January 2009
63 posts
“Perhaps the most significant conclusion we can make from these survey results is...”
– WebAIM: Screen Reader Survey Results
Incredible study into actual screen reader usage reveals a complex, varied world. This is important, because it actually gives developers without a hint of a disability something concrete to grasp when trying to comprehend these needs. We can’t imagine...
“defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific tweetTextFilter -string "^RT"”
– Jesse Newland
Tip to filter out re-tweets in Twitterrific on Mac OSX. Not sure this is a good solution. Useful content can be reposted by people, it’s just that said content could be better distributed if they wrote their own take on it.
Retweeting is a social problem, not a technical one.
“The other day we ran a story from Valleywag with a rumor that Steve Jobs was...”
– Gizmodo
Or, “When sharing a blog network with Valleywag goes bad”. Valleywag seems to have been cross-linked quite a bit on Gizmodo lately, so I can only assume it’s an active Gawker Media effort to promote the content after the reorg. Can’t see it lasting when it hurts Gizmodo’s...
“It’s recognisable as a melodic SFA record, but is very focused
musically...”
– Super Furry Animals
New SFA album lands on March 16th. No title yet. Description sounds good to me; I’d rather they’d dumped the pedal steel an album sooner.
“But, while I abhor the death threats, that stupid kid in me cheered the guy who...”
– Jack Shedd in Big Contrarian → Sign your name.
Passion matters.
“I always assumed that our work and integrity would speak for itself.”
– Michael Arrington
When your work speaks as trolling linkbait, underpinned by ad hominem attacks and vendetta against individuals and livelihoods, anti-Europeanism verging on xenophobia; when integrity means excepting special friends and offers of exclusivity from your morally bankrupt embargo...
WatchFifty People, One Question: London on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
It’s inevitably upsetting seeing the place I called home set in beautiful shifting focus to emotive piano soundtrack (from the start to 2’00, and again from 5’45 to the end). I didn’t think watching video of a pavement near the South Bank would have me crying this year, though.
I don’t think that London is...
“Research by the UK’s Food Standards Agency in 2006 found that 18.5% of...”
– Study reveals ‘shocking’ kebabs · BBC News
I wonder if moving to San Francisco will better for my health after all.
5 tags
“Regarding class. The comment that ‘Class attributes are meant to store machine...”
– Ben Ward
A snippet of a comment I posted on Bruce Lawson’s ‘Microformats, accessibility, HTML 5 (again)’. The suggest that we just munge everything into the class attribute keeps coming up, so wanted my latest rebuke of that idea preserved for posterity; I’m sure I’ll need it...
Windows 7 Keyboard & Mouse Shortcuts
One of my long standing hate points of Microsoft Windows and reasons to love Mac OSX is that the latter has thorough, consistent and mostly logical keyboard shortcuts all over. It’s an extremely powerful system to become very proficient and powerful in using. Windows, by contrast, sucks, and Windows applications (be they from Microsoft or third parties) behave with aggravating...
“Fireworks CS4: Disabled the retarded tabbed interface, then went to open 10...”
– Adobe UI Gripes
Adobe UI Gripes, my new favourite use of Tumblr and British cursing. There are some absolutely amazing errors and quirks in play as Adobe attempt to rebuild native Mac UI from scratch.
Can we just get an Apple-produced Creativity Suite already? iCreate — a new productivity suite...
“If people want a “cheerful” typeface — and it’s clear they do...”
– Timoni Grone
“Before televisions and radios existed, before podcasts and internet pornography...”
– Lyrics to ‘Strangefolk’ by Kula Shaker
Watch
Come on now
You knew you were lost
But you carried on anyway
4 tags
Hectic City 8e - Burned In A Feathering Pyre
...
“I hate the whole “RT” thing. Just link to noteworthy tweets, don’t regurgitate...”
– John Gruber on ‘RT’ vs. ‘via’
I still don’t ‘get’ verbatim reblogging. Linking to content, or quoting content and adding additional comment and context to that makes sense (it’s what I’m doing here), but the the ‘re-tweet’ meme is noisy and irritating....
“I didn’t realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace...”
– Hugh Griffiths
In ‘Microsoft defends return to DRM’, Microsoft UK is put on the spot for launching a DRM-based music service when everyone is moving away from DRM. The above quote sums up perhaps how desperately out of touch the whole operation is, but there are other choice gems you should...
3 tags
“In the face of doubt, openness prevails”
– Barack Obama, via White House plans open government · BBC News
3 tags
6 tags
Spare a thought for poor Owen Thomas, the beleaguered professional troll whose gossip rag Valleywag was shut down recently; his role downsized into writing a section of the same name for the larger and less disrespected Gawker blog. A shock to Valley investors everywhere, it transpires that in an advertising recession the first sites to go are in fact the ones which provide no value.
Gone are...
2 tags
4 tags
“Florence is a twenty one year-old art college drop-out from Camberwell, South...”
– Eat Your Own Ears email description of Florence and the Machine.
I ♥ Florence. She’s playing a headline show in London in May, you should go see if you can!
Florence & The Machine at Bloomsbury Ballroom, Victoria House, 37–63 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1B, 2009-05-27.
Tickets are on...
“This pattern can be used to resolve some long standing issues with including...”
– Value Excerption Pattern: Parsing ‘value’ from an empty element · Microformats Wiki
Here we go then. The culmination of most of my recent microformats efforts. If this works as well as I think it does, we give publishers the flexibility they’ve been asking for that the existing...
Layers · Screen forensics →
Screenshots on acid. Capture your entire screen and sub-parts of the UI as a multi-layered Photoshop file.
5 tags
“The elimination of Thursdays forces a change to Thankgsiving.”
– Tantek Çelik — ‘NewCalendar’
Faced with both a burgeoning microformats task list and an irresistible desire to procrastinate, Tantek has apparently spent most of the past bim fixing time itself.
Rather fascinating summary into the formation of the calendar, months and weeks along with a more...
“It’s amazing. In the world’s most innovative, forward-thinking...”
– Robert Kelsey in What’s up with US women? published in The Guardian.
It’s very difficult to explain to an American the British culture of ‘what the fuck is dating?’ without coming across like a nation of Neanderthals dragging our knuckles along the streets seeking meaningless, loveless...
“One potential issue is that developers may create applications for the Android...”
– Ruslan Kogan, via Gizmodo
This seems like a strange problem to have. Android, by its open nature is full of variance. Different screen sizes, different touch capabilities, differences all over. It’s surely a challenge of the platform that application developers need to build flexible apps.
...
Something which I would be most upset about looking back on the future history of the internet is if those who only see the visual presentation of web pages win. If the combined ignorance of many should cause the semantic beauty of the web to be lost, for the abbrs and blockquotess of the world to disappear into irrelevance. Then, the web will be a far less interesting place.
A tool with which...
WatchThe Remnants on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
The pilot for The Remnants, written and directed by John August. Starring Justine Bateman, Michael Cassidy, Ben Falcone, Ze Frank, Ernie Hudson, and Amanda Walsh.
It was shot during the WGA strike in February 2008, using the SAG internet agreement.
