On Feb. 20, 1992, more American homes tuned into The Simpsons than they did The Cosby Show or the Winter Olympics from Albertville, France. A foul-mouthed cartoon on a fourth-place network bested the Huxtables and the world's best amateur athletes. Fox over NBC and CBS—its first-ever victory in prime time. New over old.

"A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit & be inhabited by. What you infuse a space w/ to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul…

Zelda would be better if it had no story…no plot to structure the adventure…first Zs barely had any plot…were better for it. With plot, sequence matters too much…early Zs had situations, worlds & scenarios that framed action, gaps to be filled in by player, sequences to be broken. Optimal paths & shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned. Items were the most prominent plot devices, & even they were not unduly strict about order. You could be slow & steady or blast straight through with a little know-how…basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot."

…a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, independence, sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around."

Some guys have strong backhands, Federer has the inescapable reality of death.

Git has plenty of great features. Using all of them can be difficult if you only

This is the Git reference site. This is meant to be a quick reference for learning and remembering the most important and commonly used Git commands. The commands are organized into sections of the type of operation you may be trying to do, and will present the common options and commands needed to accomplish these common tasks.

Thinking it through, I realized this category-based naming convention just doesn't align with my basic mental construct of what software is. Organizing items by category makes sense in libraries and bookstores, on restaurant menus, in music and movies—but not apps. An app isn't consumable media. An app is a tool. It helps you perform an action, to do something. Modern programming languages and APIs are verb-based (think MyObject->setName() and and HTTP's GET and POST), and the user interface should be, too. That's when I settled on a verb-based folder system.

Juuuust in case you find it helpful, here’s my little guide on drawing vector and pixel hearts. Consider it a starting point and spike it with your own love potion.

You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time very recently. If not, then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.

A fast and clever open source hex editor
for Mac OS X.

Embedagram was built to allow users of Instagram to embed their most recent photos on their websites, weblogs and anywhere else an HTML <iframe> is embeddable.

Some say the story begins with the CD-i. The real story however begins with the growing use of CD-ROM and the emergence of multimedia - devices that played games, movies, music, edutainment and more.

Initializr is an HTML5 templates generator to help you getting started with a new project based on HTML5 Boilerplate. It generates for you a clean customizable template with just what you need to start!

Tinycon allows the addition of alert bubbles and changing the favicon image. Tinycon gracefully falls back to a number in title approach for browsers that don't support canvas or dynamic favicons.
Alerts in the favicon allow users to pin a tab and easily see if their attention is needed.

A large part of the infographic’s intrinsic appeal seems to lie in its visual reductionism of complex information. Reductionism itself is not inherently bad—in fact, it’s an essential part of any kind of synthesis, be it mapmaking, journalism, particle physics, or statistical analysis. The problem arises when the act of reduction—in this case rendering data into an aesthetically elegant graphic—actually begins to unintentionally oversimplify, obscure, or warp the author’s intended narrative, instead of bringing it into focus.

Every time I see a word cloud presented as insight, I die a little inside.

"Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help. We know that you have little to no desire to do web design professionally, but that doesn’t mean that you want an ugly cookie-cutter site or to settle for one that hasn't been updated since Hackers was in theaters. Through short tutorial videos, you’ll learn how to take a basic wordpress blog and manipulate the css, html (and even some php!) to match your aesthetic. You’ll feel empowered rather than crippled by the internet and worst case scenario you’ll at least end up having a better idea of how professional web designers turn your design dreams into a reality on screen."

"I'm making some big shifts in my work in the coming months (read: focusing my energies rather than what's become the scattershot of freelance writing). I'm thrilled to say that this will mean more time for Hack Education, thanks in no small part to a research and writing project I'll be undertaking for Mozilla.

It's part of the organization's larger learning and literacy efforts, and my piece will involve researching practices and pedagogies and interviewing teachers, learners, technologists about tools for teaching programming for the Web. Specifically (or rather, conceptually), I'm asking the question: Do we need a "'Scratch' for HTML5?" All my findings and conversations will be written up here on this blog."

The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you well into mastery. Because Vim makes you so fast and fluent, it’s especially hard to root these out because you might not even notice them, but it’s worth it. Here I’ll list some of the more common ones.

We are a community of motherfucking programmers who have been humiliated by software development methodologies for years.

We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

We are tired of being told we're autistic idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker.

We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design.

Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

Just choose a country and a way to create your map by color, type values or by uploading your excel files (you can even use your zip / postal code column to get the best and most accurate maps!)

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

Have you ever wanted to pick up a video camera and make a short video or film, but felt intimidated by your lack of knowledge? The explosion of film-making for websites and mobiles gives people and organisations the opportunity to tell their stories and show what they have to offer, at low cost. This collection of exciting videos features The Open University’s experienced team of filmmakers, who will show you some of the craft secrets that underpin good filmmaking, and how professionals stay up to date. You will learn the basics of editing, how to conduct an interview, the role of the producer and other crew members and how to archive your finished project. This material forms part of The Open University course T156 Digital film school.

A series of mixes intended for listening
while programming to aid concentration
and increase productivity (also compatible
with other activities).

Have fun and make games, or hack your homework using Ruby!
Just tell your parents or teachers you're learning Ruby programming... ;)
Free and works on any computer.

This page aims to be a great asset for Mac users who wants to learn more about the functions and commands in the Terminal. A beginner should be able to learn the basics in how the Terminal works, but at the same time be useful to the more advanced users who can use the information to quickly refresh the memory when it fails.

I’m taking a hiatus from speaking in 2011 to recharge and focus on other things, but thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned from speaking over the last several years, from someone who isn’t a naturally-born speaker or expert in speaking, hates flying, and generally get anxious about combining those two activities.

Some of the follow points might be obvious for some, but they’re all important bits I try and keep in mind before every talk. I’ve learned most of them from other speakers, articles and advice from colleagues and event organizers.

This is an extension to the Twitter Bootstrap framework. It makes creating pretty buttons easy.

I’m going to attempt the impossible: to tell an engaging story accessible to relative laymen using a hex editor (a program for manually editing binary files). The above is the binary content of a very simple test GIF I made in order to better understand the GIF specification. Here it is, if you want to play along at home: . I’ll walk you through each part of the file, and explain each part as it pertains to the history of the GIF.

Real Vim ninjas count every keystroke - do you?
Pick a challenge, fire up Vim, and show us what you got.

Helping you build a solid stylesheet foundation based on your markup

We send a lot of mail for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire (and some for Sortfolio, the Jobs Board, Writeboard, and Tadalist). One of the most frequently asked questions we get is about how we handle mail delivery and ensure that emails are making it to people’s inboxes.

1. Enter a long word.
2. Receive shorter synonyms.

See, the amazing thing is not that Mike Powell’s record hasn’t been broken. It’s that nobody has even come close. Nobody has jumped 29 feet since that day in Tokyo in 1991. Nobody has come within eight inches of the record since that day. At the 2008 Olympics, 27 feet, 4 inches was good enough for gold — the worst gold medal performance in more than 35 years. As the greatest long jumper who ever lived likes to say: “These guys come out now, jump 28 feet, take their gold medal and go home like they did something.”

And the greatest long jumper who ever lived — and the 30-foot jump that never happened — is at the heart of our story.

At some point between then and now, my QR code image got lodged in the second position of Google Images’ search results for “qr code”. As a result, it became one of the most requested pages on my site, regularly clocking in several hundred requests a day. But what happened next defies rationale explanation.