onfocus

"Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give."

"Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!" This is both absolutely true and heartbreaking.

Does what it says on the tin. !important

"Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there."

This puts the concentration of media into perspective. [via mlkshk]

Time often uses a different cover in the US.

More thoughts on the UC Davis pepper spray incident and police militarization in general from a Davis faculty member. [via megnut]

"If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines." Hard to believe this happened in Berkeley of all places. By Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate. [via sacca]

"I hope publishers will see that conscious sharing is better than passive sharing, and that content delivery is better than app delivery." Me too. Quantity of traffic beats quality in many people's minds so I'm not optimistic.

Nice demo. I'm not sure I buy it yet. You still have to download the entire font to use a single icon. If you're using a large number of icons it might make sense.

Hello Brightness shortcut icon! This is great.

"Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students." A UC Davis professor is asking the chancellor to resign after the OWS pepper spraying incident.

You're probably already subscribing, but if not: this is the best podcast on the Internet. Merlin Mann and John Roderick discuss things. Humorous things.

We've been using alpha and beta versions of jQuery Mobile at Fuelly for quite a while now. It's great to see it reach this milestone.

ThinkUp is a great way to archive/search your entire Twitter history and get some nice metrics in the process. Congrats on 1.0! (Don't miss Anil's post about ThinkUp and Software with Purpose.)

Nice collection of designs patterns and examples for mobile devices.

This is a nice alternate theme for Google Reader. Better type. Better separation and texture. The best part is that it tones down the in-your-face-red G+ share button.

"The global brain is still in its infancy. We can raise it to help us make a better world, or we can raise it to be selfish, unjust and short-term in its outlook." Fantastic article by Tim O'Reilly describing a more practical form of global consciousness.

"Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade." Bret Victor on imagining more tactile experiences with technology.

Draw something. Get a matching unicode character back. Fun!

Nice tutorial about using shading and texture in web design.

Nice little hack for faster dynamic HTML with JavaScript.

Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr fame has put together some scripts to mirror your Flickr photos at a private domain. It uses Flickr auth and maintains privacy settings in the process.

Brian Lam from Wirecutter on those soon-to-be ubiquitous holiday gadget guides. Nice axe!