Links from April 2008 (Phil Gyford: Links)

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 from April 2008