onfocus

This animated gif shows the change from the Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet over time.

Nice sampling of the illustrator's work. Wikipedia: Edward Bawden.

Fantastic, fantastic story about the life of field recorder Tony Schwartz. Listen to this right now!

Neighborhood data for geo-aware applications under a CC license. [via joshua]

"A blogger named Violet Blue noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her." BoingBoing comments on posts missing from their archive. Glad they explained, but unpublished has an unfortunate Orwellian ring to it.

Examples of pictures from dozens of vintage cameras. [via A Photo Editor]

Make any photo look like it was taken during Japan's Edo period. [via MeFi] Here's what one of my photos looks like after being sent back in time:

"Figure out how much each Netflix rental is costing you." I don't want to know.

Nice photo of rain in Pittsburgh.

Short-wave radio is still around and growing. Funny that China still expends effort blocking short-wave signals.

The soviet photos and false intro are heavy handed, but archive integrity is an important subject. They quote Rebecca Blood's Weblog Ethics:

History can be rewritten, but it cannot be undone. Changing or deleting words is possible on the Web, but possibility does not always make good policy. Think before you publish and stand behind what you write. If you later decide you were wrong about something, make a note of it and move on.

[via Fimoculous]

A collection of tips for preserving your digital materials by The Library of Congress. [via Long Views]

"[McCain] is not only 'breaking his word' he's breaking the law."

"The campaign...includes television and online ads and 'phone and in-person conversations with influential mommy bloggers.'" Beware mommy bloggers praising corn syrup.

Derek on the often brutal world of startups, even for founders. JPG Magazine is/was great, this sucks.

Great tips about running a successful online community.

the history of the "amen break", its impact on culture, and some thoughts about copyright in the sampling age.

good summary of the different ajaxy modal windowy packages out there.

nice modal window implementation of lightbox that you can use for HTML and such instead of just images.

wonderful set of posters advertising freight/packet lines [via kottke]

New IBM project for social data visualization and analysis. Could analyzing data with others be more popular than sharing photos and videos? ;) [via O'Reilly Radar]

great images from Wikipedia articles. It's unusual to me to see wikipedia content in a slightly different context. Similarly, there's Wikiworld Comics and the Picture of the day (a pod feed is only available offsite because Wikipedia doesn't provide one.)

turns out New Zealand wasn't strictly for the birds. [via slashdot]