Links from March 2008

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.

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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!)

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Links for Friday 21 March 2008
FlickrSLiDR - Embed Flickr Slideshows within Your Site
Very nice way to include a slideshow of Flickr images in your website.
Daf Yomi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“… a daily regimen undertaken to study the Babylonian Talmud one folio (a daf consists of both sides of the page) each day.” Would take 7.5 years. (via Haddock)
How to Learn Math and Physics
Recommendations of books to take you through the main topics of physics and maths. Oh for much, much more time.
The Lost Tools of Learning
Dorothy L. Sayers suggested reviving the Trivium — grammar, rhetoric and dialectic — as children's education. Learning how to learn, rather than learning subjects.
TCPDF - PHP Class for PDF
Yet another PDF-generating PHP class. An improvement on FPDF (does UTF-8 for a start), but I had some problems getting tables to look just how I wanted.
Nkreeger.com - projects
“… a native cocoa mail client that uses the Mozilla mail/news library and the gecko browser view that Camino uses.” Early days.
BBC - BBC Three - TV Listings
TV listings done as a slowly whizzy (and pointless) Flash thing. Is there really *nothing* more useful that BBC staff could be doing? (via Haddock)
FlickrSLiDR - Embed Flickr Slideshows within Your Site
On the increasingly annoying “FAIL!” meme. Half my friends on Twitter sound interchangeable these days, as if they must regurgitate this month's coolest phrases or look like losers.
Offline folders - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
The hidden (in that you have to create it) Thunderbird setting to have it store copies of IMAP messages locally.

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Links for Wednesday 12 March 2008
Condé Nast set for a flurry of launches - Brand Republic News - Brand Republic
Apparently planning a UK edition of 'Wired'. Hahahahaha Boohoohoohoo. (via Haddock)
The Joyent Community / Any news on IronPorts (or even spamassassin or grep -v "st0ckZ")?
"A brief history of announced spam solutions from Joyent/Textdrive." Since 2005. Still waiting.
Journal of ziggy (25)
Using perl to extract ID3 data from the iTunes Music Library XML file and then update the relevant MP3s with the correct data.
Jaikoz Audio Tagger
Multi-platform ID3 tagging app, for most kinds of music file, using MusicBrainz and MusicIP. 15 quid, but powerful, even if a bit, you know, Java.
Extenuating Circumstances – SXSW 2008: Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together
Good notes on a SXSW panel. I wonder where I'd fit in, but also wonder why I'm doing all this theatre nonsense when reading stuff like this makes me so excited.
Lunch over IP: What social networking site is popular where
A map and charts showing relative popularity of Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, etc in different continents. Amazing how much it varies. (via ChrisDodo)
Food Court Musical at Improv Everywhere
This video makes me all happy. (via Boing Boing)

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Links for Sunday 9 March 2008
This American Life: 348: Tough Room
Click "Full Episode" then skip forward five minutes for a quarter of an hour of 'The Onion's staff talking about what makes a story funny or not. (via Jane in Progress)
New World Notes: All About My Avatar: Tasrill Sieyes
A Second Life avatar based on Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase'. First thing that's made me interested in getting into SL. (via Haddock)
Ironic Sans: The Other Art of Courtroom Sketch Artists
What the people who do the drawings of court proceedings draw/paint when not in court. I like Patrick Flynn's court work there. (via Drawn!)
BBC Internet Blog - BBC iPlayer On iPhone: Behind The Scenes
I'm liking this blog when it gives some insight into how things work behind the scenes. Shame about all the dumb comments though.
YouTube - Ignite ETech 2008: Matt Webb
Matt's fun five minute whizz around fictional versions of the solar system. Wish I'd been in San Diego and Austin this past week.

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Links for Wednesday 5 March 2008
Automatic writing | eG weekly | EducationGuardian.co.uk
Fascinating. Philip M Parker can generate a book automatically when someone orders it. I stumbled across one for sale on Amazon. (via Haddock)
David Cameron: More people engaged in local life means local politics revitalised
Cameron wants more local government data published online in open formats for people to do stuff with. Cites TheyWorkForYou.com. (via Alan Connor)
Cityofsound: Robin Hood Gardens is not the same as a digital model of Robin Hood Gardens
Dan Hill's excellent summary of the protest going on over plans to demolish the London housing estate. I hope they renovate rather than destroy.
Save the Railway Path | The campaign to save the Bristol to Bath cycle path from being turned into a bus-lane
Protest site over some daffy plans to let buses run alongside the peaceful but well-used Bristol to Bath cycle path.
AntiRSI - TECH.inhelsinki.nl
I've tried a few apps that nag you to take a break from the computer. I was using TimeOut but this manages to be both more subtle and more insistent.
Kevin Kelly - The Technium - 1,000 True Fans
The idea that you only need a relatively small number of people willing to pay you occasionally for your work in order to make a living. (Stewart Lee suggested he needed 7,000 fans in 2005.)
Fundable Online Fundraising
Ask people to pledge money to something you do. No one pays anything until you reach your funding target. (via Kevin Kelly)
Equidistant Objects with CSS - CSS-Tricks
Spacing things out horizontally with CSS. (via Simon Willison)
Yahoo! Developer Network: Fire Eagle Launches - O'Reilly Conferences
Tom Coates launching Fire Eagle. Yay congratulations Tom (and team)! We miss you over here you know.
Litmus: Pricing and signup
24 hours passes now available for this Browsercam-like site for testing web pages and emails against different rendering engines. (via Daring Fireball)

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