onfocus

"A Collection of iPhone Home Screens." I found this a while back but couldn't remember the name or how to get back to it because the keywords are saturated. My Google-fu was hot today, and I'm bookmarking for future reference.

This Java class is full of helpful functions for escaping and unescaping strings, and it can be used within ColdFusion (if you're into that).

"Cultivating a Late 19th-Century Style at Home." This seems to be an IRL manifestation of that thing.

Aha! This answers a question I didn't even know I had, but I've been unconsciously wondering. I thought this "look" came from the image-collecting Tumblr crowd. But apparently it's a thing IRL.

My son loved looking at and talking about these pictures of animals. You might need to skip past a couple with toddlers, but most are great for kids.

ooh, I'd like to try one of these for my working OSX drive.

Nice article about a couple good iPhone photography apps. [via merlin]

I love lists too, and I think they're going to be fantastic once everyone has them. I agree with Mat that lists will lead to fewer folks in my 'following' list, but 'listing' is lower impact so it might lead to more actual following.

Some samples of single-pane comics by H.T. Webster. Sadly, his collections appear to be out of print and there aren't any at nearby libraries.

Scan of the 1955 book with wonderful caricatures by Ronald Searle. [via peacay]

"So, this is why I say white supremacy is the only functional form of racism; the only kind that actually works."

"...you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not."

It's going to be that time of year again soon. These Thule chains look nice, but I'd rather see real people putting on chains in freezing weather in the demo, not spinning/floating CG.

Eight rules for writing a short story. [via merlin]

"The fundamental problems with the American health care system are all linked, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the vast majority of folks get insurance solely through their employers." Amen, and go Wyden! [via Kattullus]

"The problem is Twitter isn’t really open. For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use “Twitter” without an any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter’s centralized service." I'm not a fan of people pushing content to Twitter like it's an RSS reader for social reasons as well, but that's probably just me.

Oliver Sacks on Migraine Auras: "I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left -- dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors." I've had these and it's always amazing to read that others have experienced the same thing. [via Ironic Sans]

Helpful step-by-step guide to fixing deadlock problems in SQL Server 2005.

Modern take on classic propaganda posters: "Loose tweets sink fleets."

"This Friday, June 12, TV stations nationwide will cease broadcasting analog signals and switch to digital-only broadcasts...Starting Friday, I can no longer get TV on the radio." Didn't think of this, what a bummer. I've used this trick occasionally too, especially when the power goes out. [via MeFi]

"...new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace." That's Chris Messina paraphrasing Tim O'Reilly on Web 2.0 in general, applied to Facebook's new vanity URL feature specifically.

"I tried to alternate the charming children's covers with the creepy modernist covers, but I soon lost the ability to tell one type from the other." Excellent collection of early 20th century graphic design in Japan. Be sure to check out the previous post with book covers too.

Nice collection of YouTube videos featuring many Jazz legends at their peak in 1959. (My favorite is Horace Silver's Señor Blues.)

Nice post about commercial illustrator Frank Soltesz who drew cut-away illustrations in the 40's and 50's.

Cameron expands on the Economist article: "...while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core."

"...people who are members of online social networks are not so much 'networking' as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle'..."

SBJ's talk at SXSW about the future of news. "...in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it's important that we try to imagine how we'd like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years."

"Las Vegas casinos increasingly pay attention to their customers - their likes, dislikes, moods and patterns - in order to create an engaging experience." This was my favorite talk at Gel 2008.

"What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09."

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem."

Paintings of alchemists in their laboratories. Posted to Flickr by the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

"People went to Google to find specific information about the President-Elect and the ceremony. People go to Twitter and Facebook to share the experience with one another. That means, Twitter and Facebook are delighting users more than Google, because they are keyed into natural human needs and emotions that trigger far greater and more addictive endorphin rushes than just finding a piece of information." [via msippey]

Tom Armitage on journalists learning to code: "Learn to think like a programmer. What's really important is to not understand how to do magical things with code, but to learn what magical things are possible, what the necessary inputs for that magic are, and who to ask to do it." [via rc3.org]

"None of which is saying you shouldn't be talking to your sources, and questioning what you're told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You've got to learn to interrogate them effectively - and quote them meaningfully - too." [via migurski]

Brian Eno put together a generative music app for the iPhone called Bloom.

"Our results showed that just the very basic metric of reply length, along with the number of competing answers, and the track record of the user, was most predictive of whether the answer would be selected. The number of other best answers by a user, a potential indicator of expertise, was predictive of an answer being selected as best, but most significantly so for the technically focused Programming category." [via waxy]

Jay Rosen: "At what point does an extreme attempt to de-legitimate the press actually de-legitimate the candidate as an extremist in the eyes of the press?"

"COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews."

"Few men dare ask the question 'What is toffee, exactly?' All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane." [via schampeo]