- Sourcefabric
“Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences.”
- Information Diet | Notifications are evil
“For me, the evilest thing that Google has ever done is put that red box on the search-results page. Every Google search now says to me: “we know you’re in the middle of searching for something, but we think that you might instead like to immediately know that somebody that you don’t know has followed you on Google+, so we’ve made a bright red box — the most eye catching and animated thing on the page, just so you know.” Google’s not doing this because Google+ has actual, relevant information that requires my immediate attention. If they were interested in that, they’d give me actual control over what goes into that red box, or give me the ability to shut it off entirely. No — they’re doing this because they want me to use Google+ more, so that they can say that they boosted “user engagement on Google+” on their next earnings call.”
c/o rw
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London Fashion Week
Being a bit of a fan of animated gifs I love that Burberry has been posting them for the London Fashion Week.
c/o @sandoz
- What’s the difference between Text Document, Text Document – MS-DOS Format, and Unicode Text Document? MSDN Blogs
“In the United States, the so-called ANSI code page is code page 1252, the so-called OEM code page is code page 437, and Unicode is code page 1200.”
- NHS leaflet mixes past and present | Ben Goldacre | The Guardian
Incremental privatization of the NHS using misleading “facts” and figures.
“Then we have choice: “95% want more choice over their healthcare”. The source given is the British Social Attitudes Survey. Interestingly, the government has just announced that it’s going to abolish the British Social Attitudes Survey. The data was collected in 2007, and if you download it you’ll see they didn’t ask about “more choice”.”
- New code lets websites opt-out of Pinterest. | LL Social
This week I wrote about Pinterest’s potential copyright violations. Pinterest is taking these issues seriously and implementing changes to better allow publishers to opt-out of Pinterest.
Pinterest made an addition to their help section called “What if I don’t want images from my site to be pinned?”:
We have a small piece of code you can add to the head of any page on your site:
- How You Could Get Sued For Using Pinterest
FUD? “Web editor Galen Moore started playing around with the rapidly-growing social network on Thursday as a possible way to share the visual images that the Boston Business Journal uses in its coverage of real estate development: things like blueprints, artists conceptions and photos. But by Friday afternoon he had pulled the content after taking a careful read of Pinterest’s user agreement and finding out the company reserves the right to sell images users upload.
“In other words, if you upload an image that doesn’t belong to you and Pinterest sells it, you could be sued for copyright infringement.”
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Cost of living
c/o devour.com
Mad Men – Season 5 – ‘Don Is Back’
- How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy – Magazine – The Atlantic
“[Jaroslav Flegr] began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family [carried by house cats] was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.
“..if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”
c/o kottke
- All sizes | so you want to be a modern poster designer? | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
6 Rules of modern poster design c/o kottke
- A nice cup of rabies – Memorial: Ricky Garduno
The “In loving memory of Ricky Garduno” at the end of Family Guy’s “Tom Tucker: The Man and His Dream” episode prompted a search for Ricky Garduno which led to this heartfelt and searching illustrated tribute to him.
- The Electoral Wasteland – NYTimes.com
“[W]hen you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States. They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.” c/o @syntheticpubes
- Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy – Bloomberg
“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”
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TV series I’ve binged my way through, too
Lizzy Caplan, Party Down
Party Down – ★★★★☆
Dead Like Me – ☆☆☆☆☆
Southland – ★★★★☆
- hit & miss for first couple of seasons, then great
House MD – ★★★☆☆
Community – ★★★☆☆
Misfits – ★★★★★
Person of Interest – ★★★☆☆
Luther – ★★★★☆
Fringe – ★★☆☆☆
Louie – ★★★★☆
Sons of Anarchy – ★★☆☆☆
- the Irish story line? Really?
- Escapes.js
escapes.js is a small JavaScript library for rendering ANSI art, a form of computer art that flourished in the mid 90s. ANSI art was composed by colorizing sequences of characters and blocks drawn in the built-in system font, which made it easy to transmit across telephone wires. As a result, ANSI art was especially popular on Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes).
This library was designed to be simple and fun to hack on. It has no hard dependencies, but it integrates neatly with jQuery.
- Music Lessons (that work for publishing, too) – The Domino Project
4. Permission is the asset of the future
For generations, businesses had no idea who their end users were. No ability to reach through the record store and figure out who was buying that Rolling Stones album, no way to know who bought this book or that vase.Today, of course, permission is an asset to be earned. The ability (not the right, but the privilege) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. For ten years, the music business has been steadfastly avoiding this opportunity.
It’s interesting though, because many musicians have NOT been avoiding it. Many musicians have understood that all they need to make a (very good) living is to have 10,000 fans. 10,000 people who look forward to the next record, who are willing to trek out to the next concert. Add 7 fans a day and you’re done in 5 years. Set for life. A life making music for your fans, not finding fans for your music.
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