Links from October 2011

Links for Saturday 1 October 2011
James Meek · It'€™s already happened: The NHS Goes Private · LRB 22 September 2011
Long, good, interesting, righteous-anger-inducing article about the ongoing privatisation of the NHS, and how the service compares to other options. I am struggling not to swear.
Pinboard/Fandom OTP - Renaming tags
A way to rename any/all of your tags on Pinboard using Python. (via @pinboard)
The Best (and Worst) of Django
A presentation covering a few things to do or avoid. Bookmarking it mainly for the settings bit at the end, something I should do better, like this.

Permalink

Links for Monday 3 October 2011
A New Season of Arrested Development?! - TV News at IGN
Ooh, exciting. Director and cast have confirmed a new short season to be shot next summer, along with the long-promised movie. Backing not certain yet though. (via @secretbean)
00:/Blog - Silicon Roundabout’s ‘Start-up City’
Ugh. How do you take the really ugly Old Street roundabout and make it even more ugly and hideous and somewhere you really wouldn't want to be? Like this! (via @antimega)
Django Deployment Workshop by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
This looks good. A three hour video tutorial about deploying Django, "including Amazon's EC2 and S3, Fabric, Varnish, nginx, mod_wsgi, memcached, PostgreSQL, pgpool, pg_standby, and more." I just need to find three spare hours now.

Permalink

Links for Tuesday 4 October 2011
Street Fashion Photography Is Messing With Me « Thought Catalog
Ha, very good. My memories of photos on these blogs does collapse into: women in casually very little; women in expensive smartness; men, usually older, in odd combinations.

Permalink

Links for Wednesday 5 October 2011
Melin Maildy
I'm enjoying this blog, chronicling one person preparing to make and sell things they knit. Suppliers, materials, processes, etc. (via @hiutdenim)
Astrogator’s Logs » Blog Archive » If They Come, It Might Get Built
"If we launch starships, whether of exploration or settlement, they won’t be conquerors; they will be worse off than the Polynesians on their catamarans, the losses will be heavy and their state at planetfall won’t resemble anything depicted in Hollywood SF." (via Futurismic)

Permalink

Links for Thursday 6 October 2011
Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Obama: "The reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over."

Permalink

Links for Saturday 8 October 2011
Outlier Tailored Performance Clothing for a Life in Motion
If you tell me your simple, plain-looking clothes are made out of innovative hi-tech fabrics, I'm half-way there. (via Lineage of Influence)
Cadence App | Your Music. Your Motion. | Cadence BPM Tapper
Blacktree's old iTunes-BPM doesn't work on Lion, but this free app is a decent replacement. Tap in time to a song, click a button to update the tune's BPM setting in iTunes.

Permalink

Links for Sunday 9 October 2011
Rude Britannia is a myth, says report into English manners | Society | The Observer
"While people care more deeply about bad manners and unkindness from strangers than they do about crime ... they are often unaware of how their own behaviour might offend." The report isn't yet on the Young Foundation's site,
The Business of Blogging | The Sartorialist − BoF – The Business of Fashion
How 'The Sartorialist' blog makes money. (Mainly advertising, but a few other sporadic things too.) (via @GreatDismal)

Permalink

Links for Monday 10 October 2011
London Cycling Campaign | Campaigns | Key campaigns | Blackfriars | People-friendly Blackfriars
Pretty impressive graphics and animations for an alternative vision of a tricky junction, as competition for the official and protested-against plans.
Noah Raford » Complete PhD Online
“Large Scale Participatory Futures Systems: a Comparative Study of Online Scenario Planning Approaches” focused on the field of urban planning. I would like to work out how to make time to read this. (via @cityofsound)
The last days of a legendary gay venue | From the Guardian | The Guardian
Awww, that's a shame. Gay or not, First Out was a lovely little cafe. Progress, eh?

Permalink

Links for Tuesday 11 October 2011
Porn blocking: what the big four ISPs are actually doing | Broadband | News | PC Pro
A good description of what this "porn blocking" actually involves. The filtering actually happens through McAfee Family Protection, installed on the users' Windows PCs. I wish newspapers, TV, etc were this accurate and less hand wavy. (via @ianbetteridge)
"Secret" Firmware lets Late '08 MacBooks use 8GB. | Other World Computing Blog
Ooh, blimey, looks like I could double the RAM in my three-year-old MacBook. (via Tom Taylor)

Permalink

Links for Friday 14 October 2011
Django snippets: Filter by taggit tags in the admin
That'll be handy at some point.

Permalink

Links for Sunday 16 October 2011
Discombobulated: Guardian iPad: Product challenges
Jonathan Moore on the process of developing the new app, from a product point of view. (via Preoccupations)
The Guardian iPad edition design evolution | Media | guardian.co.uk
Images showing different stages from the process behind developing the new iPad app.
Mark Porter » Blog Archive » New work: The Guardian iPad app
His description of the design work behind the new app, which is very good indeed.
Amanda Knox: What's in a face? | World news | The Guardian
Fascinating article about how quickly, and wrongly, we judge others. "The model we seem to work with is something like this: I am infinitely subtle, complex and never quite what I seem; you are predictable and straightforward, an open book."
Charm Offensive: Cultivating Civility in 21st Century Britain (Oct 2011) | The Young Foundation
The Young Foundation's report, an interesting read. Free PDF.
BBC News - 'Occupy' is a response to economic permafrost
Good stuff by Paul Mason. "Occupy Everywhere, then, is the kind of movement you get when people start to believe mainstream politicians have lost their principles, or are trapped by vested interests, or are all crooked." (via Preoccupations)

Permalink

Links for Tuesday 18 October 2011
I took students down to #occupywallst today. I... - Fresser.
Kevin Slavin: "Tonight, I came across the 99 Percent Tumblr ... I’ve spent the last 30 minutes staring at the screen, wondering just what is supposed to happen next."
The last spasms of a dying business model – Why the Guardian iPad App is a step into the past « The Tall Designer
Criticisms of the Guardian's iPad app, almost all of which I entirely disagree with.
How the Guardian’s iPad app changed the way that I consumed news
Martin Belam on the Guardian's iPad app, and how it's... well, it says in the title. (via Preoccupations)

Permalink

Links for Wednesday 19 October 2011
The Guardian iPad App | The Ministry of Type
A comprehensive, and very positive, overview of the user's experience of the app's design.
Emptyage — Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It
I'm not quite sure what point this is trying to make, if any, but I like it all the same. (via Waxy)

Permalink

Links for Thursday 20 October 2011
Peak oil, the next Kondratiev cycle, generational turnings, and ERE Early Retirement Extreme: — The choice nobody ever told you about
Great thinking on long term futures. Kondratiev cycles, peak oil, the downturn, the next world war, generations. Well worth a read.

Permalink

Links for Friday 21 October 2011
Telegraph Pole Hieroglyphics | Hardware
Interpreting the carvings and badges on telegraph poles.

Permalink

Links for Saturday 22 October 2011
Will someone rid me of this turbulent language | Robinince's Blog
On the Ricky Gervais "mong" debacle. It's thoughtful posts like this that confirm how ineffectual tweets are for serious, nuanced discussions. (via @D_Nye_Griffiths)
Amazon introduces new Kindle eBook format and makes a major misstep :Guido Henkel
This kind of obsolescence in an already fairly new platform doesn't encourage me to buy a Kindle. (via @jamesbridle)

Permalink

Links for Sunday 23 October 2011
BBC - Adam Curtis Blog: The Curae of TINA
blimey, just caught up with this, and it's an incredible read. Hayek, Radio Caroline, Thatcher, Institute for Economic Affairs... so many things. I really wish the BBC would get a non-Flash video player though.
Paradise Regained « Snarkmarket
That is a lovely story from the introduction to a Project Gutenberg ebook of 'Paradise Lost'. 100,000 punch cards!
Infovore » Why on earth would you do otherwise?
Tom writes everything I thought while reading Igor's good Wieden+Kennedy blog post about "creative technologists", only better than I would have done.
iCal Cleaner
Deletes duplicate events, and more, from iCal calendars. Just what I needed after a big iCloud confusion. And it's free.
United States Early Radio History
A fascinating read, with loads of links to text and images from period articles and adverts.

Permalink

Links for Monday 24 October 2011
jQuery.fracs · larsjung.de
A library for dealing with objects that extend beyond the viewport - how much is visible, where it is, etc.

Permalink

Links for Tuesday 25 October 2011
Travel Back In Time With Yahoo! Maps | Londonist
Yahoo's (and therefore Flickr's) aerial photos are about a decade old. Watching Yahoo slowly stagnate and decay and crumble is like seeing a once-excitingly new part of town become a ruined no-go zone.
A 53% Surge in Poverty Rate Is Reshaping Suburbs - NYTimes.com
I've thought for years, decades, that when sprawling suburbs with few through roads stop being comfortably wealthy, their unlivableness is going to be horribly apparent. Dead ends in two senses.
I cite: End of #OccupyWallStreet: conflict over drummers
Nothing good can come of drumming circles. But this is very interesting. People who simply won't play the rules (however collectively those rules are agreed) are why democracies end up with police forces. And online communities end up banning people. etc. (via @ianbetteridge)

Permalink

Links for Friday 28 October 2011
Overton window - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Overton window, in political theory, describes a 'window' in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on a particular issue." More extreme ideas can expand the range of the window, making previously unacceptable ideas acceptable. (via Haddock)
Infovore/goodcastle - GitHub
"A script for deploying Wordpress sites." Sounds useful. I've never been sure how to deploy bloggy/CMS stuff other than terrible FTPing etc.

Permalink