March 2009
4 posts
BBC - Food - Recipes - Fluffy American pancakes →
Delicious with maple syrup and bacon. I’m late to the party.
2 tags
“Autoplay sucks because its just plain rude. Its like the people who aggressively...”
– Trip O’Dell discussing Video autoplay on the IxDA mailing list
3 tags
“I made up my mind…that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too...”
– Buckminster Fuller
StupidFilter :: Main / HomePage →
An open-source filter software that detects rampant stupidity in written English. Genius. Already suggested YouTube, Digg and Techcrunch as sources for the pattern-matching algorithm.
February 2009
12 posts
How the city hurts your brain - Boston.com →
Jonah Lehrer tells us about the psychological effects of urban spaces. In short, it promotes innovation due to the multitude of exchanges and interactions we’re forced to engage in. In contrast, the…
Paper-Based Visualization Competition: The Winner... →
Infosethics ran a paper-based info-viz competition. The results are both charming and meaningful.
1 tag
WatchDavid Merrill demos Siftables, the smart blocks | Video on TED.com
Designing by writing (or The non-iterative design... →
Title’s a bit of a misnomer – it’s more designing by words (speaking and writing) – but the sentiment is bang on. I often feel designers hide from this kind of conversation by burying themselves in a…
“I don’t care how gorgeous the thing you made was, if that’s your answer, I’m not...”
– Designing by writing (or The non-iterative design process) | tiny gigantic
“We created the Kiva API because we know the idea of Kiva is bigger than any...”
– From ‘Introducing the Kiva API’
build.kiva: Blog - Introducing the Kiva API →
Kiva – a service that allows entrepreneurs in the developing world to get connected to benefactors – has launched an API. Smart, smart thinking. Especially when the service has such a positive…
“We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and...”
– Official google.org Blog: Power to the people
The City Is Here: Table of contents « Adam... →
Adam Greenfield has published an outline of his forthcoming book The City Is Here. Cities are the new black.
Academic Earth - Video lectures from the world's... →
Amazing resource of academic lectures from some of the top universities in the US (some downloadable), including a 25 lecture series on game theory.
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google →
Google are hosting an archive of photos from Life magazine stretching back to the 1750s. Lots of unpublished stuff apparently. Only drawback is the license seems somewhat flaky (‘For personal…
January 2009
19 posts
OpenCycleMap.org - the OpenStreetMap Cycle Map →
OpenCycleMap is based on data from the OpenStreetMap project. At low zoom levels it is intended for overviews of the National Cycle Network; at higher zoom levels it should help with planning which…
Nick Cohen: Why I blame the left for Britain's... →
Brilliantly crafted extract from Nick Cohen’s book ‘Waiting for the Etonians’ which points the blame for the credit crunch at Gordon Brown’s liberal economic policy and the resulting gluttony of…
Improving the usability of within-page links -... →
Wrestling with this problem on a client’s site at the moment: we need to use within-page links but they always feel so sucky. This technique helps mitigate the problems as well as explaining the…
The $300 Million Button →
Jared describes how usability testing an e-commerce task flow showed up a problem that was effectively costing the company $300million in lost revenue. With one simple fix, they repaired the problem…
David Adam: Could the answer to global warming be... →
Hashem Akbari believes painting more of the world’s exterior surfaces white could have a significant impact on delaying the onset of global warming. This would be most effective in built-up areas,…
The Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project →
A blog following the Daily Mail’s ongoing mission to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into those that cause or cure cancer. Warning: this blog could easily end up being classed as…
WatchUserfly remote screen capturing looks interesting.
Norfolk Cottage - a broadband enabled hideaway in... →
Never know when you might need this. The birthplace of Dopplr (so legend has it).
“It is this narrow definition of context that makes life harder for ourselves,...”
– Dawn Nafus - Add GPS and Stir?: Some Context Needed for Context Awareness
Ebook DRM provider goes dark, the books you paid... →
“I hate the design idiom…
Accordions are jazz. They are superfluous. They are a...”
– William Brall on the ‘Usability of accordions (from the IxDA mailing list.) Bang on.
PostSpectacular: Faber Finds generative book... →
Post Spectacular, working with a visual language developed by typographer Marian Bantjes, developed an application to generate individual covers for a range of print-on-demand books. The range of…
“It’s best to do one thing really, really well.”
– Google Philosophy (Yes, I know it’s old news, but it’s worth reminding oneself every now and again)
Kickbee : portfolio.menscher.com →
Corey Menscher – a second year Masters student at NYU Interactive – has developed Kickbee: A wearable harness his pregnant wife wears which then tweets when his unborn baby kicks. Ante-natal…
TESLA (Time Elapsed Since Labs Attended) and RMU... →
Harry’s responds to a Clay Shirky post on BoingBoing in which he outlines meetup.com’s approach to usability testing and specifically how the results are disseminated internally. Daily rituals to…
December 2008
2 posts
“…most public objects - and certainly all municipal objects - should offer...”
– Public objects « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
“It was a dead heat. General Motors sold 9.37 million vehicles worldwide in 2007...”
– Mismanagement at the Big Three - Mises Economics Blog
November 2008
2 posts
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple...”
– Gall’s law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do....”
– Buckminster Fuller in the February 1972 issue of Playboy. (Here)
October 2008
17 posts
2 tags
“Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and...”
– Edward Tufte on The smallest effective difference
3 tags
“Between the world and our action of the world is a fascinating kink....”
– p2, How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
3 tags
“Age plus adaptability is what makes a building come to be loved. The building...”
– Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn
4 tags
“These buildings have this character because they are so deep, because they were...”
– p525, Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
“We need to stop describing ad-supported things as ‘free’. There...”
– russell davies: design engaged the second
“At the moment we see spimes as spewing off data. And when we start with data we...”
– russell davies: design engaged the second
“…living in Bladerunner brought to you by Cillit Bang would be horrible”
– russell davies: design engaged the second
“One person’s fun is another’s spam.”
– russell davies: design engaged the second
“The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have...”
– Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
“However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in...”
– Boris Johnson in Barack Obama: Why I believe he should be the next President - Telegraph
“I find the best writing almost impossible to read. Partly because I want to...”
– .CSV