of Feed Readers’ →
Alex Payne:
Today, at least in the web-tech echo chamber, feed reading is quickly falling
out of fashion. Too many sites producing too many feeds of dubious quality
means information overload, and a creeping sense of obligation to keep up
with a torrent of questionably relevant content. Some have gone back to
checking a handful of bookmarked sites, as we did in the early days of the
...
2 tags
What I Want in a Bookmarking Service
When Maciej Cegłowski first put out the call for people to alpha-test Pinboard, I quickly applied. After accepting me, Maciej asked what kinds of features I was looking for. I didn’t have much to offer except complaints about the limits of delicious, but I’ve since spent some time trying to come up with a more definitive list. My ideas are primarily drawn from experience with delicious, Pinboard,...
April 2009
9 posts
7 tags
Transcript of ‘Rescuing GeoCities’
Transcript of the Future Tense episode
‘Rescuing GeoCities’.
Participants
Jon Gordon
Jason Scott
Transcript
Jon Gordon: Rescuing GeoCities. This is Future Tense from American Public Media; I’m Jon Gordon. Yahoo! said last week that it would shut down its GeoCities personal website service later this year. Hard to believe now, but Yahoo! paid about three billion dollars for the company...
2 tags
Advice
Ronald Jenkees:
See, it doesn’t have to be perfect, folks, for you to play music. Sometimes
it’s good; sometimes it’s so-so; and sometimes you just have fun with it.
And, y’know, not everybody turns on a camera and puts it on YouTube, but that
doesn’t mean you can’t play and enjoy it.
Start simple. Make up a couple of melodies — get good at those. Start some
more — build on those....
2 tags
Design-a-day #14
(wireframe, screencast; PSD by
request)
Feelin’ the 50s today.
3 tags
‘Why I Use Tumblr’ →
Patrick Hanlon’s response to my
entry on tumblelogs. I agree with everything he says.
When I wrote the piece, I only briefly mentioned specific services, because I
was more interested in the mindset than the actual implementation — I’m
currently running this site on Tumblr, which is definitely a great service.
4 tags
Follow-up on vendor-specific CSS and the DOM
Yesterday I wrote about my difficulty in getting certain
CSS properties that I needed for my code. Today
I discovered the solution.
After unsuccessfully poking around at a simplified version of my code, I
decided to try looking at the complete list of the relevant element’s
DOM properties, to see if I was simply asking
for the wrong thing. I quickly discovered that element.style doesn’t...
4 tags
How can I get vendor-specific CSS properties from...
When I first released pagering, I wrote:
It’s not bug free — the ‘pages’ don’t all appear at the same spot, and so
on — but it’s written, and it works. Now I can move on to making it better.
Today I decided to work on making it better, and quickly figured out why the
‘pages’ render inconsistently. It turns out there are three variables involved:
the width of the ‘paged’ element in the...
2 tags
Design-a-day #13
(wireframe, screencast; PSD by
request)
It’s been a little while since I last did one of these. I was preoccupied with
other things (e.g. rewriting Turpentine).
The idea for this one came from browsing through my ‘inspiration folder’ and
noticing all the screen grabs of online galleries. I wasn’t able to think of a
good way to set up arrow navigation, so that useful interface element...