Links
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How Britain exported next-generation surveillance — Matter — Medium
Finally got round to reading James’s piece on Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. It’s odd to think of this vast network of vision and computation churning away monitoring live and historical movements of people, invisibly.
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Adam Green: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins, Pickpocket : The New Yorker
(Jan 2013) Not only good on how Apollo Robbins does his amazing pickpocketing but I also liked its description of the different things he tries to make a paying (legal) career out of it.
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They’re Taking Over! by Tim Flannery | The New York Review of Books
About how jellyfish are filling the oceans, destroying everything else, and are really hard to fight (they’re still a problem when they’re dead). A bit longer and more interesting than the LRB review of the same book.
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Andrew O’Hagan · Ghosting: Julian Assange · LRB 6 March 2014
This very long piece about failing to ghost-write Julian Assange’s biography is as good as everyone said it was.
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The Task Rabbit Economy
(Oct 2013) Suggestions for fixing non-Nordic Western (specifically US) economies. It’s not technology, TaskRabbit et al, increasing inequality, but capitalism.
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Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
Interesting to read about them trying to work out what kind of education MOOCs are best suited to (university? Pre-university? Professional training?). I start to think the traditional boxes are less and less useful.
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Amazon unpacked - FT.com
From February 2013, on the poor-quality jobs Amazon is creating and the disappointment of many local people near their Rugeley warehouse. There is, though, something to be written about people disliking Amazon’s working conditions and fondly remembering… coal mining. (via Dan W)
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The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain — Overthought
For future reference. (via Daring Fireball)
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A nation of slaves
Charlie Stross on the Conservatives’ target of “full employment”. I hate their (and Labour’s) “hardworking families” rhetoric as if work, any work at all, no matter how it’s achieved or what the alternatives might be, is an end in itself.
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Where Brooklyn At?
Some digging into the metadata Aaron Straup Cope saved before Brooklyn Museum deleted their Flickr stuff. It makes me so mad and sad that they did this, not just the images but thousands of comments, tags, notes, too. On Flickr, you don’t own your own words.
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Five Reasons Not To Raise Venture Capital, by Rachel Chalmers | Model View Culture
Very good. (via Waxy)
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Adactio: Journal—The tragedy of the commons
All of this. On the Brooklyn Museum, who haven’t just moved on from Flickr Commons, but deleted all their stuff from it as well.
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Citation Needed – blarg?
Got round to reading this, about why arrays are indexed from zero, which is also an illustration of how history can be effectively lost when old academic papers cost a lot of money to read.
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coddingtonbear/django-location
Interesting… Django app that stores location data from Foursquare, iCloud and Runmeter.
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mbrochh comments on How do YOU deploy to Webfaction?
Nice description of deploying a Django site to WebFaction, although not that WebFaction-specific.
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Put This On - Fit
Put This On’s posts on getting suits, shirts, etc to fit well.
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Put This On • The Seven-Shoe Wardrobe The longer I write about…
I was wondering what something like this would look like yesterday, then came across this.
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Summer Style When You’re Not Gary Cooper I don’t know if you…
For this: “on clothing forums … an argument erupts, a bunch of random strangers weigh in, some vociferous poster throws down a 1930s illustration from ‘Apparel Arts’ or a photo of the Duke of Windsor, and everyone simmers down.”
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Social Change - BKM TECH
About which services the Brooklyn Museum is going to stop using (incuding Flickr and iTunes U) due to decreasing engagement with users. I like the explicitness of this. Stop it if it’s not working. (via @thisisaaronland)
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What’s happened to TextDrive? | Bill’s tech blog
“What a mess.” Indeed.
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Web Hosting For App Developers – Marco.org
Some good rules of thumb and encouragement to use simple, standard VPSes rather than anything fancier.
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Layout in Flipboard for Web and Windows
Fascinating look at how Flipboard automatically match content to one of thousands of possible page layouts (some created by designers, some more algorithmic). (via @revdancatt)
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Variance
Nice web charting/visualization thing, using a markup-based system for data, with appearance editable using CSS. Somewhere between Raphael/d3 and simple charting libraries. Costs money for commercial use. (via Tom Taylor)
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JavaScript Testing Recipes
Sounds very good. Adding to the list of books I really should read.
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Crafting link underlines on Medium
Not necessarily for how they decided to make nice underlines on text, but for the description of how complicated a very simple-seeming website can be. (via @jamesweiner)
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Free Beautiful Online Survey & Form Builder | Typeform
Looks like a maybe nicer alternative to Survey Monkey.
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Managers are awesome / managers are cool when they’re part of your team
Although I’m up for new kinds of management/company structure, the GitHub/Valve thing of having an extremely flat organisation does make me wary. Not least for the kinds of people who only blossom when given support and shelter by those whose position it is to do that.
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(633) Stan Hayward’s answer to Aging: What does it feel like to be old? - Quora
This is a really lovely read. A life.
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Folded Up Shirt P0rn - Page 211
I was just thinking yesterday that casual shirts (ie, worn with no tie) don’t need top buttons, and then I came across these (bottom of page). Very nice.