Link archive: January, 2013

Mercator Puzzle!

This is fun. Drag the red country outlines around and slot them into place on the map. Sounds easy, right? But the distorting effect of the Mercator projection makes it a lot tougher than it looks.

What’s the deal with copyright and 3D printing? by Michael Weinberg

Michael Weinberg’s follow-up whitepaper to “It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up.”

Stick-n-find

Spimify your household with these bluetooth location stickers. Now you can google your shoes.

HTML5 in six steps by Andy Hume

You’re probably doing each of these already but just in case your’e not, Andy has listed six quick wins you can get from HTML5.

Setting a performance budget by Tim Kadlec

Tim talks about the very useful technique of setting a page-weight limit; something that Mark wrote about on the Clearleft blog recently.

Metadesign at Hack Farm by James Box

James’s notes from the most recent Hack Farm show that, even without a finished product, there were a lot of benefits.

On layout and web performance by Kelly Norton

This is handy: a look at which DOM properties and methods cause layout thrashing (reflows).

Performance as design by Brad Frost

Amen, Brad, Amen.

It’s time for us to treat performance as an essential design feature, not just as a technical best practice.

Life as German POW by Carl Lehman

My friend Dan’s stepfather Carl passed away recently, aged 90. His experiences during World War II were quite something.

Offscreen 4: I got what I paid for by Jeff Porter

A really nice write-up of issue four of Offscreen magazine, wherein I was featured.

Flickr: ugordan’s Photostream

Gorgeous colour-processed images from NASA probes. I could stare at the fountains of Enceladus all day.

Actual Facebook Graph Searches

Another Tom Scott project:

I had to take one more quick, cheap shot — and I think a Tumblr blog is the quickest, cheapest shot it’s possible to take.

UX Job Title Generator

Like @jeremysjob, but specifically for UX roles.

Carousel interaction stats by Eric Runyon

I’ve never been a fan of carousels on websites, to put it mildy. It seems I am not alone. And if you doubt the data, ask yourself this: when was the last time you, as a user, interacted with a carousel on any website?

Owning your own words – is it important?

A fascinating discussion on sharecropping vs. homesteading. Josh Miller from Branch freely admits that he’s only ever known a web where your content is held by somone else. Gina Trapani’s response is spot-on:

For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web—even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful—I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.

When you get old and your memory is long and you lose parents and start having kids, you value your own and others’ personal archive much more.

On the styling of forms by Bruce Lawson

Bruce takes a look at the tricky issue of styling native form controls. Help us, Shadow DOM, you’re our only hope!

Soul Compare: Get the most for your soul.

The latest project from Tom Scott is like many Facebook-authenticated apps that ask you to sell your soul, but this one is literal. I think I might offer my soul (worth 56gigaMorgans) to Cthulhu.

Speed up your site using prefetching by Jon Fox

More details on DNS prefetching, page prefetching and, controversial, page pre-rendering.

Front-end performance for web designers and front-end developers by Harry Roberts

A really good introduction to front-end performance techniques. Most of this was already on my radar, but I still picked up a handy tip or two (particularly about DNS prefetching).

At this stage it should go without saying that you should be keeping up with this kind of thing: performance is really, really, really important.

The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 by Troy Hunt

A good explanation of the litany of woes that comes from Internet Explorer 8 being the highest that users of Windows XP can upgrade to. It’s a particularly woeful situation if you are a web developer attempting to provide parity. But there is hope on the horizon:

2013 will see the culmination of all these issues; support for IE 8 will drop of rapidly, users of XP will find an increasingly broken web, the cost of building software in XP organisations will increase.

The Last Pictures: Contemporary pessimism and hope for the future by Paul Glister

From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the Pioneer plaques and Voyager golden records to Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures” project, Paul Glister examines the passage and preservation of art and information through time. Fascinating.

Or perhaps, as Paglen envisions, those who find a Pioneer Plaque, a Voyager Record, or one of our electromagnetic transmissions will be interested enough to search us out, coming upon a future Earth where all that is left of humanity are our terrestrial ruins and that artificial ring of geosynchronous satellites, with one of them having a particular golden artifact bolted to its pitted hull. In that scenario, about all that would be left for the visiting ETI to do in terms of learning about us would be grand-scale dumpster diving.

Come at me!

A wonderful collection of misconceptions, often the result of being myzelled when young.

The importance of HTML5 sectioning elements by Heydon Pickering

A good explanation of HTML5’s sectioning content and outline algorithm.

Interview with Lauren Beukes about Shining Girls

Lauren talks about The Shining Girls and the tools she uses to write with.

The paradoxes of time travel by David Lewis

A well-written white paper on time travel. Alas, it relies a bit too much on semantic nitpickery to offer any real insight.

DNA molecule plush on Think Geek

Brilliant little magnetic cuddly nucleobases from Jun. You get all four bases to combine to your heart’s content: cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine — take that, Pokémon.

2012 Project Google Birdhouse - a set on Flickr

I’ve been thinking about getting a birdhouse.

To Be Today

A beautiful project from Brendan and the Royal Shakespeare Company: the headlines of today preceded by quotes from The Bard.

Bargain Bin Blasphemy

I think there might be some subliminal messages hidden in these album covers.

Song blogging: Files That Last

I hereby declare that this song is my official anthem.

I want some files that last, data that will not stray.

Files just as fresh tomorrow as they were yesterday.

Implementing off-canvas navigation for a responsive website by David Bushell

This off-canvas demo is a great practical example of progressive enhancement from David. It’s also a lesson in why over-reliance on jQuery can sometimes be problematic.

The Panasonic Toughpad Press Conference - LOOK, ROBOT

Now this is what I call tech reporting.

The women leave the stage, wet computer in hand, and a new man takes the stage. He plays a schmaltzy video where Portuguese children teach adults to use Windows 8 accompanied by a hyperloud xylophone soundtrack that slices through my hangover like cheesewire though lukewarm gouda.

The responsive web will be 99.9% typography

An intriguing extrapolation of current design trends: perhaps typographically-strong single-column layouts will become popular out of sheet necessity.

Out of Eden — A Walk Through Time

I like this idea of slow journalism: taking seven years to tell a story.

Snapshot Serengeti

The latest project from Zooniverse is, as you would expect, an extremely enjoyable and useful way to spend your time: classifying animals that have captured in camera trap images.

The opening tutorial is a lesson in how to do “on-boarding” right.

The changing face of computers on screen

A look at the depiction of computer hardware and peripherals in sci-fi movies over time.

Flickr, codeswarming

A beautiful timelapse visualisation of code commits to Flickr from 2004 to 2011.

Form Follows Function

A gorgeous collection of experiments that showcase just how much is possible in browsers today.

Responsive web design interview series: Trent Walton & Jeremy Keith

Trent and I answered a few questions for the Responsive Design Weekly newsletter.

Sparkicons and the humble hyperlink by Mark Boulton

I really like Mark’s idea of standardised “sparkicons” …for a while there, reading this, I was worried he was going to propose something like Snap Preview. shudder

Tapeworm logic by Charles Stross

The Fermi paradox as applied to tapeworms.

‘Sfunny; just yesterday I was revisiting this classic tapeworm tale on Fray.

Interview with Ian Hickson, HTML editor on HTML5 Doctor

Bruce sits down for a chat with Hixie. This is a good insight into the past and present process behind HTML.

Issue 4 — Offscreen Magazine

There’s an interview with me in the new issue of Offscreen Magazine. Some of sort of clerical error, I’m guessing.

Olaf Stapledon

The out-of-copyright books of Olaf Stapledon are available to download from the University of Adelaide. Be sure to grab Starmaker and First And Last Men.

phuu/sparksvg · GitHub

Remember when I made that canvas sparkline script? Remember when Stuart grant my wish for an SVG version? Well, now Tom has gone one further and created a hosted version on sparksvg.me

Not a fan of sparklines? Bars and circles are also available.

Mark Lynas » Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference, 3 January 2013

This is a superb talk by Mark Lynas who once spearheaded the anti-GM movement, and who has now completely changed his stance on genetically-modified crops. Why? Science.

You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have died from choosing organic, but no-one has died from eating GM.

Science Hackday Dublin

Dublin is going to play host to its second Science Hack Day at the start of March. It looks like it’s going to be a fantastic event (again!) but they need sponsors. Do you know of any?

Squaremans | Gaming Culture Blog

Ostensibly about gaming (and written by Matt Colville who works in the games industry), this blog actually has a lot of interesting observations on sci-fi cinema. I like it.

30 Great Reads from 2012 - Readlists

Some of the past year’s best long-form non-fiction, gathered together into a handy readlist for your portable epub pleasure.

Front-end London - A New London Based Meetup for Front-end Developers, hosted by Made by Many

This looks like being an excellent (free) event in London featuring three talks related to front-end web development.

The inaugural event this month features a talk on responsive design, a talk on data visualisation, and a talk on accessibility.

All you need to know about CSS Transitions | Alex MacCaw

An in-depth look at CSS transitions with some handy tips for improving performance.

» Responsive Design for Apps — Part 1 Cloud Four Blog

A great piece by Jason analysing the ever-blurring lines between device classes.

Mind you, there is one question he doesn’t answer which would help clear up his framing of the situation. That question is:

What’s a web app?

Schedule | Breaking Development Dallas 2012: Web design and development for beyond the desktop

All the videos from last year’s Breaking Development conference in Dallas are up on the site. They’re all excellent.

Medaler.com

I know have a visualisation of my public data in the form of 3D-printed snowflake, thanks to Medaler.

CABINET // Trap Streets

A fascinating piece by James on trap streets, those fictitious places on maps that have no corresponding territory.

The Pastry Box Project | 2 January 2013, baked by Chris Coyier

I heartily concur with Chris’s sentiment:

I wish everyone in the world would blog.

PlaceIt by Breezi - Generate Product Screenshots in Realistic Environments

A cute little service for mocking up pictures of your site being used on different devices. Just drag and drop a screenshot on to an image.

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz - Stuff

The biggest plot holes of World War Two.

Warning: contains spoilers.