Category: Links

I normally manage all my links through del.icio.us but for some reason the other day my normal publishing routine failed to work just as I’d linked to a hundred thousand things. So here is what that post would have looked like, carefully recreated by hand:

• Check out Flickr’s new maps for London. This is stunningly good stuff… Yahoo and Flickr now have good maps for Britain and the rest of Europe as well, which should help the whole geotagging thing really fly outside the US. I’ve known this was coming for a while, but it doesn’t make its arrival any less welcome…
• Awesome Japanese version of the Apple Mac ads See if you can guess which one is the PC and the particular subject of this advert. It’s weird how literal the translation has been…
• Locomotive – the simplest way to get playing with Rails quickly I started off thinking that it would be easier to play with Rails by getting Pair to install it for me on my server, but actually having a go using Locomotive is actually much the simplest option. Much recommended. Get the Agile book too…
• Big Brother are now operating in Second Life Now I enjoy Second Life as much as the next guy, but you have to wonder about big media’s relationship with it. It all seems to be about getting headlines and being talked about. The actual Second Life experiences are normally a bust.
• Photosynth appears to be a pretty extraordinary new way of exploring and using photos Created by Microsoft Research, my only real eyebrow raise is whether or not it’s one of those things that actually gets effectively translated into the mainstream. Microsoft’s done a lot of fascinating work recently that hasn’t been productisable…
• Joe Clark is asking for your money to help him get some accessibility projects off the ground I think this is very interesting indeed. He’s looking for people who can fund him for four months while he tries to get a larger and more serious piece of funding together. I’ll probably contribute something. You should do, it’s a decent goal…
• Das Rad is a German video about human civilisation from the perspective of some sentient rocks Reminds me of the Super Furry Animals song ‘Slow Life’. It leaves me wanting more – what happened to all the people?! What’s the story of the solitary light that blinks for a while? Awesome.
• Ask Metafilter discusses the frat boys who were confused participants in the Borat movie Scandalously, I’m on the side of the students here. I’d need to see the full video of the evening, complete with the way they were primed, the things that Cohen himself said and how selectively they were edited before I’d be prepared to condemn them…
• Looks like the lovely Dunstan Orchard is going to start working on Flickr Perfect, lovely match. They’ll do very well with one another. I’m really interested in the international nature of the Flickr team. Surprisingly well-stacked with Australians, Canadians and Brits…
• Ze Frank talks about Web Developers Simon and Paul are nothing like this at all. I’m not either. None of my friends are like this. It’s a scandalous misrepresentation. Um.
• Samurai Jack vs. Kill Bill Now this is entertainment! Samurai’s destroying robots in gloriously invigorating (if slightly clich√©d) pastiche with Kill Bill music…
• iShowU – screencast software for the Mac I haven’t tried this yet, but I have a feeling it’s going to come in very handy. Recommended by friends.
• .net magazine has a list of top British blogs that is worth exploring I feel a bit of a fraud being referenced in these things as if I were an eager publisher desperate for an audience, rather than a grumpy curmudgeon who views this site rather as a part of himself and considers this self rather shy…
• The Top 100 darndest things that fundamentalist Christians have said recently… Even though I’m profoundly atheistic I’m well aware that most Christians are utterly unlike the lunatics exposed here. But I spent over an hour reading through the site in horror, and people need to be aware that these extremes exist…
• Sir Elton John would like to ban all organised religion It’s a sentiment with which I find myself sympathetic to, although banning stuff seldom seems to solve anything. He’s going to get no end of stick for this though. It could destroy him in parts of the US…
• Glumbert.com has a 1950s Anti-Homosexual Propoganda film from the United States There’s so much I’d say about this if I had more time. The important thing to remember is that there is a sizeable population in the US who would like to start making films like this again. Never believe that the progression in gay
• Our soldiers are getting scorched colons launching fireworks from their arseholes… Godsmacked. Stunned. And not only because this actually happened, but that the Times would print the story. The latter situation may be what this link is really about…
• Daring Fireball has a sizeable and comprehensive review of Stikkit, Rael Dornfest’s new project recently launched at Web 2.0I was going to write a review of my own, but I’d be pretty hard-pressed to compete with this. Mine in a nutshell – it’s a beautiful and classy bit of work that I’m having trouble getting my head around.
• Entertaining Late Late Show approach to Donald Rumsfeld… Thanks to Kerry Bailey at mugwump.typepad.com for finding me that one. S’funny

• Ms. Dewey So it went around a month ago but I stumbled upon it today for some reason and you have to ask yourself, what the fuck is in the water at Microsoft if they think this is a good idea?

• ‘Brilliant’ Bond seduces critics I’m surprisingly excited about the new Bond film, and am delighted to hear that it’s getting generally good reviews, although after my Borat experience I’m not sure whether to trust them…
• Check out Flickr’s new maps for London. This is stunningly good stuff… Yahoo and Flickr now have good maps for Britain and the rest of Europe as well, which should help the whole geotagging thing really fly outside the US. I’ve known this was coming for a while, but it doesn’t make its arrival any less welcome…

• National Geographic reports on the dolphin that’s been discovered with four fins The rear limbs may be an atavistic throwback to a time where dolphin ancestors had limbs and walked on land. Unless you’re against evolution, of course. In which case the dolphin’s extra limbs can be considered evidence of your stupidity…
• Ryan Carson reveals DropSend’s month on month earnings What a fascinating move, and what an interesting situation to be in, to have build a simple functional service that generates money month on month for limited amounts of physical effort.

• The Men of Flickr And a studly bunch of 5′ 10″ ers they are too.

• The BBC reports on a think tank that reports the obvious – that you should legally be allowed to copy your CDs for personal use It’s absolutely fascinating to me that copyright law in the UK is so massively behind the day to day use of technology…
• According to the MPAA, New York is the city in the world most responsible for in-screen recordings of movies The most interesting thing about this is that it isn’t interesting in the slightest. I can’t imagine for a moment why the MPAA should be interested in where piracy occurs given that they can’t possibly hope to shut down all recordings of movies…
• Torrentfreak is my new favourite future of media distribution weblog Obviously BitTorrent is mostly used for piracy, but observing what’s going on around BitTorrent seems like a no-brainer way to learn what early-adopters are actually interested in getting from their media consumption…
• 500,000 people are downloading Lost each week Torrentfreak again – here I think missing the point a bit when they say that 5% of its audience is via Torrents. For a start, I suspect that it’s mostly downloaded by non-Americans…
• Techcrunch bigs up CastTV as the future of media search I really don’t know if I believe that search of this kind is really the future of head-content distribution. The same environment for short-form and long-form media? Head and tail? For pay and free? They’re more blurred than they used to be, but they’re not the same…
• Nine months of gestation in twenty seconds Another in my long series of favourite gawker time-lapse created YouTube videos – this time nine months of pregnancy in twenty seconds.

• Interesting Technology Review article on a new cheap Motorola phone with interesting display technology Back to basics phones that only do a couple of things effectively without any of the frills. I can see the appeal, even as I give up on voice calls and now only really use my phone to take pictures and stick em on the internet…
• The Hubble Deep Field A rather grandiose narrative and some Pink Floyd and pan pipes can’t quite obfuscate the idea that in the tiniest patch of our darkest night sky lurk tens of thousands of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars…
• djay is open source turntable-replicating DJ software for the Mac I had a play and I have conclusively determined that I have absolutely no bloody idea how this whole process is supposed to work and it pisses me off.
• Does anyone know if it’s possible to add HITs to Amazon Mechanical Turk if you’re outside the US? I’m really interested in what I could do with mturk, but it seems like you have to have a US bank account to use it at all, which is profoundly frustrating…
• Go and see The Departed if you get a chance It’s not a gentle film, it’s a bloody brutal film, but it’s also a completely fascinating and engrossing film with plot arcs that you don’t see coming that are allowed to manifest slowly and elegantly and with fascinating inevitability…

• London Underground geographic maps from the Wikimedia Commons also include significant free geo information If you’re looking to do mapping projects around open geo data, then having a significant data source like the location of all London Underground stations has got to be useful…
• Get a $5000 scholarship at an American University – if you regularly write a weblog! This is a significant opportunity for a young weblogger to get some help with their career, and while these are odd criteria for a scholarship that doesn’t make the money less real.
• PIxiesbest band everare to record a new album to be released next year There’s a party in my auditory canal and everyone’s invited!

• Pitchfork reviews the Goldfrapp remix album, “We are Glitter” Gayest thing I’ve ever said – Disco makes me feel good. I’m currently really really enjoying this album. It’s somehow more interesting than the original album and I can really see myself grinning as I walk down the street with this on my iPod…
• I got all excited about Firefox 2 but it turns out it’s just a browser and not a sequel to the Client Eastwood classic… How disappointing!

• Matt and Clare strip all the wallpaper in their flat with the motivating factor of a timelapse video I bloody love Gawker. It’s got me to do all manner of dull jobs recently relatively quickly and efficiently. There’s a bit of Matt and Clare’s video where the sunlight’s moving across the wall that is surprisingly beautiful…