onfocus

• Criminal: He's Neutral
  A great story about transforming a public space from this consistently great podcast.

• THE KINSPIRACY
  A certain minimalist/latte art/feet/egg/volkswagen/ice cream cone/wood/American flag aesthetic appears on Instagram and somehow a Portland lifestyle magazine called Kinfolk is the unifying force? This is just weirdly fascinating to me.

• YouTube: South China Sea - 4K Single Take by Toby Smith
  I added this to my favorites at YouTube.

• Pirating the 2015 Oscars: HD Edition
  This is Andy Baio's annual round-up of online movie piracy. This year: HD video makes leaked screeners irrelevant. "Already, with a month to go before the ceremony, 89% of this year’s nominated films have already leaked in high quality online, more than last year."
• Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia
  I had no idea that Oregon tried to keep minorities out in its early years. It's a depressing article but it's important to understand our history.

• How Paper Magazine's web engineers scaled Kim Kardashian’s back-end
  Paul Ford explains how Greg Knauss prepared for massive Web traffic. It's a great look at how Web scaling works. "Can you turn our tour bus into an airplane for a week or two?" Simple!

• No Flying No Tights
  Reviews of (mostly) non superhero graphic novels. [via mefi podcast]

• The Washington Post: Are you raising nice kids?
  Some practical strategies for teaching empathy to kids.

• Evan Williams: A mile wide, an inch deep
  Ev expands on his Instagram comment by laying out the problems with Web metrics and measuring success.
• Kickstarter Ditches Amazon Payments for Stripe
  This is a big shift in the world of online payment systems.

What nerdery do I use to work on @metafilter? I told The Setup @usesthis. http://t.co/uVn0AttNWf

— Paul Bausch (@pbausch) January 1, 2015