Links (Phil Gyford)

Links for Monday 28 April 2008

Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All - New York Times: A paper rebuts the Easterlin paradox (that above a certain level money doesn't make one happier). (via Kevin Kelly)
Soundamus - new and upcoming music releases from the artists you listen to: Looks at your Last.fm playlist and tells you when new music by your listened-to artists is released. Could do with some kind of threshold, but still very useful.
Color Wars 2008 » Youngme / Nowme: People submit a photo of themselves as a child, alongside a photo of themself today in the same pose. Some of these are awesome. Whole lives in two photos. Time travel. Hope.
Timeframe: Very nice calendar selector widget. (via Daring Fireball)
David Weiss: Metacognitive Miscalibration: Thinking things are easy when you don't know enough to tell. "There's a great difference between 50 years of experience and 1 years worth of experience repeated 50 times." (via Daring Fireball)
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody: Clay on the answer to "where do they [gamers, Wikipedias, bloggers, etc.] find the time?" By watching less TV. Great stuff.
2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky: Or watch Clay give that "how do they find the time?" talk in person on this video. Worth it; he's an awesome speaker. (via Daring Fireballl)

Links for Saturday 19 April 2008

Your London - Living: "This website lets you search for food businesses across London to find out the hygiene rating they achieved from their last food hygiene inspection." Am I Being Poisoned Or Not? (via Haddock)
Vote Match: Help to decide who to vote for in the London elections. For me it says: Paddick, Livingstone, Left List, Greens… Still hard to decide. (via Haddock)
TweetDumpr: Exports all your Twitters to a CSV file. (via MegP)
Cityofsound: Monocle: design notes: Dan Hill's fantastic description of the design decisions that went into the Monocle website. Lovely to see a site that manages to be distinctive but still classy.
Postcard from Provence ◊ a painting a day ◊ a daily painting blog: He paints a painting every day and then auctions it. Lovely paintings. Something like this has been my exit strategy for a while (assuming I found time to improve at painting/drawing/etc). (via Textism)
Kbinstuff -perl, Unicode/utf8, CGI.pm, apache, mod_perl and MySQL: My Perl scripts were never fetching UTF8 strings from a UTF8 database. Much cursing later, I found this reference to doing $dbh->("mysql_enable_utf8") = 1. Seems to work. Finally. Grr.

Links for Tuesday 15 April 2008

Tweet Clouds: Showing what words you use most on Twitter. Home, College, Day, Work are the unremarkable stand-outs for me. (via Russell Davies)
A List Apart: Articles: Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards: Lovely CSS bar charts and sparklines created in HTML and CSS.
Zamzar - Free online file conversion: Convert a file to a different kind. Audio, video, text documents, archives, etc. Plus download YouTube etc videos in a different format. (via Cool Tools)
Free Traffic For Your Squidoo Lens on Squidoo: Instructions for how to spam people via Twitter. As Ian said, wankers, making the Internet a little bit more unpleasant for everyone else.
Long live Karl Marx! « The Bristol Blogger: Awww… we used to see this guy at Ashton Court Festival, wandering around in a leather thong with a huge bottle of cider. He was called Colin Toogood and he's died.
Best Game Ever at Improv Everywhere: Brings a tear to my eye. Another lovely, lovely event.

Links for Thursday 10 April 2008

HistoryShots Information Graphics - Prints: Nice posters of timelines and similar infographics, along the lines of that one of Napoleon's Russian campaign. Mostly American topics. (via Haddock)
DadHacker » Blog Archive » Donkey Kong and Me: Lovely early days of computing story about the guy who wrote Donkey Kong for the Atari 400/800 home computer. (via Kottke)
Freaky People Productions » Blog Archive » Google Maps causes Safari 1.3.2 to crash: If you use the Google Maps API your Javascript may have recently started crashing Safari 1.3.2. This is how to fix it.
YouTube - Design Coding: Rap: "Please don't use tables even though they work fine, when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time. Make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide, remove font-type, font-color and font-size." Awesome. (via Haddock)
Gumbaby: Collecting comments left on vaguely-related websites by people thinking they're contacting a famous person. I still occasionally get comments left by people talking to Jamie Oliver.
Purgatory Creek: For the "Digital Piano Shootout" — MP3s of dozens of different digital pianos for comparison.

Links for Friday 4 April 2008

Mail-trends - Google Code: "Mail Trends lets you analyze and visualize your email (as extracted from an IMAP server)" Haven't tried it, but it looks purty. (via Haddock)
Philgyford.muxtape.com: My Muxtape. Which may or may not update occasionally.
Asaph - phoboslab.org: Nice-looking and very simple weblog CMS focused on collecting links, photos and quotes, rather than writing stuff yourself. (via Daring Fireball)
BSA Actor Training: Part-time courses in London from somewhere I haven't heard of. (I keep meaning to collate such places in a post. One day.)
Ladybird Prints: Nostalgia prints. Great idea, some lovely illustrations there. (via Blech)
CanonicalTomes: Web Archive version of a site I've been trying to remember for years. It tried to create a database of "books … which define their respective domains". Didn't get very far.

Links for Friday 28 March 2008

Kevin Kelly — Help Wanted — The world's best how-to?: "What are the best how-to books, videos, software, websites that you've ever seen?" From 2004.
Kevin Kelly — The Technium — The Forever Book: Not just a library of all essential knowledge about human civilisation, but it would contain instructions for how to recreate a version of itself. From 2006.
Lina Scheynius (MS Logan Photographic Agency): I like this photo and some of her others. I hope it's this one; stupid, slow, infuriating Flash interface makes it hard to link to stuff. Who commissions this crap (the website, not the photos)?
YouTube - Bristol In The 1920s: Lovely old footage of bits of Bristol. Presumably with sound added more recently. (via the Bristol Blogger)
YouTube - Wills's Girls: Interviews with women who used to work at Wills' tobacco factory in Bristol. Lovely, but would have been much better if we could just see the women being interviewed, instead of all the graphics.

Links for Tuesday 25 March 2008

Wikinear.com: Awesome little app by Simon Willison that shows you places near you from Wikipedia, using Yahoo! Fire Eagle. Makes me want an iPhone.
Fawnt - Top free fonts | Font - Archive | Blog Design and Webdesign: What it says. (via Blackbeltjones)
We Are The Lambeth Boys: Really, really lovely 1959 documentary by Karel Reisz about young men and women at a London youth club. Fascinating for both similarities and differences to now. Do watch. 49 mins.
Archive Player - FourDocs - O Dreamland: 1953 Lindsay Anderson film about a fun fair in Margate. A bit dreamy, with sound added after the filming; no authorial voice over or interviews. (Click 'Play' button for tiny but full-length screening.)
Alexandre Day: I like these drawings. Verge slightly on the too twee, with those winsome eyes, but I love the marks. (via Drawn!)

Links