Links from May 2012

Links for Friday 4 May 2012
Jacqueline Rose · A Rumbling of Things Unknown: Marilyn Monroe · LRB 26 April 2012
I know very little about Monroe but she sounds brilliant, sadness aside. This is a great, long article about how she was always reading and learning and trying to do things the right way.
Life after Seinfeld | Television & radio | The Guardian
Not really about life after Seinfeld at all, just a really nice appreciation of the show, including lots of sitcom writers saying how they copied its structure etc. It's still my happy place.
A Profile of London by A.A. Gill - NYTimes.com
"The natives may, occasionally, if backed against a wall, be rudimentarily helpful, but mostly they’ll ignore you with the huffing sighs of people in a hurry." "She furiously bellowed; 'Oh my God, is there no end to these improvements?'" (via Haddock)

Permalink

Links for Monday 7 May 2012
Visiting NYC? Where to Eat in New York, The Best Restaurants And More | Serious Eats : New York
Because one day I'll visit again. and this looks a food list. (via Kottke)
Timeline of the far future - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Starts in 10,000 years time and goes on from there. (via Dan Hon)

Permalink

Links for Tuesday 8 May 2012
White Negro for Mayor
Adam Curtis on Normal Mailer and the rise of hipsters. "Today it is possible to argue that we have all become gay white negroes."
Early Modern Texts - Philosophers and Philosophy Topics
Lots of older philosophy works translated into more modern English to make them easier going today. (via The Online Photographer)
The Online Photographer: Blog Note
I keep hearing an ad at the cinema with a cover of 'Little Boxes' on it. No idea what it's for, but I enjoyed the Featured Comment from Ctein on this post, who lives in Daly City, which is where the song was about.
Jenna Wortham: What I Read - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire
Having just had ten days off social media and blogs etc, this daily schedule of keeping up with tech news sounds exhausting. Really. (via Snarkmarket)
The rise of bokeh photography
The BBC's Paul Mason on using SLRs to shoot news footage, and the different kinds of video quality there are now (cf Charlie Brooker's recent article on news footage quality).
The 21st-Century TV Shows That Get 21st-Century Tech Right - Technology - The Atlantic Wire
Looks at a few US TV shows and the ways people in them use consumer technologies, rightly or wrongly.

Permalink

Links for Wednesday 9 May 2012
An Interview With James Bridle of the New Aesthetic - The Huffington Post
Brilliant: "a lot of people out there have basically gone 'the New Aesthetic is wrong' and it can be many things but it can't be wrong because I just made it up."
Writing About Music is Like Dancing About Architecture | Quote Investigator
Quite lengthy investigation of the elusive origins of that quote. (via @alanconnor)

Permalink

Links for Thursday 10 May 2012
User Guide: Getting the most out of the Olympus E-M5: Digital Photography Review
For future reference. (One can dream.) But also, blimey, are cameras the most complicated and complexly configurable items of consumer electronics available today? With the most clumsy interfaces?
LUV & HAT: Love and hate and hilarious disagreements • PINTEREST
Pinterest? "...it’s just Tumblr. It’s just Tumblr in a grid. And Tumblr is already woeful enough. Look, there are already enough Instagrammed pictures of sad girls holding balloons on the internet." (via @benhammersley)
The woman who lives in a shed: how London landlords are cashing in | Society | The Guardian
Sometimes I fear we're going backwards.

Permalink

Links for Friday 11 May 2012
TMA-1 - AIAIAI
Nice looking closed-back headphones. Because you've never bought your final pair of headphones.
Secret Underground
"Smart ways around the tube system." I'll never remember these, but interesting and handy nonetheless. (via @antimega)

Permalink

Links for Sunday 13 May 2012
Retirement Researcher Blog: The Shocking International Experience of the 4% Rule
Historical number-crunching, looking at one of the universal rules-of-thumb of financial blogs. (via Monevator)

Permalink

Links for Monday 14 May 2012
Why do web sites and software take so long to build? And why is it so hard? at Scott Porad
"In the history of the world, is there one thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such a large scale as software, that was as complex?"

Permalink

Links for Tuesday 15 May 2012
Essex Fingerposts - a set on Flickr
Lovely set of familiar signposts. (via Paul Mison)
google-map-marker-with-shadow.js — Gist
"Here's how to add a coloured marker to a Google Map with a shadow in the right place." The marker's dynamically generated using the Google Charts API.
The Sex Myth: How To Blog Anonymously (and how not to)
Some good (but, as she says, far from exhaustive) and interesting tips on how to blog anonymously, by Brooke Magnanti / Belle du Jour. (via @tomcoates)

Permalink

Links for Wednesday 16 May 2012
Roll Call. Say hello! (Pepys' Diary)
This is the why. Well, one of the whys.

Permalink

Links for Thursday 17 May 2012
Minicons: 1500 Vector Icons for Wireframes and Interface Design. The Web’s largest Vector Icons Library!
Handy. (via @tomcoates)

Permalink

Links for Monday 21 May 2012
Wysihtml5 - A better approach to rich text editing
Looks nice. IE8+ (and other modernish browsers). (via @dotcode)

Permalink

Links for Thursday 24 May 2012
Ice-blog » Blog Archive » Lords of Midnight – Video Footage
'Lords of Midnight' adapted for the iPad. Looks very nicely done.

Permalink

Links for Friday 25 May 2012
Liking :: Mission Workshop Arkiv Field Pack
Nice non-military modular backpack system.

Permalink

Links for Monday 28 May 2012
Instagram as an island economy (11 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)
The same with Matt Webb's thoughts on Lanchester's piece. Belatedly adding it to my link memory.
John Lanchester · Marx at 193 · LRB 5 April 2012
Just realised I never Pinboarded this at the time, only wrote about it. For completion's sake.
Ian Bogost - What should we do for a living?
An interesting addition to that stuff about the value of Instagram etc coming from the activity of its users (or not): Do those users only have time for this activity because of the "leisure time bought by jobs in the non-Internet economy"?

Permalink

Links for Tuesday 29 May 2012
Twitter / SeaContainers: The largest ever picture o
100m wide photo of the royal family on the south bank of the Thames. As Londonist put it, "reminiscent of Pyongyang leader worship." Horrific. Tag "jubilympics". (via Londonist)
Cash in the attic: short-term home letting | Life and style | The Guardian
Couple appear in national newspaper showing off their Barbican flat which they let out to strangers, against the terms of their lease. What fun.

Permalink