Links
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Mac Bundy Said He Was ‘All Wrong’ by William Pfaff | The New York Review of Books
About the Vietnam War, but also good on parallels with Iraq/Afghanistan, and how only one or two ideas can shape events that affect continents, very similar to that Adam Curtis article about a “global terror network”.
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Will Bad CGI Breath Cost The Social Network a Visual Effects Oscar Nomination? | Movieline
Glad it wasn’t just me that found that weird CGI breath distracting. It looked like some weird Harry Potter-esque evil spirits escaping from their mouths.
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Some thoughts on Lightroom Keywords – Chuqui 3.0
I’m fascinated, amused and horrified that people have to spend so much time on thinking about the kind of thing that was once a relatively obscure part of a small profession. (via John Beardsworth)
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Facebook News Feed Settings: Random or Not, Biggest Secrets Revealed - The Daily Beast
Reverse engineering how Facebook’s Top News feed decides what to show you. (via Kottke)
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The Participant Observer » Blog Archive » Cyborganic and the Birth of Networked Social Media (It’s here!)
PhD thesis from a couple of years ago, on Cyborganic and other things (like Wired/Hotwired) that its members were involved in.
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K-punk: The Great Bullingdon Club Swindle
Trying to find some optimism for the left from this almighty mess. (via @moleitau)
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Rejectamentalist manifesto
China Mieville with questions addressed to a hypothetical Liberal Democrat voter who still believes in a progressive agenda. “So it has to be asked of you: WTF?”
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HTML Purifier - Filter your HTML the standards-compliant way!
PHP library for whitelisting certain HTML, protecting against XSS, etc. (via @simonw)
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Johann Hari: A colder, crueller country – for no gain - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent
I’ve just been trying to avoid the news, pretend it’s not happening. I was lured into reading this. Fuckers.
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Movies, Downloads, Blu Ray, DVDs, Cinema & TV Listings | Find Any Film
Alerts for when films you want to see appear in the formats you want. Good idea but ugly, confusing, unintuitive, Lottery-funded. Needs a slap with the Web 2.0 stick.
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Kardashev scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization.” (via The Speculist)
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Agiliq’s django-blogango at master - GitHub
Another Django blogging engine.
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The Pope and the Axis of Terror
Adam Curtis on the manufacturing of the idea of a “global terror network” from the 1970s to today. Fascinating story, worth the time to read. Shame the BBC’s video clips are only in Flash though.
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Belstaff | Official Website
Heavily retro rather than futury, although there’s still something slightly SF about some of the jackets. Also, the coat Sherlock wore.
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Saul Griffith and Jonathan Bachrach’s algorithmically-designed “DARPA Hoodie” - Boing Boing
Interesting. Want to find more modern/future-y but still wearable clothes. Any ideas? (via @GreatDismal)
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Dataists
“Our goal is to bring well-written articles on big data processing, statistics and statistical programming, and machine learning to one place.” (via BERG)
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Evom - Convert and Download Videos to iTunes
“Download internet videos (YouTube and more) to iTunes and iPod.” Handy. (via Ben Hammersley and more)
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Carlos Bueno: A Paper Internet
Instructions for printing stuff out and encasing them in resin to bury in the ground, as the best way to preserve bits of the Internet. (via Tom Taylor)
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45cat - Vinyl Database - Records - Music Reviews - Discographies, Discoveries, Discussions
Scans, credits, etc for (currently) 73,788 UK-released seven-inch singles. Blimey. (via @dorianfm)
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Today’s News • on iPhone & iPad • Powered by the Guardian
An iPad app that gives you a way to read The Guardian very much like my “Today’s Guardian” site. The sincerest form of flattery, I guess.
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The Unsorting Office
Leaving aside the making-my-blood-boil mess of the Royal Mail, that bit at the end about recording all the knowledge of posties about short-cuts, hills, gates, etc is interesting.
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Backbone.js
What looks like a lovely way to structure large JavaScript projects into an MVC structure. (via Simon Willison)
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A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail
While my favourite Vancouver-based science fiction author (William Gibson) is writing about the present, my favourite Vancouver-based chronicler of the now (Douglas Coupland) has written this about the future. (via @moleitau)
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A Hyper-Organized, Smart Collection-based Lightroom Workflow
Another complex, customised workflow.
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Workflow smart collections - John Beardsworth
I don’t need anything this complicated, but I find this ability to create complicated but very custom workflows fascinating.
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Notes.husk.org: Incompetence, Malice and ereading
Yes, this. So many iPad magazines are focusing on the whizziness. I’d just want the easy-to-read-ness.
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Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook
James Bridle again, saying and proposing wonderful things.
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Ubu Web (ubuweb) on Twitter
Lots of dodgy (in a legal sense) and intriguing (in an aural sense) listening on Ubu Web’s stream.
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U B U W E B - Film & Video: John Berger - Ways of Seeing (1972)
Ooh, all four episodes for download. I’ve never seen the TV version.