Links from 2009

Uncannily accurate.

Holy fuck.

New material from Devo: Don’t Shoot (I’m A Man) (via ireallylovemusic)

Hadn't realised there was a W3C Widget Spec in the pipeline.

Graphs of how often things feature on guardian.co.uk

Software for real-time sound synthesis, music composition and performance-oriented audio processing.

Liner notes for The Village Orchestra's Et In Arcadia Ego. The album is made from samples of tracks the artist really hates (Richard Marx, Chris Isaak, The Corrs, Bruce Hornsby and The Range etc)

Weird analogy but some useful points.

"[Bob Willett] says it is wrong for analysts to focus on store openings, as the internet is key to growth - web sales are rising faster here than in the US. "Up to a third of our business will be done on the web, so you don't need hundreds of stores," he says."

Hilarious.

Ooooh. "Thingiverse is a place for you to share your digital designs with the world. We believe that just as computing shifted away from the mainframe into the personal computer that you use today, digital fabrication will share the same path."

Good argument to use for gzip. "Inevitably, someone will argue that they can't spare a few ms per page to compress the data, even though it will make their site much more responsive. However, it occured to me today that thanks to Amazon, it's very easy to compare CPU vs Bandwidth."

It works directly with Django Models and provides a familiar API to people who are comfortable with Django.

Creates a page fold effect in the top right corner.

FACT magazine: Download/Interview: The Village Orchestra (Full Album)

Really enjoying this album.

“We’ve hooked up with the excellent Highpoint Lowlife label to give away The Village Orchestra’s 2005 full-length Et In Arcadia Ego for free.”

Hurrah, Undercover iPhone version is out. "If your iPhone is stolen, Undercover will pretend to be a game. This will encourage the thief to wait a few seconds for the game to load, enabling Undercover to get accurate location information. This location information is then added to your account and transmitted to the police station where you reported the theft."

Cool is relative.

“Its staff are polite, serve afternoon tea and let you buy your ticket on the train – and now they’ve seen off competition from Virgin”.

I have no particular reason to visit any of the places on the Wrexham & Shropshire line but I’m going to find one after reading this.

Victory of the ‘Shropshire thunderbolt’ | UK news | The Observer

Soufflé? Pah. Recipe for hot chocolate puddings further down.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

We source our sea salt from Guérande. Our flour is exclusively stone-ground. We work closely with our flour makers to use the very best varieties of wheat. And, we use a piece of dough from the previous batch of bread – the sourdough – as a starter for the next batch. The type of oven used to bake bread is also important. We bake our breads in wood-fired ovens. These ovens are fed with waste wood that cannot be used for any other industry.

Humane Content Management for Rails

The signature behavior of people who routinely achieve innovative outcomes is that they constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.

"A social music website built around a curated library of free, legal audio" from WFMU, KEXP, Cash Music, Dublab and others.

The best French, Italian and British food delivered next day to your door

The concept of usability often seems to exclude people with disabilities, as though just access is all they are entitled to. What about creating a good user experience for people with disabilities—going beyond making a Web site merely accessible to make it truly usable for them?

Two calls for Delicious data are now supported inside BOSS: the number of times a URL has been bookmarked and the top tags that users have applied to categorize that URL. Delicious has its own API, but it's not as helpful as this integration with BOSS is.

In short: OU academic Tony Hirst produced a rather lovely map, on the suggestion (taunt?) of the Guardian’s technology editor, Charles Arthur, and the result? A brand new politics story for the Guardian on MPs’ expenses.

"Designed for businesses using Twitter to engage existing customers and attract new ones, CoTweet is a comprehensive Twitter business platform that supports both proactive marketing communication and response-driven customer support." Wow, way to make it sound really boring.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

PSDs illustrating safe areas for various browsers.

Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend.

People don't stop talking in a recession. So making your marketing dependent on a scarce resource - your advertising budget. Or making it more dependent on an abundant resource - your customers? You decide.

If you're Home Depot, and you've got 150,000 employees, half of whom are on Facebook, you had better be thinking about this. Social media is no longer experimental.

New Web Trends map is nearly there.

Nice Japanese products. Crazy words. "100% is condition beyond reasons. Not the scheduled or harmonized world, but the world where we live is filled with the logically un-analyzable mysterious factors beyond the range of expression with words and numerical value."

The social sites we visit today are not just friend networks - they're also built around objects that connect people with shared interests. These social objects could be anything from a photo on flickr to a video on YouTube or a track on Last.fm.

A collection of 51 cards representing diverse ways that design teams can understand the people they are designing for. They are used to make a number of different methods accessible to all members of a design team, to explain how and when the methods are best used, and to demonstrate how they have been applied to real design projects.

MakerBot Industries creates open source robot kits that transform your digital designs into physical objects automatically. The kits are modular, modifiable, and built to be hacked.