onfocus

"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!

"Holy Fucking Shit, these are good." ok, then. Bookmarking for future use.

Interesting look at how MailChimp helps their employees write for different types of communication with customers. Their blog is laid back and funny. Their tweets are focused and to the point.

Some good information here about using Google's iOS Authenticator app to implement 2-factor authentication at any website.

Vint Cerf on Google: "...we couldn't run our system if everything in it were encrypted because then we wouldn't know which ads to show you. So this is a system that was designed around a particular business model."

This library uses an API to get up-to-the-hour currency rates.

"Cities cannot 'come to the end of their patience' because they’re not people. Mayors and local officials can come to the end of their patience. So can cops. But cities?" Analyzing and comparing the coverage of Occupy Oakland violence with Kent State coverage. [via bluishorange]

It's not a great idea, but if you want to write a regular expression to define a numeric range, this tool makes it easier than doing it by hand.

"And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more." Linked everywhere for good reason--this is an excellent take on the occupy wall street movement.

Chart: the top 1 percent has been doing ok for themselves for the past few years.

Hollywood should not control DNS. I can't believe I even had to write that sentence.

Great interview with Tom Waits at the Washoe House. He laments digitization: "They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone."