Links
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The Online Photographer: What I Would Get If I Were Starting Now
I like this guide to how to start out in photography, particularly the bit about buying initial equipment and then not even looking at possible new kit for five years. Just do photography, don’t shop.
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The Technium: Corporate Long-term-ism
“There is a strong anti-government attitude at loose in the world (not just in the US) that believes that government can only screw things up. And at the same time, a belief that corporations are the prime engines of all that is socially good.”
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The best intro book for any topic | BestIntroBook.com
Suggesting the best book to start learning about many topics. Needs more context and justification, but an interesting thing to browse. (via Kottke)
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Carbonmade : Your online portfolio.
Quite fun looking, free portfolio websites.
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Django Authentication using an Email Address
I’ve read a lot of half-thought-through explanations for how to let users of a Django site log in with email address rather than username. This seems to be the only one that covers all the bases. Still, it shouldn’t be this hard.
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Groovify your music tweets - Denoiser the better
Tweet a song and @groovify generates a Spotify or Grooveshark playlist based on it.
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Spotibot.com - Generate Spotify Playlists powered by Lastfm!
Makes Spotify playlists based on the name of a music artist or your Last.fm favorites/recommendations.
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Nicky Wire on Lipstick Traces : The Thought Fox
A new introduction by Nicky Wire to a new edition of Greil Marcus’s ‘Lipstick Traces’ which I owe another read. (via Alan Connor)
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The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle - Technology - GOOD
Kids today are going to go through so many handles, unless they’re all just using their names. Which is what I do these days. I’m just me now. (via Kottke)
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Flickr: Faces illuminated by Displays
I love seeing faces lit up by screens at night. A beautiful and only modern sight. (via The New Aesthetic)
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Fear And Monocles — Broken Toys
Mainly for the video of the “Jita Microtransaction Riot, 6/24/11”. Future. (via Tom Insam)
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LRB · Daniel Soar · Short Cuts
Fascinating, brief, look at the US government’s interest in analysing metaphors in foreign languages for security purposes. Well worth a read if you write, talk or think.
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YouTube - Talking Funny Part 1 Of 4
Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis CK talking about comedy. Part 2 didn’t work for me in the UK, others OK. I’d love something like this involving Stewart Lee. (via Ted Mills)
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Henry Beck Rules, not OK? Breaking the Rules of Diagrammatic Map Design (PDF)
A thoughtful essay by Max Roberts, from 2009, about the rules used in Beck’s diagrammatic London Underground map, and when they’re worth breaking. Well worth a read. (via Blech)
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Comment Challenge plugin
Apparently is (still) effective at stopping Movable Type comment spam. I feel like I’ve gone back in time several years.
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For 2 weeks only – alternative tube maps on display
Photos of the work of Max Roberts on the tube map. Photos, rather than decent graphics unfortunately. Can’t find better versions of his stuff online, so london-tubemap.com “wins”.
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London Tubemap - A new angle on the London Underground
I like the original, but this compromise does feel more usefully connected to the geography of the city, rather than a complete abstraction. (via @benhammersley)
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Resetting Your South Migrations
I was thinking of doing this after a lot of solo early development on a Django project.
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Week 315 – Blog – BERG
Epic week notes from Matt Webb on growing and nurturing BERG. It’s an honour to work just the other side of a door from these folks.
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10 Myths About Introverts || CarlKingCreative.com || Los Angeles, CA
Yes. (via Kottke)
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Flickrgram
“A quick hack to present your Flickr contacts’ recent photos as a flat list for iPhone” a la Instagram, by Tom Insam. Is handy and nice.
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How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs - 10,000 Words
Describing how the ‘Bangor Daily News’ (Maine, USA) uses Google Docs and WordPress to publish its website and then send the text to InDesign for laying out the print paper. Includes a list of WP plugins used. (via @benhammersley)
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Early Retirement Extreme: — written by Jacob Lund Fisker, Freelancer
Fascinating to read something like this (save 70-80% of your income, invest it, spend little, retire after five years) written by someone who has the perspective to know it’s not for everyone. (via Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian column)
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UseTheSource | Newest Jobs
John Graham-Cumming’s tech job board for Hacker News folk, the name of which I’ll never remember, hence bookmarking it here.
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Total recall: why retromania is all the rage | Music | The Guardian
This is all very good, on retro of many kinds. “How come the very kind of people who would have once been in the vanguard of creating new music (bohemian early adopter types) have switched roles to become antiquarians and curators?”
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Choose how unique you want your t-shirt to be - ONE of a TEE
Cunning. Pay progressively more for being the only one in your city/country/continent/world owning a particular t-shirt design. (Presumably until Urban Outfitters rips off the design, anyway.) (via @hiutdenim)
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Grime_tapes : grimetapes.com : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive
Grimetapes.com (which was archiving loads of old grime cassettes) appears to have disappeared, but it looks like they put some(?) of the files on archive.org.
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The Wire: A Brief History Of Grime Tapes
Some streams/MP3s of recordings of early(?) grime sets on pirate radio. I’m enjoying the first one so far. (via Shaun at Ruby Pseudo)
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Daniel Rosenthal’s answer to Why is U2 so popular? - Quora
“You’re not only dancing and reminiscing – you’re spreading freedom and reasonably-priced medicines to distant lands!” (via Shaun at Ruby Pseudo)
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Twitter Ye Not – why this geek went back to the real world | Sarah Angliss
On why she’s stopped using Twitter. I’ve been going through a love/hate thing with it all myself the last few weeks and most (but not all) of this captures some of my feelings. (via @FinalBullet)