Links from 2012

"Are you severely annoyed because none of the supplied keyboard layouts in Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 match up with the key legends on the keyboard, even when you use the US English or US Extended English layouts? I was, so I decided to remedy the situation so I could use the keyboard without getting # instead of £ or @ instead of " whenever I was working on a document or email or anything at all."

"Even more than anachronism, a core theme of Mad Men is the lost art of personal reserve, self-effacement, and mystery. When Don Draper says, "Tell Jimmy I need to talk to him" in season 2 instead of "I have to talk to him," it hits a slightly more narcissistic, self-revealing note than it should. A baby boomer might set up a business meeting by invoking his personal needs; but a member of the "silent generation"—particularly one living a double life like Draper—doesn't talk about himself quite so readily."

"With the exception of Nairobi — insert joke here about Kenyans crushing everyone at the New York City Marathon — the fastest walking cities were from wealthy nations. The statistical analysis confirmed this general perception: two of the three strongest social predictors of walking speed were a country's G.D.P. and its purchasing power parity (the other was its individualism). Indeed, when Levine considered all his "pace of life" metrics, he found that pace of life was swifter in "economically productive countries" like Western Europe and Japan than in undeveloped countries."

Useful.

We can no longer presume that the content accessed through mobile devices will also be viewed on them. With AirPlay, mobile device experiences can just as easily become 10 foot lean-back experiences, negating all your assumptions about display size and bandwidth. Responsive meda strategies will need to get more sophisticated to take this into account.

In terms of web performance, the experience we need to measure is user perceived page load time, and the single number we need to extract depends on the distribution of measurements across the sample. There are a few contenders for what the magic number should be. Do you use the mean, median, mode, or something else? How do you determine the correctness of this number or whether your sample size is large enough? Is one number sufficient?

Wondering how I missed Spitalfields Life until now.

The first ever Chelsea Fringe will begin on Saturday 19th May and run for three weeks, at a host of different venues and settings across London.

A collection of styleguides.

By condensing the pieces of information you need or want to know in to a piece of software that’s optimizing your learning experience, you can learn more, remember it longer, and remove much of the tedium.

I'm really glad it's not just me.

Potentially useful. "An AssetGraph object is a collection of assets (nodes) and the relations (edges) between them. It's a basic data model that allows you to populate, query, and manipulate the graph at a high level of abstraction. For instance, if you change the url of an asset, all relations pointing at it are automatically updated."

"A management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm's customer relationships." Mmmm.

Exceptionally scummy.

This doesn't appear to work particularly well.