Link archive: September, 2013

Thoreau 2.0 - XOXO Conference Talk

Maciej’s talk from this year’s XOXO—excellent stuff!

If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work | hacker journalist

A great presentation from Brian Boyer on NPR’s mobile strategy. Spoiler: it’s responsive design.

Star Wars: Endor Holocaust

Realistically, what happens when you detonate a large metallic satellite (about the the size of the second Death Star) in orbit around an inhabited world (like, say, the forest moon of Endor).

It isn’t pretty.

CERN: Line Mode Browser « optional.is/required

Brian writes up his experience working on the line-mode browser hack event at CERN.

Perma: Scoping and addressing the problem of “link rot” :: Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain are uncovering disturbing data on link rot in Supreme Court documents: 50% of the the links cited no longer work.

The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish by Rebecca J. Rosen in The Atlantic

Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability.

Robert Cailliau’s world wide web on Dazed Digital

From CERN to singularity - the digital pioneer and cofounder of the WWW on 20 years of webscapades.

Internet and Web Pioneers: Robert Cailliau - YouTube

Once you get past the cheesy intro music, there are some gems from Robert Cailliau in here.

Smart Quotes for Smart People

Jason provides some instruction in using the correct quotation marks online.

It Takes a Village to Save a Hard Drive

An epic tale of data recovery.

Of course Jason Scott was involved.

Percussive Maintenance on Vimeo

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Kill All Your Darlings - Learning - Source: An OpenNews project

Some good advice on how to mothball (rather than destroy) a project when it reaches the end of its useful life. In short, build a switch so that, when the worst comes to the worst, you can output static files and walk away.

In all your excitement starting a new project, spend a little time thinking about the end.

LMB hack days: Jeremy Keith

I took a little time out of the hacking here at CERN to answer a few questions about the line-mode browser project.

Good Content Is Too Valuable To Die

A heartfelt response from Vitaly to .net magazine’s digital destruction.

The document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993. - CERN Document Server

Earlier today, thanks to Robert Cailliau, I held the only notarised copy of this document. That was quite a feeling.

Dream team of web developers to recreate line-mode browser at CERN

This is what I’m working on today (where by “working on”, I mean “watching other far more talented people work on”).

UX Career Advice – User Experience

Speakers from this year’s UX Week conference provide career advice. I think my advice is clearly the best:

To be successful in today’s industry, UX professionals should have really killer paisley shirts. Some people will tell you that it’s more important to have good hair and straight teeth, but in my experience, a really good paisley shirt will really take you places.

Better late than never: notes from @dconstruct

I’ll even go so far as to say that the line-up both this year and last constituted the best I’ve ever seen at a conference.

The Web Ahead 56: The Nature of the Web with Jeremy Keith on Huffduffer

I had a lot of fun chatting with Jen on this week’s episode of The Web Ahead. Wind me up and let me loose; I ended up rambling on about blogging, the indie web movement, progressive enhancement, and just about everything in between.

Bouzoukis, Brighton and the Bigger Picture: Jeremy Keith Takes the Long View

I had a nice chat with Michelle from Future Insights about the web and long-term thinking.

IndieAuth now supports OpenID delegation! - Aaron Parecki

It’s sad to see MyOpenID shut down, but now I can simply use IndieAuth instead …which means my delegate URL is simply adactio.com: magic!

The Omega Glory

Michael Chabon muses on The Future, prompted by the Clock of the Long Now.

DPD - dConstruct dBrief

I couldn’t keep up with the processing my brain was doing with the stuff it was seeing and hearing.

dConstruct: where the future comes to life

dConstruct represents everything that is great and wonderful about humans: our creativity, initiative, collaboration and ability to approach some challenges in slightly leftfield yet genius ways.

Do as Little as Possible ∙ An A List Apart Column

I heartily concur with Lyza’s mini-manifesto:

I think we need to try to do as little as possible when we build the future web …putting commonality first, approaching differentiation carefully.

It’s always surprised me how quickly developers will reach for complex, potentially over-engineered solutions, when—in my experience—that approach invariably creates more problems than it solves.

Simplicity is powerful.

Progressive Enhancement: It’s About the Content

A cogent definition and spirited defence of progressive enhancement:

Progressive Enhancement is an extension of our shared values on the web and goes to the root of the web. I believe—and hope you agree—that the web is for everybody and should be accessible regardless of the device a user brings to the party.

Benedict Cumberbatch Name Generator

I bet you’re going to just keep clicking and clicking and clicking…

dConstruct 2013. Or rather, now for something completely different - Creative Jar

There are only a select, in my opinion, beautifully crafted conferences and dConstruct is definitely one of them.

BBC Click: 10 Sept 2013: Brighton Digital Festival on Huffduffer

A report from the BBC on this year’s Brighton Digital Festival including interviews with Honor, Timo, and Seb.

68 Middle Street launch and Clearleft 8th birthday party - a set on Flickr

Some lovely pictures from the Clearleft office-warming party last weekend.

dConstruct Brighton, 6 September 2013

Another round-up of this year’s dConstruct.

Needy toasters and cyborgs – dConstruct 2013

Another great write-up of this year’s dConstruct.

Explorers of the combined territory.

Inspired by dConstruct, Ellen is going to start exploring the world of smart objects.

dConstruct 2013 - Kanoti

A comprehensive run-through of this year’s dConstruct.

Designed Addictions / Short memories and recollections from clearer listeners @ dConstruct

A quick-fire burst of dConstruct moments from Simone.

Immaterials, dConstruct and Culture Ships on Vimeo

Iain M.Banks and dConstruct, together at last.

Notes from dConstruct 2013 | Government Digital Service

Matt looks at this year’s dConstruct through the lens of GDS.

dConstruct 2013 – a review : Sally Jenkinson

A really lovely write-up of this year’s dConstruct.

I don’t think a single line of code was shown all day, and yet whilst sipping my MailChimp-sponsored red wine out of a plastic cup at the after-party I pondered the day, and the fact that dConstruct was very likely my favourite conference of the year.

The History of the Internet in a Nutshell

A timeline of technology.

dConstruct: Artists grapple with the culture of technology surveillance

Honor’s piece for The Guardian on this year’s dConstruct.

Three themes from dConstruct 2013

A smart and thoughtful write-up of dConstruct from Lee, pulling together three emergent themes:

1. how we interact with machines and each other,
2. how we co-evolve with machines, and
3. making the invisible visible.

A great, thought-provoking day that proved, once again, that there are many brilliant, generous minds working in or around the future of technology and human experience today.

The future is (almost) here — Liz Pizzuti

A lovely write-up of dConstruct from Liz, including important post-conference conversations at the after-party.

dConstruct 2013 at The Watchmaker Project

Matthew gives a run-down of the talks he managed to catch at this year’s dConstruct when he wasn’t busy manning the Booking.com stand.

Thanks again for sponsoring, Booking.com!

dConstruct 2013: “It’s the Future. Take it.” | matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

This is a terrific write up of this year’s dConstruct, tying together all the emergent themes.

embedresponsively.com

Here’s the CSS and markup you need to make third-party iframes responsive. Handy!

Ask About Going Home

Some examples to illustrate the UK Border Agency’s latest campaign.

Omni Reboot: Hackers Of The Renaissance

This history of hacking.

Information doth wish to be free.

Shinseungback Kimyonghun: Portrait

Beautiful amalgamations of film characters:

A custom software detects faces from every 24 frames of a movie, and creates an average face of all found faces. The composite image reflects the centric figure(s) and the visual mood of the movie.

Omni Reboot | THE LANDLINE

Omni returns with a Bruce Sterling short story that marries alternative history and satire with a dash of digital preservation.

Go ahead, just wait a year, or two years, or maybe five years. Then try to find this, later. There will be no sign of this website, because it’s just made of pixels. No remains of the machine that you read it with, either.

-… ..- .-. .-. .. – — .— ..- … – .. -.-. . | Burrito Justice

A little sojourn around the Victorian internet.

Inspiring Tech Quotes

Some of the more idiotic, harmful, stupid and nasty things said by the thought leaders of Silicon Valley.

Planetary: collecting and preserving code as a living object | Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York

Aaron Straup-Cope and Seb Chan on the challenges of adding (and keeping) code to the Cooper-Hewitt collection:

The distinction between preservation and access is increasingly blurred. This is especially true for digital objects.