onfocus

"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.

A little web app for creating a shadow image for custom Google Maps icons.

Handy little wizard for generating custom Google Maps icons.

Nice royalty-free icons, including the new free Payments set.

Handy bit of JavaScript to get the longitude and latitude of the center point on a Google Map. This works great as a bookmarklet.

For all your Star Trek bridge needs.

Ryan Tate on Oakland bloggers: "...I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as 'gadflies' — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived."

"They certainly don't make SF book jackets like they used to." Fun post about classic Penguin book covers. I enjoyed browsing through the Penguin Covers on Flickr as well, and I recommend Penguin By Design by Phil Baines for even more design inspiration.

Eric Johnson covered on a Nintendo. He mimicked the guitar tones (including harmonics) well. I can almost picture the side-scrolling shooting spree this could back. [via waxy]

Lifehacker brings down the hammer on commenters. Interesting to see what will earn someone an instant ban from their site; it's a catalog of bad online behavior.

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

"There are three other parties in the ecosystem of a link: the publisher (the site the link points to), the transit (places where that shortened link is used, such as Twitter or Typepad), and the clicker (the person who ultimately follows the shortened links). Each is harmed to some extent by URL shortening." [via kottke]

Visualize the most viewed wikipedia articles, or compare the views of different articles. Here's more information about the launch from Jeff Veen: Announcing Wikirank.

"I've always thought their status updates design was brilliant. Not because it was usable or attractive, I've always thought it was terrible. But because their design didn’t make promises they couldn’t keep." Painful and true advice: make sure you can deliver what you promise through design. [via rc3]

"The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it."

"This system of 50 symbol signs was designed for use at the crossroads of modern life: in airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events. Produced through a collaboration between the AIGA and the U.S. Department of Transportation, they are an example of how public-minded designers can address a universal communication need." [via migurski]

People share and vote for their favorite command-line snippets at this site, and these are the most popular. Didn't know about "sudo !!"—that's worth the price of admission right there.

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."

This bookmarklet will format a web page as text-only. Nicely done!

A W3C validator for mobile sites.

Nice roundup of design trends for phones. [via magnetbox]