Links from January 2011

Links for Monday 3 January 2011
LRB · Vol. 33 No. 1 · 6 January 2011 · letters
I must have missed the government's embarrassment and apologies over its peaceful citizens being treated like this by the police in the student protests.

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Links for Wednesday 5 January 2011
Old maps of Southwark - Southwark Council
Not just maps of Southwark, but good resolution PDFs of historical maps of London. Good. (via @alanconnor)
Flickr: The Broad Street & old Liverpool Street station, London Pool
Some good old pics. I should remember a lot more of the old Liverpool and Broad Street stations than I do.
How to represent a pension investment account? / Questions / Discussion Area - Moneydance Support
It's currently impossible to represent UK pensions in Moneydance, which is otherwise quite good.
Christmas on the high street: retail winners and losers | Business | guardian.co.uk
2011's award for 'Most Pointless And Over The Top Use Of Flash' has already been won by the Guardian! Horrifyingly hilarious. (via @dracos)
Boardwalk Empire VFX Breakdowns of Season 1 on Vimeo
I love watching these kinds of effects reels. It's amazing what you see these days that's so realistic you don't really notice the effects. (via Kottke)
URL Design — Warpspire
Tips for designing URLs, most of which seems like common sense to me, but also some tips re HTML5 Javascript shenanigans. (via Simon Willison)

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Links for Thursday 6 January 2011
Staging Servers, Source Control & Deploy Workflows, And Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You: MicroISV on a Shoestring
Handy description of git and staging/production environments and workflow. In like reading how other people do things. (via mildlydiverting)

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Links for Friday 7 January 2011
Rory Hyde Projects / Blog » Blog Archive » ‘Know No Boundaries’: an interview with Matt Webb of BERG London
Nice interview with Webb about design and BERG and stuff. (via Preoccupations)
ThinkUp: Social Media Insights Engine
Looks fascinating - a PHP/MySQL project you can install which then grabs your Twitter and Facebook network info and processes and graphs it al. (via Preoccupations)
Cyberspace When You’re Dead - NYTimes.com
Long article about what happens to peoples' online lives after they die. Good stuff, although I find so many companies' focus on safeguarding passwords odd; it doesn't seem like the big problem in this area. (via Haddock)
That Gormandizer Man: How London buses are numbered - TfL come up trumps!
A lovely and interesting email from TfL. I love how historic numbers are maintained/adapted. It's the kind of thing that has no direct benefit to a company's profit, but it makes the world a better place.
Simon Reynolds' 2010 (Playlist by philgyford - Spotify)
I made a playlist of all of the albums and tracks Simon Reynolds liked most from 2010. Well, those I could find on Spotify, around 50%.
And Now Presenting: Amazing Satellite Images Of The Ghost Cities Of China
I skipped this link the first couple of times seeing it, but I'm glad I finally looked. Amazing, stunning amounts of development, largely uninhabited. (via BERG)

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Links for Saturday 8 January 2011
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
"The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. 'Intense moderation' in a customer service medium is what 'editing' was for publishing. ... Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members."

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Links for Sunday 9 January 2011
YouTube - The London Nobody Knows (Part 1 of 4) Documentary
'The London Nobody Knows' has found its way to YouTube. Watch, if you haven't seen it, and you like/know London, in case it disappears.
Django-syncr: Synchronize Django with the web | JesseLegg.com
Introduction to django-syncr, which grabs Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, etc stuff from your accounts to your own Django-powered website.
Django-syncr - Project Hosting on Google Code
The "official" django-syncr source, but not updated since December 2008.
Danfairs/django-syncr at danfairs - GitHub
What looks like the most active copy of django-syncr around. Dan's adding stuff to the 'danfairs' branch.
From zero to coder hero: Synchronizing django with twitter using django-syncr
How to fix the out-of-date django-syncr to work with Twitter's OAuth.
Cyclists in the City: HGVs - Time to make common cause with pedestrians and motorcyclists?
Some figures on how pedestrian and cycle casualties are caused in the City. Only 5% of pedestrian casualties are the result of cyclists, although pedestrians generally feel cyclists are dangerous. 

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Links for Monday 10 January 2011
Exquisite Tweets
Really handy way of being able to point at an entire Twitter conversation, or a hand-curated selection of tweets, from James Wheare.
Obama London: Inexplicable Edits on Sarah Palin's Facebook Page
It's fascinating how quickly Palin's team remove comments (and fair enough; it's their page). It's annoying how many people shout that this is "censorship", as if they wouldn't do the same if the tables were turned.
Who killed the Intel microprocessor? | asymco
I never knew about the difference between Intel (who design, manufacture and sell microprocessors) and ARM (who license microprocessors which designers use as part of a chip which is then manufactured by a fabricator).
New Lightroom plug-in – CaptureTime to Exif - John Beardsworth
Bascially a Lightroom-plugin front-end for Exiftool. Lets you easily update the Date Time Original EXIF field (eg, for setting the date a scanned photo was taken) but also add other arguments manually.
LRB · job
Now that's a job advert. No faffing. "The 'London Review of Books' is looking for an editor, preferably one with an interest in politics and history. Would suit a young, disaffected academic."

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Links for Tuesday 11 January 2011
Matt Webb's Interconnected (it's all confused and beautiful.)
Like very year, I meant to start blogging more frequently. Webb's actually doing it. I just caught up on his January over lunch and feel like I've eaten too well.
Oops on Vimeo
Found footage of video cameras being dropped. So much more absorbing than you'd imagine. Beautifully done. (via Waxy)
The Online Photographer: OT: The Worst Remuddling Job in the History of the Universe
Amazing that someone could prefer the second over the first, but a reminder of how very different people are to what seems "normal" to me/you/whoever. But even so. (Also, click through "the 'Ouch' post".)

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Links for Wednesday 12 January 2011
trendwatching.com: Join our team
TrendWatching have two full-time jobs going in London. A decade ago I expect I would have been super keen on these.
Movieos - London again
Tom Insam, ex of Dopplr, is back in London and looking for a job. You should try to hire him, because he is good.
In praise of the sci-fi corridor - Den of Geek
Wonderful essay about science fiction movie corridors, with lots of pictures. The internet gives generously. (via @moleitau)
YouTube - "Fuck you" Sign language performance
You know the song, and it's just a girl in a classroom doing sign language, how good can it be... Watch it! It's my favourite thing I've seen in a while and makes me all smiley. Brilliant!

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Links for Thursday 13 January 2011
Requiem for a Dream
Still one of my favourite websites promoting a film. Tries to convert the feeling of the film into something more about the web (of ten years ago) (in Flash). Also, it's great to see that it's still online.

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Links for Saturday 15 January 2011
Avatron Software: Air Display
Six quid for this, but I had to give it a go (two screens aren't enough!). Feels like magic: a wireless screen! But updating (eg, dragging windows) is pretty jerky and it can use 10-25% of my MacBook's CPU when I'm dragging stuff on it, 15% if something is updating frequently (like Activity Monitor). Around 2% when idle. But could be very handy for some things.

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Links for Sunday 16 January 2011
Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
For future arguing reference. But also, I don't understand why monospaced typewriter folk wanted two spaces either; I still type emails monospaced, and two spaces looks ugly. (via Preoccupations)
Pepys' Shows: Samuel Pepys' Theatre Reviews
The remarkable Matthew Somerville and Clare Lovell made a lovely little thing at Culture Hack Day: a random review of a play as seen by Samuel Pepys, also linking to Theatricalia.

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Links for Monday 17 January 2011
Irvinebrown » Music for Shuffle
I'm listening to this now. It's lovely. Little snippets of music that can be played in any order. Clever Matt.

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Links for Wednesday 19 January 2011
Exquisite Tweets from @candicecbailey...
Whoops! One careless word and suddenly people think there's a shooting in Oxford Circus. @candicecbailey appears to have deleted her original tweet now, although it's not really her fault. (via @abscond)
Philgyford | Share Spotify Playlists at ShareMyPlaylists.com
Here are my Spotify playlists, in case anything takes your fancy. i'll update it when I make new ones worth sharing.

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Links for Thursday 20 January 2011
Is Mobile Affecting When We Read? « Read It Later Blog
Interesting graphs of when ReadItLater users read stuff online, whether on desktop, iPhone or iPad. I definitely read less on my computer now I have an iPad. (via Kottke)
iPad View Source Bookmarklet - Ravelrumba
What it says. Could be handy. (via Daring Fireball)

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Links for Saturday 22 January 2011
Vice Style » News » Riot Girls, Literally
Wondering if VICE's next fashion shoot will be in a war zone. Or maybe, yeah, like in Africa, you know, like with all the famines and that? Amazing light! (via @benhammersley)

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Links for Monday 24 January 2011
In English « Haluan nähdä muutakin
1458 people donated money to keep 21 bus and tram stops in Helsinki free of advertising for a week. A shame the posters still had big text on though. (via @antimega)
Implementing a Fixed Position iOS Web Application - Google Mobile Developer Products - Google Code
Brilliant: how to (a) make page elements fixed on iOS Safari (which doesn't acknowledge position:fixed, grrrr) and (b) do scrolling with momentum. Gmail in iOS Safari is very swish.
Trustworthy Digital Repository - Chronicle of Life
Really interesting description of an organisation to keep peoples' data safe forever. This organisational stuff must be at least half the battle, aside from technical things. Rest of site seems a bit... clunky though. (via Haddock)
Little Big Details
Examples of nice little UI touches. Some a bit obvious but others that are lovely. (via @paulpod)

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Links for Thursday 27 January 2011
LRB · Iain Sinclair · The Raging Peloton
He has a nice turn of phrase but Iain Sinclair is a gloomy, misanthropic reactionary who thinks the only people who can ride bikes authentically are the 1950s working class and eccentric poets. One wonders why he still lives in London.
Grenson | Men's Shoes, Men's Brogues, Mens Boots, Handmade Shoes, British Shoes
Some nice shoes, the name of which I'll forget. (via Antimega)

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Links for Sunday 30 January 2011
A (Complete) Guide to Running Django on Joyent Shared Accelerators using Virtualenv, pip, git, and NginX | ecarmi.org
Brilliant. I've been waiting a long, long time for instructions like this.

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Links for Monday 31 January 2011
Barbican - Images | Jamie Smith
Some nice photos of the Barbican by a student who's doing a project on it. They'd be even nicer if they didn't have a copyright statement stamped across their middles though.

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