"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!"

"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."

"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."

Link to Dropbox. Write Markdown-formatted text. Use your favorite TextExpander snippets. Do quick research to find reference materials. Lookup or substitute words from Terminology app. Insert quotes and links into your documents. Upload images to CloudApp. Export your writings as Markdown or HTML files. Send them to Evernote, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr and Twitter. Or use the generated HTML for your blog post. Your choice.

"“Gamification” is a word and concept invented by idiocrats who confuse humane with manipulative.

Theory about how the mistake gets made

Everybody sees the trend toward simpler, more-focused, better-designed software. Enterprise developers see the consumerization of IT.

You could look at this trend and say, “As software improves, it respects its users more. It works better and looks better, is easier to learn, and leaves out the things that waste a user’s time.”

Or you could look at this trend and say, “As software gets simpler, it gets dumbed-down — even toddlers can use iPads. Users are now on the mental level of children, and we should design accordingly. What do children like? Games.”

Respect

It should be obvious that one conclusion respects people and one doesn’t. It should also be obvious that the first conclusion is correct and the second is incorrect, cynical, and low."

"If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like & cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?
From where I sit creating things does the following:

Let’s you filter to something you like…Frees you…Makes you happy…Plays to strengths not weaknesses…

I can’t say it better than _why [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff ]: "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

…

If you quiet your mind & allow yourself to stop judging everything you will find that you have more potential for innovation (at work, in the kitchen…with your hobbies…your thoughts) than you thought before. You were using the same brutal quality filter on yourself that you used on viral videos, talk radio, and blog posts. You deserve better."

"Remember also that such a pack would have to be small enough not to scare geeks away (or be graded somehow)…"

Erika Hall: "Nichomachean Ethics - Aristotle (350 BCE), Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond (1997), The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine (1794), Paul Rand: Conversations with Students - Michael Kroeger (Conversations took place in 1995, book published in 2008), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley (1818), Søren Kierkegaard's In Vino Veritas"

"By clicking on the image above, you'll be able to explore:

*The history of the Periodic Table in just 2 minutes
*How certain elements changed the course of history
*How the different parts of our planet are made up of the same elemental building blocks
*Where different elements occur, and what places they get their names from
*Which elements make up the human body
*The elements that are vital, and dangerous, to human life"

"I used to prefer Vimeo over YouTube. Vimeo was always a bit better in quality, had a nicer looking player and website. Most importantly, it had a more mature and tasteful community. So when I released my game TRAUMA, it was a no-brainer to publish the trailer for it on Vimeo. It was an arty project that was made exactly for the kind of audience I would meet on Vimeo.

Today, I’m regretting that decision…"

"The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed."

"However, one thing that has become increasingly difficult to find has been anything related to video games. Specifically, indie video games. Vimeo's long been the go-to space for heralded indie titles like Sword and Sworcery to tease viewers with glimpses of in-development games. Yet, indie devlopers are finding themselves running afoul of an edict that forbids video of gameplays for users at the Basic and Plus levels of membership. To have gameplay videos hosted, users must purchase the Pro level at a cost of $199/year. That may not seem like a lot, but considering how many indie games get made by one- or two-person teams with no other source of income, it can be a big difference.

After seeing a flurry of tweets about the Vimeo policy earlier today, Kotaku reached out to Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer for his take on the situation. His editorial follows:"

"But wait… That wasn’t all they did. They disabled embedding of all content on our site, even the things we had made ourselves. Sure, the videos were still available by going directly to Vimeo.com and going into our account, but embedding was gone, so every occurrence of a video on our site was replaced with a block that said “embedding has been disabled for this site.”"

"rep.licants.org allows people to install a bot on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. The bot will combine the activity the user is already having on other channels such as youtube or flickr with a set of keywords selected by the user to attempt and simulate that person's activity, feeding their account with more frequent updates, engaging in discussions with other users and adding new people to their list of contacts."

"Last week...a software program running on borrowed supercomputers...beat a US Go professional...Go has been Turing'd [as well as chess and checkers]. Driving a car has been Turing'd. The list of human cognitive activities that normal humans believe computers can't do is very short; Make art. Create a novel, symphony, movie. Have a conversation. Laugh at a joke. Are there other things people popularly believe computers can't do?"

"Once you are Turing'd it is much easier to believe other occupations which we humans used to do uniquely, can be done by computers. You tend to be open to disruptive technology in all parts of your life."

"The life and death of Alan Turing."

Okay, enough of these stoner epiphanies! The point is that Instagram’s tags, primed by de Kerckhove’s provocation, made me think anew about the cognitive power of tags — their sense-making ability. But I also realized I haven’t seen designers do anything particularly interesting with tags in a while. I haven’t seen anything that helps me spy patterns in data/documents/pictures in similarly weird and fresh ways. Maybe tagging, as a discipline, hasn’t been pushed in very interesting ways. Or maybe I haven’t been looking in the right place?

Until its OED entry is solemnized, we’ll have to settle for this definition on Wiktionary: “grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.” I don’t think I’ll ever look at a character set quite the same way again.

The sneakiest way to use a hashtag is to set apart a word or phrase or name in your tweet and make it look like you very accidentally blurted it out, which is an extension of the muttered-into-a-handkerchief usage, but with a slight Freudian twist. Here, the hashtag is like a bit of chicken wire between what you are consciously and deliberately saying, and what just happened to slip out, especially useful when you are making a comment and pretending that you absolutely, positively will not name names, and then, whoops, it just came tumbling out. A hashtag is not a secure perimeter, after all! Just look at how holey a hashtag is—it’s only chicken wire, and sometimes things—bad things, names and particulars, details, information, those sorts of things—do manage to make it through. To wit:

“I just made out with your husband! #kidding #hewishes #likeIwouldadmititanyway #ToddPalin”

Amazing how rich and complex 140 characters with a few symbols thrown in can be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks at the Princeton University Library are in two spring binders with alphabetized index separators. The pages are typed on 8 1/2’’x 11” white paper—except for yellow sheets 1-17 inserted after Z. The white sheets are unnumbered, and it is possible that they are not now in their original order.

Create and view beautifully informative animated maps, for free!

Learning the subtleties of Helvetica and Garamond used to be a pain—but a sleek new app has made the process easier

Elephant path is a name for a path that is formed in space by people making their own paths and shortcuts; it is an unofficial route. Elephant path is an anarchist way of moving in a city, a town or a village. It is an overlaying system of going from a place to a place in a space regardless of the city/town plan. Still, it is connected to the streets and the architectural forms.

With Ruby, and the gosu gem you can do it. It is fairly easy to get going. And if you follow our screencasts, you can have a game going in minutes!

If you want to "trickle" your photos into Flickr instead of dumping in dozens of pictures at one time when your contacts will only see at most 5 in their "Photos From" tab, this is your tool.<br />
Instructions: Just upload your photos as private and add the tag "flickrtrickle" to them. Then visit this page and I'll pull your 5 oldest (by date posted) trickle photos. Hit the button and I'll update the date posted to the current time, remove the tag, and make the photo public. This way you can trickle in your photos as you see fit.

BetterTouchTool lets you define tons of gestures for your Macbooks Trackpad, your MagicMouse and your MagicTrackpad. In addition to that it brings lots of new stuff to MacOS like Windows 7 like window snapping, window switchers etc......

"Even now (I’m twenty-four), people ask me what my days were like, as an unschooler. What did I do? How did I learn? And the truth is—I’m not exactly sure. Because they were almost never the same. There were some textbooks along the way. Maybe two. I was supposed to complete a certain amount of lessons a week from them. I did a lot of them on Fridays, when I remembered. I remember reading all the time. And writing all the time. And painting. And playing music. I did these things because I loved them. I loved them in a way that I sometimes think people have forgotten they can be loved by children and young adults. Because these activities weren’t school, or work, or homework, or a requirement. They were me. And when you love something enough to do it constantly, it will always lead to other things, and you will always get better at it. It sounds so simple. People want more of an answer…"

Enzo is a vigorous sans serif consisting of five weights, ranging from Thin to Black. Designed by Tobias Kvant, it was inspired by type from the past as well as from the present, giving it quite a unique look. Its short ascenders and descenders makes it a good headline face, ideal for magazines, posters and such, but it will work fine for body text as well.

I think keeping drafts can be counterproductive. The problem is that, once something is a draft rather than a blog post, it’s likely to stay a draft and never become a blog post. And the longer something stays in draft, the less likely it is to ever see the light of day.

“What am I passionate about?” This is the essential starting point for any discussion of what the Web is, what it is becoming, and how it should be presented. The individual, with their needs, their passions, their opinions, their desires and their goals is always paramount. We tend to forget this, or overlook it, or just plain ignore it. We design from a point of view which is about what we have to say, what we want to present, what we expect to communicate. It’s not that that we should ignore these considerations, but they are always secondary. The Web is a ground for being. Individuals do not present themselves as receptacles to be filled. They are souls looking to be fulfilled. This is as true for children as for adults – perhaps more so – and for this reason the educational Web has to be about space and place for being, not merely the presentation of a good-looking set of data.

This gets me to an odd thing about the reception of Infinite Jest. I write as someone who was entirely charmed by the formal novelties of that book. The footnotes, the digressive narration, the freight-train sentences steaming over entire pages all struck me as entirely authentic. (And as someone who struggles with the visual and cognitive mechanics of reading, I found all the surface static to provide, as a source of ongoing pleasure, the attention-incentives that I otherwise have to gird myself with through manipulations of lighting and environment and blood chemistry. For some of us, reading is a highly complicated, vexatious game. For me anyway, Infinite Jest felt like a gift.)

I've never worked as a journalist, but in the unremembered mysterious way that we learn most words, I somehow learned these terms and their idiosyncratic spellings. "Hed" is head, as in headline. "Dek" is deck, which is a sort of sub-headline, a phrase or two between the headline and the body of the article that explains what the story is about. "Lede" is lead, as in leading paragraph, the way a piece starts. "Graf" is graph, as in paragraph, often used in combinations like nut graf, which comes just after the lede, and summarizes the story's content. "Tk" should be "tc", I guess, because it's short for "to come", i.e. not yet written.

“What’s the one thing I need to know?” she asked.

I made her wait, of course, so that I could explain the premise of the book. It turns out the vast majority in the United States and other nations believe that the way to get ahead is to focus on your weaknesses and try to fix them. That’s wrong, Buckingham says.

Zoe Fraade-Blanar presented a wonderful piece of work as her MFA thesis project for NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. “Current” is a Java application designed to sit on the desktop of a journalist and monitor trending topics on Google and the appearance of those topics within Google News. The application looks for stories that have widespread reader interest (i.e., they are trending on Google Trends) and little press coverage – these, Zoe theorizes, are the stories most profitable for news organizations to cover.