Links from 2009

The more I think about it, the more I want a portable Last.fm player. Not just a client app, but a proper dedicated piece of hardware, with big round love, ban and skip buttons.

The iPhone apparently uses a link tag in the page’s header to locate a suitable image and then falls back on its own creation powers if that fails.

The iPhone apparently uses a link tag in the page’s header to locate a suitable image and then falls back on its own creation powers if that fails.

"Australia’s leading lubricant and additives manufacturer; Nulon Products is solving a much needed dilemma for UK drivers just in time for winter by releasing “Start Ya Bastard” Instant Engine Starter." I don't have any engines but I need some of this.

My new favourite place. Great food, amazing range of excellent tequila.

My new favourite place. Great food, amazing range of excellent tequila.

Missed this the first time round.

"Create your own hat, dare the color, the pompom, the papaya stripe, be imaginative and create the most stylish hat of the neighborhood. Then, when you’re done playing the artist, you choose the grandma who is going to make your hat." Genius.

Antony Gormley, the man behind Britain's best-loved sculpture The Angel of the North, is inviting the people of the UK to occupy the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break beginning on 6th July, a different person will make the Plinth their own.

Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.

Quick compendium of things to bear in mind when building iPhone sites.

"Unlimited connections on static IPs. Secure VPN exit in Switzerland. No download or upload limits. No content filtering. No port blocking. No packet shaping. No transparent web caches. No fair usage policy. No Phorm. No small print. No call centres. No lock in period." But... expensive.

"Xenocode WebApp technology allows Internet Explorer 8, 7, 6, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome to run simultaneously on any version of Windows, directly from the web". Win only.

"Yes, there is full page zoom (which works much better in IE 8 than in IE 7), but the controls for resizing text only are still there, and they still do not work when pixels or an absolute unit has been used." Still? Doh.

More reasons for JavaScript off.

Better title might be "Reasons why orgs or individuals might disable JavaScript". List is "Protection from XSS and CSRF, Mobile Device Issues, Problem with Screen Readers." Final one (Framework vs. Coding) doesn't really make sense.

“Mr Foster says that what must be done is to teach organisations to "expand their talent management agenda from a narrow and tactical focus on human resources activities around the employee life…

— Accenture’s next champion of waffle words

The player accumulates points by how much they stretch during gameplay. These points can be submitted online via a character called Sun to another character called Girl. Points submitted online by players to Girl will be added cumulatively, causing Girl to stretch. Beginning on Earth, Girl will stretch to the Moon, then to several other planets, each unlocking new playable environments for Boy to stretch in. The Noby Noby Boy team expects players to take between one and two weeks of cumulative play time to reach the Moon.

The pop-up store is offering the public the chance to sample the Kingsmill product range for breakfast every weekday between 8 - 11am until the 27th of February.

It turns out that Best Buy has embraced the use of social media to empower it’s employees and reaped massive productivity gains as a result.

Internal microblogging/sharing at Best Buy.

"Mr Foster says that what must be done is to teach organisations to "expand their talent management agenda from a narrow and tactical focus on human resources activities around the employee life cycle, to a broad and strategic focus on highly integrated systems of capabilities fundamental to business strategies and operations". This is shameful, outrageous bilge."

"One day it dawned on me that Webkit is VERY similar on Safari for Windows and the iPhone. Could I somehow embed just the rendering component into a native Windows application and give it enough polish to do a decent job of simulating the iPhone Web browsing experience?" It would appear that the answer is "yes".

Ex-Jockey Slut types in new online music magazine venture.

"My attitude to most Location-Based Services [...] has been hardened by sitting through umpty-nine presentations by the white-men-in-chinos who maintain a fortune can be made by the first company to reliably send a passer-by a voucher for a cheap coffee as they drift past *bucks." This post is not that.

This whole situation is so wrong.

An API that you can use to check whether your site is included in IE8's Compatibility View blacklist. Simply add your domain name to the URL and you'll be returned either YES if your site is on the current blacklist, or NO if it's not.

Summary of the Target class action and outcomes.

While useful for consumers, faceted navigation as normally implemented actually confuses the search engines by generating massive numbers of URL permutations that contain mostly duplicated content. This is bot spam.

Finder replacement.

Finder replacement.

Def Jux Free Tracks Playlist, a playlist by Definitive Jux, on Fairtilizer

An impromptu film made in Tokyo by Dennis Wheatley and Stefan McClean. They were sitting in this sushi bar pondering how best to set up a camera to film things all by itself whilst they were in Tokyo. Take our hands out of the equation… let the camera have its own journey.

Via Two men eating for three.

"A web site where you can type up some lists and have them handy if you need them later." Can generate lists as JSON, a MySQL insert query, or Plain Text.

A List Apart published an article called “Return of the Mobile Style Sheet”. While the article provides some good information, it has several major flaws. After testing this method extensively, I decided to try and build a better mousetrap.

"We are moving all FeedBurner accounts to Google Accounts." Necessary but a bit annoying.

Cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

Copy tracks from iPod to Mac.

Probably a better bet than passwordmaker. "use strong and unique passwords for every site and never forget any of them".

We now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL.

You can install it as a local ’service’, essentially a web application running on Apache on your local machine. That means you can adjust the Web Developers Toolbar for Firefox to use you local version.