Links
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The Strange Death of Municipal England (London Review of Books)
A good read, especially if you’re feeling all full of optimism about a new year and need to be brought crashing back to earth.
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Death and Treasure – Matter – Medium
About Zak Smith, painter, porn star and player of, and writer about, role-playing games. The arguments about modern RPGs that are alluded to sound even more interesting than the art and porn. (Oct 2014)
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Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
Long profile and interview with Ive from around the launch of the Apple Watch.
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Getting Out Of Afghanistan | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
January 2015 article on the logistics involved.
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GoogleChrome/lighthouse: Auditing, performance metrics, and best practices for Progressive Web Apps
Chrome extension that makes a nice report about websites. (via @dracos)
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Headshot Hunter | Compare Actor Headshot Photographers
I’m not sure why I’m surprised this exists, but it does. The search/browse form’s a bit confusing, but still.
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Simple Django error logging configuration for Heroku | chrxr.com
For future reference. Just because it seemed harder than necessary to work out how to get Django errors to display in Heroku’s console.
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50 weeks to learn film | Mark Cousins’ Dispatches | Sight & Sound | BFI
I liked this brief year-long curriculum for learning about films. A year ago. But it wasn’t online then for reasons best known to S&S.
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Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories | GQ
A good read. “He would have loved to see Finding Dory.” (via Kottke)
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finishability - Word Spy
“n. The characteristics or qualities that enable something to be read, watched, or listened to completely.” Citing me as the earliest usage! (via @hugovk)
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Radio Garden
Really nice way to browse international radio stations via a globe. (via @undermanager)
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A GDS Story | Government Digital Service
Really nice as a chronicle of an evolving service’s history. It’s so easy to lose this stuff. Especially great that it has lots of old screenshots, sketches, photos etc. It’d be good if more organisations and companies found time to do this kind of thing. (via @gilest)
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U.K. Cinemas : London
Seating capacities of different screens. (via antimega)
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Who Will Command The Robot Armies?
Loads of good stuff in this transcript of Maciej Ceglowski’s latest talk. The section taking the piss out of silly IoT things seems like a trivialising distraction though.
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Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?—Stephen Wolfram Blog
On helping with the science stuff for the movie. “In the end I basically had just one evening to invent how interstellar space travel might work.” (via Infovore)
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How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It) - The Talkhouse
What it says. On writing the film script. I love reading about the process of writing these things.
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Simon Stålenhag Art Gallery
Really lovely illustrations. To quote one review, “the deeply creepy, robot-and-monster-haunted alt-Sweden”. (via Paul Pod)
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You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex
Good on keeping some of the Trump stuff in perspective. Yes, he’s terrible but the media tends to focus on certain things out of all proportion to their actual importance or relevance.
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The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release
Brilliant transcript of a talk by Audrey Watters on predictions about the future of technology, what they mean, why they’re wrong, etc. Very good. (via Russell Davies)
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The Agas Map
Really nicely done zoomable, clickable, searchable perspective map of London from the 16th century. Very good.
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Tufte CSS
Some nice things in this example of CSS that styles things in a web parallel of Edward Tufte’s books. (via Russell Davies)
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Snob Cuts (London Review of Books)
A fun, brief piece about snobbery and class.
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How To Talk Comedy Writer – Updated! — Andy Riley | misterandyriley.com
Brilliant list of British TV comedy-writing jargon. (via Russell Davies)
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Rocket—Slack-style emoji everywhere on your Mac
Makes it easy to type emojis. I’m surprised typing emojis on OS X is such a pain. (via @benhammersley)
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Open Infrastructure Map
This is nice.
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AWS Git-backed Static Website · Alestic.com
This is clever and bonkers. Why on earth would you run a static website like this unless you understood all of that? What do you do if something in that tangle stops working? Good luck!
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Networks Land
“A collection of educational activities and material explaining how the internet works … The activities are designed to mostly take place offline using physical objects, field trips, and games.”
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UK Finance Detailed Flowchart : UKPersonalFinance
Attempting to create a flowchart for deciding how to pay debts and/or save. Its hard to make this stuff both simple and general.
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Grand Designs For Sale | Buildings From Kevin McCloud’s Iconic Television Series
By the Unique Property Bulletin people, keeping track of which Grand Designs have sold, and when.
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Unique Property Bulletin | Unique Property For Unique People
Lots of amazing property for sale in the UK… islands, forts, windmills, water towers, manor houses, etc.