1. A new year, no resolutions, but a strong, well rested desire to embrace writing all over again.

1. BenWard: I don’t understand why TechCrunch is a featured corporate user on the Github frontpage. §
2. RellyAB: Perhaps they are putting the Git into github? §

##River of Brakelights - Julian Casablancas

A draft set of rules for groups playing multiple, simultaneous games of Settlers of Catan, enabling trading of resources between games (and rewarding the establishment of trade routes.)

A copy of my vitriolic response to James Aylett’s dissection of the Tenth Doctor’s finale, ‘The End of Time’.

Yes, his network is called ‘comedy’, but we live in a day where Fox is called ‘news’.

Fuck “Auntie Beeb”, the BBC is more of a dead cool uncle. Sure it does some really shit, stupid things now and again, but it’s just too good of a thing to get really upset about.

People love narratives. They go to the movies to indulge in someone else’s narrative, they read books to shoot narratives straight into their bloodstream. People like narratives because narratives are the lies they’re allowed to believe. So we need to stop saying that the Republicans deal in narrative. We need to be honest. We need to tell people that they deal in lies.

Kraft have a proud record of creating entirely new substances from a range of natural ingredients such as Welshman’s foot sweat, monkey bum-grease and pheno-glyceryl tribenzoate.

“This then goes into a hot oven for 20 minutes and out pops something that they have the sheer brass nuts to attach the word ‘cheese’ to.

There is value in email, and that value is communication. Over years, service providers and publishers have taken advantage of email’s ubiquity to adapt it for push, notification and automation. Better solutions to those use cases are emerging (or already exist), so this is the time to reclaim the inbox, reduce your email throughput back to what the medium is really good for. I’ve already seen that a little bit of persistent effort can greatly increase the quality of email as a tool.

Hello, dear reader.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.

This, of course, can easily be misunderstood as some kind of scam, leaving people with the impression that we want to collect additional information. This is not the case, however, because it is merely the method Visa has chosen to upgrade their customers’ accounts, which is totally beyond our control.

To remove any suspicion regarding the need to enter part of one’s social security number when making a small payment to PlayCatan, we have decided to refrain from offering the “Verified by Visa” security detail for now.

All I wanted was something new that absolutely made sense to me, and reflected who I am

Filibuster 2.0: How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Actually Filibustering

I wouldn’t want to take away your joy and surprise on Wednesday when you see our latest creation.

Part one of my Designing for Location series. Back in 2008 I worked for Yahoo! on Fire Eagle, in 2009 I tried to present everything I’d learned to an audience at Chromatic in San Francisco, and this is the long delayed write-up of what I know.

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming, scientific evidence on climate change…

Unrefined thought on the iPad closed system/open system/old world-new world/learning to programme meme: We learned to programme and it made us smarter, better, improved our brains. We fear a world in which people cannot improve their brains in the same way. We fear that simpler, more refined interfaces will close off a route to getting smart, that people will be stupider as a result, or that access to knowledge we take for granted will be accessible only to an elite.

If root did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. In a world with only closed systems, commercial success would still be tied to the development of third party apps, but the responsibility to train developers and introduce people to programming would fall to the gatekeeper of each system, rather than it being something that can organically happen. So, Apple, or Microsoft, or whoever, would be shipping programming sandboxes for their devices; maybe scripting tools, maybe programming games, maybe cut-down versions of the professional development environment. Whatever it would be, if there was no open ecosystem to learn in, a closed system to learn would be created. The idea that people would not become programmers in 1995 because they can’t do everything to a single closed system in an otherwise open industry today is a fallacy. If the first computers had been closed, everything would be different, right down to the seeds that inspired our initial passions for software development.

I like the iPad; I’d like to buy one for my parents.

We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products – as well as new Docs and Sites features – won’t work properly in older browsers.

Many of the restrictions around the iPhone OS are well documented and infamous. Here though, I lament the loss of a less regarded capability of open systems; the extensibility of existing applications themselves, and explore the closest alternative on the iPad: The web browser, and the web itself.

Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important:  important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps

Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening—really listening—to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and—if you can manage to get anybody’s attention—get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more.

This was an epiphany. I publish my work in HTML, people primarily read my work in HTML, so it makes sense to write in HTML too. Writing in one format and converting it to HTML is not worth the mental and technical overhead. HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our age.

If you’re reading this in the Tumblr Dashboard, there’s a good chance this is irrelevant. Bear with me, though.

Song of the Day: ‘Romance is Boring’ by Los Campesinos!

I seem to reference Fever° every day at the moment (usually in the context of reading Tumblr…), but this evening I was hacking in aid of a different service; Twitter.

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Across Britain thousands of people took to their computers and mobile phones to be comprehensively wrong about freedom of speech and the role of the Press Complaints Commission.

@Nickking said: “Don’t understand why PCC are not acting on #janmoir comments on Stephen Gateley. When 25,000 offended people complain it has to be offensive.”

But Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, explained: “No it doesn’t.

Well, yeah, of course it’s extreme. You don’t know anything about the individual. He could have had other issues, certainly. No one likes paying taxes, obviously.

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

The States seem to have an aversion to products with “blood” in their name. I have to go out of my way to buy German Blutwurst, for example. Fortunately the British are so traditional that they wrap around and become progressive, offering these delicious breakfast cakes. I enjoy them much more than bacon or sausages.

You hear a song, quiet on the radio, underneath somebody’s conversation. You don’t know this new song, but it helps you to remember two bars of another, different song. You desperately want to hear this second song, but you don’t recall anything but those two bars (which are now repeating over and over in your head.) You want to hear that song, but you can’t, because the song that’s playing isn’t that song.

Cameron rejected the view that he was too weak to take on Ashcroft. “I would put it to you that it’s now time for the BBC to go after the Labour party and ask questions about their donors and where they pay tax.

What is it about the £1.5 million appearance fee that’s so appealing to you?” “£1.2 million,” Doherty quickly corrected, “and what’s appealing about the money is what’s left over after tax, obviously. Which, turns out, luckily, to be just about enough to pay last year’s tax bill.

At the age of sixteen, or maybe fifteen, my Dad took me to my first gig. I’m aware that isn’t a very cool age to see your first show (my brother, Josh, was already playing gigs at fourteen…), but that’s irrelevant. We saw Super Furry Animals play Cambridge Corn Exchange. I am supremely blessed to have a father so passionate about music that the first time I heard Super Furry Animal’s ‘Radiator’ and Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’ in our household it was from the copies that belonged to him, that (so the story goes) after my birth I was brought home, sat (perched) in front of a loudspeaker and played The Clash (‘London’s Calling’, I think), and that, as an otherwise very quiet teenager, I was taken to this first show to see a magnificent band. If you’ve ever had a piece of music recommended to you by me (and enjoyed it), it’s this moment in my life that it stems from.

So, the iPad was released. We see some controversy about Apple’s continued push of a closed software and purchasing environment, and we see lots of crap counter-analogies about cars.

Rob: taco shots
Caroline: TACO SHOTS

If Twitter want a consistent user experience across platforms, that’s good and that’s their right. If Twitter wants the business security of owning their own app, and not being totally dependent on third parties, that’s good and that’s their right. But there is absolutely no justification for them being so damn cold about it.

If you feel the need to surround yourself with stuff, at the very least make it stuff that you love. Keep it because it appeals to you, not because everyone else has one. To be surrounded by beautiful things - whether it’s a view of the hills, or your back garden, paintings, ornaments, plants or pure nothingness - is a luxury that makes life worth the bother. Remembering to stop and look at them is entirely up to us.

I’m surrounded by things. Loads of ‘things’. Art on my walls (Jon Burgerman, Pete Fowler, lots of screenprints), vinyl records and books in a slim bookcase by the wall, some toys balanced on top of that, a stack of board games (and a preference for the oldest editions I can find), plus the first set of ‘Sinfest’ webcomic books spread over a coffee table (I’d like other people to pick them up and start reading.) There are two guitars and a mandolin in the corner. In so far as I do, I love being in possession of these things. But I could do without all of them, individually. They are all beautiful objects, that’s their value. But so long as I’ve got one aesthetic something near me that makes me smile, I’ll suffice.

I love bread. I grew up first provided with nice fresh loaves from local groceries, and later—after Dad got his first bread maker—a cavalcade of elaborate breads containing nuts, cheese, olives… and so forth. Put a meal in front of me and I will sample the bread first.

Some months ago, Apple acquired a music service that I didn’t care about: Lala. I didn’t care because between my personal library in iTunes and on my iPod, Spotify (via proxy), Last.FM, and Hype Machine I was well hydrated for music discovery and appreciation. Lala was famous for its ‘web songs’ model, where you pay a small fraction of the retail price for a song or album in order to stream it repeatedly from its site. Neat, but I’m sceptical of ‘renting music’.

The Web does suck at APIs, and hardware devices, and 3D acceleration. None of those things have anything to do with being a web of information. This essay tries to explain why I disagree so strongly with recent detractors, and why I passionately believe in the web’s true, native architecture: Interlinked information.

The web, with its interconnectedness, happens to be a pretty good tool for distributing content. Applications tend to be tools for manipulating content. So we get web applications: tools for manipulating content that you can find or create on the web. The problem comes when web applications start to bite the hand that feeds, by isolating the content within the application from the rest of the web.

The National - Runaway

drutil tray eject

The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous “Atlantic triangular trade”, and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism

Cons:

Highly dependent on Google account. For example, Calendar can’t even be used without being logged into a Google account. In a way, you are a just trading a certain amount of Apple lock-in for a certain amount of Google lock-in.

I use a standard IMAP server for email. Gmail and Mail are two separate apps (why?) and the standard mail client is very much a second-class citizen. (Cannot move a message to another folder, for example. It’s just not possible.) A third-party fork of the standard email client (called K-9) offers better IMAP support, along with its own set of weird behaviors, fractured GUI, and regrettable Dr. Who icon.

Andy [Rubin]’s point was simple. Older Android devices that can’t be upgraded to newer versions of the OS or run newer apps are no different than an iPhone from 2007 not being updated to OS 4. It’s not fragmentation – it’s legacy.

According to our sources, this project has been in the works long before Google announced its TV solution

I don’t know about you, but my eyes are already trained only to read the top half of a web page these days. Rather as a Victorian would not look below the waist, I do not let my eyes have even a second’s contact with the revolting Have Your Say or Comments section of a BBC site, a YouTube page or any blog or tech forum. The lower half of web pages is very like the lower half of the body — full of all kinds of noxious evil smelling poison. I suppose it has to be expelled somewhere, but you will forgive me for not wanting to be close by when it happens.

I rail against thoughtless recruiters too, but I try to distinguish between thoughtless and typos.

— lauraglu.

In Web development no assumption goes unpunished.

Full D8 Interview Video: Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Run this in a Terminal:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/\
LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister \
-kill -r \
-domain local -domain system -domain user 

Then relaunch the Finder (Command+Option+Escape, click Finder, click Relaunch).

When choosing to use an image from my computer [I have to choose a Picasa album to add the image to], I am not allowed to create a new Picasa album or choose not to upload the image to Picasa.

This is a problem in the screenshot above, as I’ve been given access to a client’s Picasa album, but I have never created a personal Picasa album.

Primarily, Saturday night in Rustenburg offered England supporters a whistlestop tour of tournaments past: featuring as it did irrational player choices, injuries, goalkeeping howlers providing the requisite scapegoat/tabloid hate figure, perceived national humiliation against a perceived national enemy, and a manager acting like an archetypal malfunctioning England boss. It was, as the stadium chants have yet to observe, “just like watching England”. If you only had tickets for the Rustenburg game, you can console yourself with having had the entire traditional England World Cup experience in microcosm.

Reading Watchmen in the past I’ve always had a hard time of the castaway story cutaways. Not conceptually, the juxtopositions Are wonderful, but the words of the captions themselves never seemed to sink in.

New Radiohead album nearly finished

1. Ben: With rash, sweeping cuts like that, you should be the British Chancellor of the Exchequer.
2. Tantek: …
3. Ben: What is it your people say, ‘hiyoo’?
4. Tantek: ‘Heeyo’
5. Ben: I'm never sure of the pronunciation.

shut the fuck up about hipsters.

shut the fuck up about hipsters.

shut the fuck up about hipsters.

SHUT. the fuck UP. about HIPSTERS. shut the fuck up forever about them. they are not even real. they are just regular dudes and ladies with a certain aesthetic and maybe a certain taste in music, just like you and your friends. shut the fuck up about triangles, beards, and irony. you created them. shut the fuck up about hipsters now and tomorrow check again to be sure you have remained shut (the fuck) up. shut the fuck up about buzz bands. clean-shaven dudes in polos like them just as much as hirsute ones in flannel. if you have ever said “ugh there are so many hipsters here” you literally deserve to be murdered. small-town Iowa has dudes who like obscure things too. shut the fuck up about hipsters.

I feel a broken man, completely disconsolate, frustrated and an unimaginable sadness,” the 25-year-old winger told the BBC.

It’s a humiliating climbdown for a monster originally inspired by Vlad the Impaler, a man who’d happily eat his lunch while watching a skewered peasant slide down an immense wooden spike, being slowly and agonisingly dragged toward the ground by their own kicking, flailing body mass. Vlad would sit among entire forests of screaming human kebabs, chuckling and munching his oxburger or whatever the hell they ate back then.

Confronted with that kind of visceral horror, Robert Pattinson wouldn’t make it through his asparagus and shaved parmesan starter.

Holland slating [referee] Howard Webb is like having a go at a policeman who books you for speeding when he could’ve done you for drink driving.

As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.

At this point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan had 42 percent approval and was headed to a low of 37 percent. Clinton was at 42 percent, headed to a low of 39 percent. George W. Bush was at 76 percent approval. Truman was at 34 percent.

It is, overall, a misleading representation of FourSquare to the readership of the Guardian. But to rip into the piece would be wrong, because although much of detail and attribution of functionality is fuzzy (or wrong), the social problem that the article describes is absolutely real, to the point that it doesn’t matter that FourSquare as an application isn’t the precise cause.

Leo Hickman wrote about FourSquare. Badly. But not entirely incorrectly, which means swallowing geek pride, and focus on a the major social behaviour problem that he highlights.

David Faraci’s “meaning and secret of Inception”

Two years seemed such a long time.

Personally I’m surprised it wasn’t put down sooner. There was some innovative stuff in Wave, but when a service that is ‘designed to replace email’ gains an email notifier to help people keep up with what’s happening in their Wave, you’ve got to question what the service’s actual purpose is.

Treats is the album iPod speakers are warned about as children, a ghostly camp fire tale to the eardrums, tinnitus’s backward cousin from across the pond. Mastered at a level surely pushing the boundaries of legality, on first listen it seems less an album and more an elaborate prank to make the listener jump when a track appears on shuffle.

This is written late at night, so I reserve the right to edit heavily in the morning.

Imagine”, sang John Lennon. “All the people”, he’s rumoured to have continued. All of them? Really? Can you imagine all the people? Of course not. There are people living in parts of the Brazilian rainforest that no-one has even found yet. How could you possibly imagine something that no-one else has seen? Are you some kind of imagination super-man? Of course, you are not.

Don’t worry though, rampant deforestation will ensure within 20 years we discover every hidden civilisation that still lurks in those countries just far enough away not to emotionally affect us. Then we’ll all be able to imagine them; thanks to photographs.

Sixth, we both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly. In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement. In addition, the Government Accountability Office would be required to report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace, and whether or not current policies are working to protect consumers.

Pitiful exercise in FUD that at best pushes a set of edge-case features, but mostly just whines about what a ‘hassle’ it might be to move to a Mac.

It is reassuring to hear that the foxes are guarding the henhouse so diligently.

Google, Verizon and an “Open Internet” from a Mobile perspective - pinch/zoom blog

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants.

The Britisher

A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.

PLANS to build a state of the art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America.

We fully support Dove World Outreach Center and its efforts to put an end to the notion that Islam is a peaceful religion.

We used to wait for it
Now we’re screaming
Sing the chorus again

August 4th marks my anniversary in this city. With each successive party the invitations become more elaborate, and since this year got organised on Facebook, I’m reproducing the text here for longevity. Also with the punchline image positioned in the right place as originally intended. Some pictures were taken, too.

I wouldn’t vote for me. I’d vote for someone who was, like, qualified.

You can’t be “fair and balanced.” You can only be fair or balanced. To be fair is to tell the truth; to be balanced is to tell a truth, tell a lie, and then let the public determine which is which — and this, of course, isn’t fair to anyone.

Trent Reznor discusses The Social Network soundtrack

Titles appear to have quietly died again.