Links
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Cañas
Chris Heathcote’s started an occasional email about food out and about. London so far, but he does travel, so you never know. Really good.
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Online JSON Viewer
I keep forgetting this URL. Useful because it’s much less picky about formatting input data, so it will nicely format things like Ruby objects I’ve printed to the logs even though they’re not JSON. (@infovore has now pointed me at pp and awesome_print, thanks!)
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Brian Sewell: the BBC’s factual television is an insult to the nation
Very good. So rare to find a documentary that is complex or deep and isn’t full of daft re-enactments or the presenter pretending to “discover” something.
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Debug and test your API, webhook and mobile back end service integrations. · Runscope
For inspecting your requests to/from APIs etc. Also a tunnelling thing for sharing your localhost, but only on the pay-for plan.
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Are Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode Conversion Killers? | Practical eCommerce
This was going round Twitter today with people saying it shows Verified By Visa etc can reduce your site’s checkout completion rate by 10%. But it’s just the results of a survey, with 10% saying they’d “consider” stopping checkout.
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Dodgy wind? Why “innovative” turbines are often anything but
A good read about why many supposedly new-and-improved designs for wind turbines aren’t improved, and sometimes aren’t even new. (via @undermanager)
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At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR
On the tiny percentage of movies, especially mainstream, which is all most people get a chance to see in a cinema, which are about, never mind by, women. (via Paul Mison)
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The New Aesthetic and its Politics
James on what’s beneath the surface. “This wilful anti-technicalism, which is a form of anti-intellectualism, mirrors the present cultural obsession with nostalgia, retro and vintage which was one of the spurs for the entire New Aesthetic project.”
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The New Aesthetic: James Bridle’s Drones and Our Invisible, Networked World | Vanity Fair
James: “…there’s no such thing as avant-gardes anymore. … But it leads to that idea of there being avant-garde figures that are ahead of everything else. But there’s not. It’s just me, looking at this stuff, and going, ‘Have you seen this? Have you actually seen it?’”
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localtunnel: instantly show localhost to the rest of the world
I keep forgetting the name of this alternative to forwardhq.com (née Showoff.io).
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TypeMedia TypeCooker: Generator
“A tool for generating type-drawing exercises. The system creates a random list of requirements for a typeface, but with relevant criteria.”
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Sketching Out of My Comfort Zone: A Type Design Experiment | Typographica
A nice post about doing a sketch of a new typeface every day.
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Do We Need to Fire the Entire Financial Advice Industry?
A good rant about how much financial advice assumes the advice-seeker’s large level of spending is perfectly fine.
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Ipswich man in Japanese Earthquake, of 1923 — Kindred Spirit
My grandad’s account of surviving the Yokohama Earthquake of 1923. Also, a photo of the old Gyford greengrocer in Ipswich.
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WowHaus
A blog of modernist etc houses for sale in the UK (see also ‘Modernist Estates’ for the apartment equivalent).
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Jessica Hische on typography
Really nice, lengthy article on how to choose typefaces, particularly for websites. (via Waxy)
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Arq: Online Backup for Mac to Amazon AWS Glacier and S3 | Haystack Software
Mac app for backing up to S3 or Glacier. Interesting, compared to Backblaze, Mozy, etc.
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wandering wandering star • DISAPPEAR US ALGORITHMS, AESTHETICS, AND THE…
Interview about designing effective camouflage. Really interesting. (via Fresser)
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Terrorist or Martyr? by Christopher Benfey | The New York Review of Books
Solely for this incidental quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, after commenting on the “gloom” of Harper’s Ferry: “Yet there would be a less striking contrast between Southern and New-England villages, if the former were as much in the habit of using white paint as we are. It is prodigiously efficacious in putting a bright face on a bad matter.” (Subscribers only)
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The Way They Live Now by Michael Lewis | The New York Review of Books
A good review by Michael Lewis of John Lanchester’s ‘Capital’. I’ve realised there’s, often something extra enjoyable in reviews of very British books by Americans, and vice versa.
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Double Agents in Love by Lorrie Moore | The New York Review of Books
A decent, and favourable, review of ‘Homeland’. Good on the second series’ confusion, and the romance that doesn’t quite work: “Give Danes and Lewis a country cabin, a roaring fire, and a bottle of wine, and we feel only anxiety.”
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Diving Deep into Danger by Nathaniel Rich | The New York Review of Books
About commercial “saturation diving” - really deep sea diving. A really good read.
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Getting Nearer and Nearer by David Cole | The New York Review of Books
Just for the bit about how the courts’ “job is to enforce the law, even if, and especially when, public opinion is against it. … Democracy is not particularly good at protecting the rights of minorities. … [Courts] will sometimes make decisions that result in short-term backlash.”
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The Taste for Being Moral by Thomas Nagel | The New York Review of Books
For the six types of moral response and the description of how conservatives emphasise all of them in their appeal, but liberals only, relying also on reason. Which is why conservatives tend to appeal most to most people.
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The top 20 data visualisation tools | Feature | .net magazine
A nice summary of everything from Excel to Gephi. (via Dotcode)
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UWE Graduation Ceremony 1993 - YouTube
Blimey, nearly twenty years ago. Everyone is so smooth and wide-eyed. (12:30 if you’re wondering.)
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The Online Photographer: (OT) All You Need for Great Sound
Suggestion for great-sounding iPhone/iPad amp and small speakers. More suggestions in the comments.
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Recurring Developments
Showing which episodes of Arrested Development each of its recurring jokes appears in. I’ve been researching recently; even better than I remembered. (via Waxy)
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Composer
Dependency manager for PHP. I’m out of touch with PHP and hadn’t heard of this.