That's what I tell my Gutenbourgeois friends, if they'll listen. I say: Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don't just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you'll sell things. (Don't count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They're clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don't want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It's a better online spend.

A collection of the best time-saving apps, tools, and widgets from around the web.

There seems to be a disproportionate amount of vitriol spit at a director who is so well regarded in so many circles. We seem to be in a more or less bland era of mainstream American filmmaking where some of the most celebrated and decorated directors are ones that are almost invisible from a visual standpoint. You have someone like Sam Mendes whose films do not appear to possess one single discernible characteristic. Even worse is Ron Howard, whose films’ only linking attribute is constant and egregious manipulation. And then there’s James Cameron who could easily be described as spectacle over substance, though has no signature traits to hang his hat on. Yet these are the directors that win Oscars, make huge profits at the box office, and while they receive their share of criticism, it doesn’t compare to the amount that’s heaped on Wes Anderson who has the courage to stick by his visual world even when a movie flops financially.

> I sometimes think about Paul McCartney. People always say, “Oh, Paul McCartney, he sold out. He writes popular music.” Paul McCartney is as true to himself as John Lennon was true to himself. They just had different interests. One of the things that I find is that I tend not to be very good at making commercial Hollywood movies. Every time I try, I fail, because I don’t understand them. I worked with Denzel Washington and he understands how to make a good Hollywood movie. He understands what the audience is thinking and wanting and knows how to do that without being crass. It’s an art; it’s a skill. It’s just a question of what your goal is. I do think about what I want from the second half of my life. I don’t know what I want to do…

I realized we weren’t just mourning Adam Yauch. As many would agree, we’ve been mourning our memories. Mourning an adolescence that seemed to get over on fifteen years of adulthood, from Def Jam to Grand Royal. Mourning how a record once could finish your thought, and how much that thought would cost once the lawyers realized it belonged to someone else. (The Beasties were sued for copyright infringement the day before Yauch passed.)

The surprise package in the second half of Premier League season was the only side who switched to a back three on a permanent basis.

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Müllerian mimicry is a natural phenomenon when two or more poisonous species, that may or may not be closely related and share one or more common predators, have come to mimic each other's warning signals. It is named after the German naturalist Fritz Müller, who first proposed the concept in 1878.[2][3]

Historically, women have not enjoyed educational equality. Indeed, Oxford only began awarding degrees to women in the 1920s.  Even today the number of women receiving degrees in mathematics is half that of men. In turn, this lack of access has seeded a widely held, but fallacious, view that men are inherently better skilled at numerate subjects. Despite many studies into sex difference in mathematical ability, the differences have been found to be insignificant. Moreover, studies have shown that reminding women that men are 'better' at mathematics actually causes them to underperform.  This would suggest that it is largely social factors which determine how attractive mathematics is to women; if there is a wide perception that women cannot be mathematicians then they will not become mathematicians. In order, therefore, to promote women in mathematics, it is extremely important to highlight the achievements of those who have bucked the historical trends. One such woman whose life and work should be championed is Emmy Noether.

I am aware of the immense number of demo EPs you must receive. Knowing that you are a busy person who does not have time to listen to even a fraction of them, I submit this proposal in order to not waste anyone’s time. Please note I have not yet produced these in any musical form. I leave the decision as to whether these tracks should be produced to your discretion.

I covered nearly forty years in the history of an art form — from its birth in the early 1970s to the latest technological developments — in my new book, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. I wanted to highlight some of the most important events in that rich history and for you to enjoy the accompanying sights and sounds.

Made by, and for the fans of The 5by5 Network of Podcasts. Instructions: Click a face.

Are you an old-school supermarket baguette fan, do you prefer a simple Italian-style toast or have you your own approach to combining cloves and loaves?

In my time working there, I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work simply discarded because it turned out not to be ‘right’ or ‘good’. This was done with very little animosity towards the people who did the work. There was a distinct difference between working on something that turned out bad and had to be discarded (fine - admirable, even) and doing bad work (bad).

Ever since I wrote about my new year’s resolutions to work smarter using better tools, compared my favorite iOS text editors, and shared some of my workflow techniques on Macdrifter, I thought it would be appropriate to share a bit more about the activity that takes up 80% of my work time: writing.

Something I never order, never make, yet would be very happy if a plate of it appeared in front of me.

As someone else said, "They’re sort of adorably snobby."

That’s how I want to learn. Don’t give me a book; I don’t want a lecture, and I don’t want a list of topics to memorize. Give me ample reason to memorize them and a sandbox where I can safely play. Test me when I least expect it, shock me with the unknown, but make sure you’ve given me enough understanding and practice with my tools that I have a high chance of handling the unexpected.

Battery life is one of the most crucial specs when it comes to any electronic device, and iOS devices tout some of the best claims in the business. But what do you do when you’re not getting anywhere close to the advertised claims? Obviously usage patterns vary, but a growing number of people are noticing drastically reduced battery life when a device is in standby most of the day.

But the album endures because of its music, not its mythology. And that's not just because of the often-cited fact that it mixed folk and rock with other genres—Wilco and plenty of other alternative-leaning bands had already gone experimental in the '90s. Rather, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's triumph was in how it captured a facet of human nature: the way we all send signals, hoping that someone will understand them but also anxious about what happens when someone does. You'll sometimes hear the album get called cryptic, or self-conscious, or difficult. And that's fine. It's really a soundtrack for the ways in which people ask to be misunderstood.

Anyway, that video is big time good. Pauline Kael is spinning over in her grave. My film technique is clearly too advanced for your small way of looking at it. Someday you will be yelling out to the streets below your windows: "He is the chancellor of all the big ones! I love his genius! I am the most his close personal friend!"

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.

Many years after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines began scrutinizing the costs — and the customers.

This Web page contains lists of common special entity codes needed in HTML to generate special characters such as ñ, ¢, ÷ and other characters. Full instructions are in the "Using the Codes" section followed by lists organized by character type

Learning VIM while playing a game

There are thousands of great American cookies but none more loved than those of the chocolate chip variety. In the interests of sanity and my blood pressure, I've kept to the simplest version: no triple chocolate chunks or cranberry oatmeal here, just cookie and chocolate. And a big, non-Puritan amen to that.

You will be glad to know, however, that even in 1962 those were controversial, protest-engendering lyrics. The song tanked—one of the few outright duds in King’s catalogue. But anyway, I came here to praise Carole King! I love Carole King! Like everyone my age, and maybe everyone period, I grew up listening to all the great songs from Tapestry on the radio and when I got older and started fancying myself a music nerd, I was startled to learn that before she was a singer-songwriter and iconic album-cover presence, King had been a Brill Building songwriter (a misnomer; she and Goffin worked out of a different Broadway building) knocking out hits for people such as Aretha Franklin, the Monkees, the Byrds, the Everly Brothers, the Shirelles, Little Eva. And if it is possible for someone as successful, honored, and beloved as King to be under-rated, I think that’s true. You rarely see her on the short-list of the greatest 60s-generation songwriters, where she should be, with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and Brian Wilson. Is that sexism, or a rockist snub of a career that began, when King was still a teenager, just down the block from Tin Pan Alley?

But that’s not to say that gamification doesn’t work. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that it was defined wrongly, not that it doesn’t work. So what is gamification then? That’s easy. Gamification is actually this; adding non-game elements to games. There you go. That’s how you do it. 

Agency Filadélfia’s short for Câmera Clara follows a Brazilian photographer to Denmark to meet the man who represents the omnipresent bane of his career: stock photography.

A treasure trove of unearthed interviews, conducted by the writer who knew him best, reveals how Jobs's ultimate success at Apple can be traced directly to his so-called wilderness years.

Farnham reports that the list of agencies that serve liquor on the premises include names such as BBDO, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Grey Group, and Mindshare. Two other standouts include J. Walter Thompson, which reportedly boasts a 50-foot bar, and Kirshenbaum, Bond, Senecal + Partners, which creates advertisements for Glenfiddich whisky and Hendricks gin, among other liquors.

Company representatives say that most of the imbibing takes place after the day's work is done. And others say the drinks can help take the sting out of workdays that can easily extend past 12 hours.

 
But another common theme is the idea that drinking on the job helps co-workers bond — and it can also spark creative solutions.

Good parables explain themselves. After you have read the story of Lazarus in the Bible, you don't need anyone to explain it to you. The same is true, I believe, of Stanley Kubrick's parable "2001: A Space Odyssey." It contains the answers to all the questions it advances.

My name is Aurelio and I'm a Python programmer who switched to Mac OS X. Being nerd and needing to automate common tasks, the learning of the AppleScript language was unavoidable. To speed up the process I've took some notes, comparing the new commands to Python statements. The result is this document.

As the name says, it's intended for Python programmers. But if you're an applescripter interested in Python you may also benefit from it.

Kryptos is an encrypted sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. Of the four messages, three have been solved, with the fourth remaining one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. The sculpture continues to provide a diversion for cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decrypt the final section.

"At 1000memories, we have a particular fondness for old stuff (if you can’t tell by our homepage). That’s why we’ve always liked Instagram. It celebrates the old, vintage aesthetic of the film photos of yore. But there’s a lot of history behind the photo filter that many folks are not aware of—in fact, none of the photo apps you know today would exist without the vintage photography that inspired them. So we set out to hack the formula to recreate the look of the analog Instagram filters using the technology that inspired them in the first place—vintage cameras and film."

"really deep appeal of Instagram…It changes the way I look at the world around me.<br />
<br />
I’m not a super visual person; I do not normally take a lot of photos. But now I am, & do. Whenever you join a new social network, there’s this sudden, gentle pressure to be more interesting. In the case of Twitter…a pressure to post ever-more-cool undiscovered URLage. In the case of Instagram, it means posting ever-more-nifty snapshots. And this in turn means that I’ve begun looking at the world around me anew. I used to walk around my neighborhood blissfully — or stressfully — ignoring my surroundings, while staring at the sidewalk (or, ironically, my iphone). Now I find myself spotting unusual bits of graffiti, or patterns that fall trees make against the sky, or how super strange the robot is on Yo Gabba Gabba when my kids watch in the morning. Or that blue door on the brownstone in the picture above: How did I not notice how pretty it was? It’s like my third eye has opened up!"

In pursuit of answers, “Chavs” covers a lot of ground. It’s a history of the British class system, a long-form indictment of Margaret Thatcher’s social and economic policies and a rowdy broadside against London’s elite media and political circles. Its combination of wit and outrage, at least in the early chapters, is intoxicating.

As Owen Jones puts it in Chavs, an utterly compelling critique of class fear and loathing in Britain today, the working class has gone from mythical ‘salt of the earth’ to reviled ‘scum of the earth’.[ii] ‘Working class’ is no longer a badge of authenticity, solidity and respectability but something base, superficial, backward and ridiculous. Lacking middle class aspirations, Jones argues that a discourse of class hatred helps justify record levels of social inequality in Britain today.

The question is this: those people down there, are they really people? It’s a question about for whose sake this world exists.

David Brown, for NPR:

More than a decade ago, an album came out recorded mostly on cassette in a house, never released on a major label — and until last month it had been out of print for almost that long. When Noel Gallagher of Oasis heard it, he declared it "amazing," and The Guardian called it "the best album The Beatles never recorded."

I adored Kon Tiki in 1997 and I'm delighted to see its reissue. I remember Harrison's voice being described as "The best 'Stars in Your Eyes' John Lennon, bar none", and while you can't escape the way CM wear their influences so clearly, the songs are still knock-out.

This article provides information for both the novice and the more experienced iTunes user to help you understand how to best catalog and organize your content in iTunes, enrich it with album art, and then build playlists that reflect your own needs and interests and then transfer that information to your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV to get the most enjoyment out of your music and video content.

Ditto.

This sounds utterly ridiculous. But tempting.

This is a glossry of terms and topics in JavaScript as covered in Codecademy courses. It does not attempt to completely define and explain terms, but rather to provide a general overview that is appropriate for someone new to the language.

Here are the dictation commands that have worked for me with Siri.

To summarize Arrested Development for new viewers is to best describe it as being in the mockumentary style; the forerunner of shows such as The Office and Parks and Recreation. It follows a once prominent Orange County family, the Bluths. The patriarch, George Bluth, is arrested by federal authorities on the day of his retirement from the family real estate development business for suspicion of treason in the building of homes in Iraq. His middle, most responsible son, Michael, takes over the family business and the role of patriarch to his hyper-dysfunctional family. The following is a quick character breakdown of the Bluth Family.

Different definitions of affordance that have developed are explained in the following sections. The original definition described all action possibilities that are physically possible. This was then refined to describe action possibilities of which an actor is aware. The term has further evolved for use in the context of HCI as indicating the easy discoverability of possible actions.

Cruijff was perhaps the most original thinker in football’s history, but most of his thinking was about attack. He liked to say that he didn’t mind conceding three goals, as long as Barça scored five. Well, Guardiola also wanted to score five, but he minded conceding even one. If Barcelona is a cathedral, Guardiola has added the buttresses. In Barça’s first 28 league games this season, they have let in only 22 goals. Here are some of “Pep”’s innovations, or the secrets of FC Barcelona:

Milan face Barcelona in this year's Champions League quarter-finals, having already put paid to one Barcelona Dream Team, 18 years ago in Athens. This is how they did it.

Created specifically for iPhone & iPad apps, they're also perfect for Android, websites, t-shirts, tattoos and more.