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  1. Steven Shapin reviews ‘Empire of Tea’ by Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger · LRB 30 July 2015

    Interesting history of tea, and the changes around it over the centuries. “By the 1910s, eight thousand [tea leaf] rolling machines had replaced the hand-labour of 1.5 million workers.” (Subscribers only)

  2. Jackson Lears reviews ‘The Age of Acquiescence’ by Steve Fraser · LRB 16 July 2015

    How left-leaning beliefs have disappeared in the US, mostly over the first half of the 20th century. (Subscribers only)

  3. Labour is now so passive, it might as well be led by an out-of-office email | Comment is free | The Guardian

    All of this. Good stuff in every paragraph.

  4. Apparently There Are 4 Kinds of Introversion — Science of Us

    I did the test at the bottom of this page a couple of weeks back and got 35-40% introverted on all four kinds. I’m not sure how that ranks in any way, so I’m not sure what the point was. (via Kottke)

  5. Skills Matter

    Opening July 2015, “CodeNode, our new 23,000 sqft Tech Events and Community venue”. Looks nice, and big. On South Place, just west of Liverpool Street station. That City / “Tech City” border is getting very blurry. (via @tomstuart)

  6. Daytum - Some data about Good Night Lamp

    Alex’s overview of how much each bit of making and selling 200 IoT lamps cost. Always interesting to see this kind of thing from small businesses.

  7. Rain.today - Your Daily Source of Natural Rain Sounds

    “A stochastic audio engine generates a realistic rain shower by randomly drawing sounds from different categories such as light rain, heavier rain, thunder, and water sounds.” (via Interconnected)

  8. Previously, On Arrested Development : NPR

    Charting all the running gags over four seasons, including their foreshadowing events. So good. (via Kottke)

  9. Open Addresses UK - Alpha : Can We Make Address Entry Work For More Of Us

    This, and the previous post that it links to, are a bit interesting about making more usable address inputs. I wished it could have explored more options though.

  10. PCA Predict, formerly Postcode Anywhere - Address lookup and verification web services

    Some people on Twitter recommended this for this kind of thing. Works for international addresses.

  11. 龙焰 Dragon Burn

    I was thinking how interesting a Chinese Burning Man might be… of course, they’ve already made a start.

  12. London, England - Google Maps

    My second appearance (that I know of) on Google Street View.

  13. The Death of Reddit | Chuq Von Rospach • Writing & Commentary

    I haven’t read many of the recent pieces about Reddit, but this is a good one about where Reddit went wrong and why it’s unsalvageable.

  14. Watch Our Holidays 1932 — BFI Player

    Lovely old home movie of holidays in Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex. Lots of smiles and clothing.

  15. ISAORA

    Nice, minimal, Outlier-esque clothing. (Online only, US-based.)

  16. ZenHub.io - Agile Project Management inside GitHub

    Turns GitHub Issues into an agile/kanban board, with story points and burndown chart. Looks nice. $5 / user / month, minimum five users. (via Brett Terpstra)

  17. Hotjar – Heatmaps, Visitor Recordings, Conversion Funnels, Form Analytics, Feedback Polls and Proactive Chat in One Platform

    Website stats. Uses a sample of visitors, rather than all of them. Some nice features. For future reference. (via Brett Terpstra)

  18. Coder’s Block Blog / Checkbox Trickery with CSS

    Lots of scope for doing this horribly, but some of this CSS-styling of radio buttons and checkboxes is nice for > IE8.

  19. Dang I’m Old

    Purely because I laughed out loud at the end.

  20. Greetings from a Ghost Town | Technoccult

    On having a code name for the area where you live. (via Warren Ellis’s newsletter)

  21. The God Login

    I thought I’d bookmarked this at the time. Some thoughts on making better login forms. I don’t agree with all of it, but good for a starting point for thinking.

  22. On conversational UIs

    Matt Webb. My initial reaction to this stuff is that I like *finding* information and conversational interfaces seem frustratingly clunky. But maybe that’s just because they’re not good enough yet. Lots to ponder here.

  23. Fontello - icon fonts generator

    Create your own icon font using only the icons you need, select from Font Awesome and other free libraries.

  24. A New Yorker walks into a San Francisco start up… — Medium

    A rant about how “Design can change the world” is nonsense. I think it *can* change the world, but that *very* much doesn’t mean any and all design can change the world. Is your design empowering people who have little power? Enabling people who are less able?

  25. Signs at the Royal Festival Hall | Journal | Hyphen Press

    On the typefaces used, then and now.

  26. Minimum salary required in London: £500k? | FIRE v London

    Staggering. You might need something to take out your anger on.

  27. The Early Days of a Better Nation

    Mainly for Régis Debray’s gloomy description of May 1968, written in 1979: “We had to imagine ourselves as Chinese, in order to become Californians.”

  28. English Buildings

    A blog about interesting buildings around England. (via Wowhaus)

  29. Municipal Dreams

    A blog with long posts about the history of UK social housing, planning, etc. (via Wowhaus)

  30. The Future Is A Confidence Trick

    “The industry of futurism is bad at the future.”