Kalita Caffe Uno

A dinky plastic mug-top pour-over coffee filter holder thing:

Landscapes of Power

During the inter-war period, thousands of electricity pylons sprang up across the British countryside. Aesthetically and politically suggestive, they fundamentally reshaped how artists viewed and understood the landscape.

James Bridle - Meet The Artist

At this Meet the Artist event, London artist and creative technologist, James Bridle discussed his large outdoor drawing of a Reaper drone aircraft, Under the Shadow of the Drone.

NSK STATE

Anybody can become a bearer of an NSK Passport and acquire the status of an NSK citizen. In its founding statements, the NSK State rejects the categories of (defined) territory and the principle of national borders and advocates the law of transnationality.

Clarks In Jamaica

From ever since, Clarks is a number-one shoe inna Jamaica. Not just now, I’m talking from the 1950s come right up. Clarks stand the test of time inna Jamaica. All the other shoes come and bow right down at Clarks’ foot.

– Bunny “Striker” Lee

aur.sh(1)

aur.sh will download every package from the AUR specified as a parameter, and will run makepkg on it with any hyphen-prefixed options.

I suspect there are as many AUR helpers as Arch Linux users at this point, but this one is defo worth a look.

My First Bookmarks

Phil Gyford’s bookmarks from 1995.

Stranger Visions

…artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. From fag ends to faces.

Evan Roth: BAD ASS MOTHER FUCKER (BADASS MOTHERFUCKER #BADA55)

Solitaire.exe is a physical pixel-for-pixel recreation of the popular computer card game included in the Windows 98 operating system

InsertMeAnywhere

DR. TOBIAS FÜNKE PRESENTS: THE ACTING STYLES OF DR. TOBIAS FÜNKE

Recurring Developments

An interactive visualization of running jokes in Arrested Development.

On Thingpunk

We hide our personal satellite computers in our woodsman’s beards and flannels.

Lines 698 to 702 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

alle þe iles of anglesay on lyft half he haldez
and farez ouer þe fordez by þe forlondez
ouer at þe holy hede til he hade eft bonk
in þe wyldrenesse of wyrale wonde þer bot lyte
þat auþer god oþer gome wyth goud hert louied

And again, in translation:

He kept the Isles of Angelsey on his left, and fared over the fords by the forelands at the Holyhead hill, until he landed in the wilderness of the Wirral. Few that lived there loved God or man with a good heart.

Andy Sprenger’s Winning 2013 US Aeropress Championship Method

I’m a fan of absurdly fiddly and precise coffee brewing methods, but this is just nuts. I’ll still try it, obviously.

Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War

No one ever believes me when I tell them about this.

The Death of Upcoming.org

Unlike other Yahoo! ‘sunsetting’ disasters, there’s really no alternative to Upcoming.

Marcella Pattyn

Marcella Pattyn, the world’s last Beguine, died on April 14th, aged 92.

What’s your “go-to” salad?

I’m working on my own “go-to” salad that I’ll always be able to make. The criteria are: “fresh ingredients you can get in most stores, which you will never tire of, and can eat twice a week for the rest of your life.” Do you have a “go-to” salad or something similar?

If you can bring yourself to ignore the phrase ‘go-to salad’ there are lots of lovely recipes in this Ask MetaFilter thread.

International Art English

On the rise–and the space–of the art-world press release.

From the Google Books scan of A True Copy of a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Greenshields, which is all fingers and thumbs (and glitches).

Via Book Patrol.

Via MeFi.

What about Spot?

Kibo joins MetaFilter.

The Ambient Kettle

Every time Laura Cowen makes a cup of tea, her kettle sends a tweet to let her Mum know. One of the default tweet texts reads ‘maybe a hot Ribena for a change’.

Sonic Arts Network

Maddalena Fagandini joined the Radiophonic Workshop in 1960. She worked in sound for about 10 years, before becoming a TV producer in 1965. The following is taken from an interview with her on 23rd March, 2000. In her explanations of how she created some of her unique sounds, she gives interesting, entertaining insight into what it was like working in the Radiophonic Workshop at that time and into the inter- relationship between music and drama

Habemus opinionem: The New York Times experiments with more structured online comments » Nieman Journalism Lab

On Wednesday afternoon… the [New York] Times rolled out an experimental approach designed to enhance discussion by adding structured data.

Filter bubbling for comments.

The Return of NetNewsWire

First, we intend to bring sync to future versions of NetNewsWire. It’s too soon to go into details about this, but you should know that we recognize how extremely important it is and that it is a top priority for us. Second, even though we’ve been quiet about it, we have been working on new versions of NetNewsWire for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

‘Quiet’ is an understatement–I can’t be the only NetNewsWire user who’d assumed Black Pixel had abandoned the application.

Twitter / ryan: This is by far the best bit …

This is by far the best bit of user interface design I have ever seen. Ever. EVER.

Speculation regarding a possible “SmartBand” product

Today it occurred to me that it could have an interesting use: acting as a gestural, accelerometer-based, Kinect-like remote. Worn on the wrist of your dominant hand, it should be able to detect swipes and jabs, or even control an onscreen pointer.

If Apple are making a thing that’s worn on the wrist, I’d prefer this sort of thing to a gussied-up watch.

Reel 2 Real - Home

Reel to Real is the archival sound project at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation Collections Fund.

This website offers an introduction to the hundreds of hours of archival sounds held by the Museum, the field recordists, their related collections, and a host of other resources such as films and the work of contemporary sound artists associated with the project.

Where and When Did the Symbols ‘+’ and ‘-‘ Originate?

There be other 2 signes in often use of which the first is made thus + and betokeneth more: the other is thus made - and betokeneth lesse.

The Real Weird Twitter Is Espionage Twitter

GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the “Region of Khabarovsk.” This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009.

A numbers station on Twitter!

The Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books

Gutenburg ebooks, listed in an ebook.

Ebook Index of Free Ebooks for the Kindle

More ebooks, listed in an ebook.

Dan Harmon and life after ‘Community’

Thirty-six hours on the road–and in the bar–with exiled TV genius Dan Harmon.

Hear also: the Harmontown podcast.

Our Incredible Journey

Phil Gyford’s depressing catalogue of acquihires and subsequent sunsettings. The fact that I’m capable of typing acquihires and sunsettings without throwing up is a bad sign, I think.

Reddit v. Fashion

A compendium of images from /r/malefashionadvice, a forum where badly dressed men gather to positively critique each others’ poor fashion choices.

404PageFound

Excavating the best active websites from the early graphical internet.

The legendary Space Jam is present and correct, but Berkshire Hathaway is probably the best example–bang up to date content wrapped in a design dating to 1996.

Guardian-style comment generator

Why are the cis-sexual backlash movement intent on opressing my right to fair-trade cocoa?

Monolyth

Twitter constrains users to tweets of 140 characters or less, encouraging concise, frequent updates and interactions. Monolyth takes these principles and flips them on their head. Each person may create a single post, their Monolyth, of exactly 140,000 characters in length.

Not, sadly, a real thing.

By The Way, In Conversation with Jeff Garlin

Wonderful stuff, as you’d expect. The podcast guests so far: Larry David, Lena Dunham, Jeff Tweedy and JJ Abrams.

The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures

I plan to adopt the motto of these hardy Nordic infants: Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder!

M.C. Schmidt & Drew Daniel of Matmos making music with a rat’s cage.

Godfather of Gangsta

Cecil Brown tells the remarkable tale of Stagolee

Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts

Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gas-like state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortex-like state called a circle pit. Both phenomena are reproduced in flocking simulations demonstrating that human collective behavior is consistent with the predictions of simplified models.

Pick-up artists trying to chat up a robot horse

Having spent a few months trawling the “seduction community” where men share canned routines for “opening” (i.e., talking to) women, it’s fascinating to see their scripted conversations play out from the opposite perspective, that of a robot horse.

Beat Delete

Browse through our extensive list of out-of-press albums and singles. If you find something you like, make an order and once the order threshold is reached the record label will repress that product and post it straight out to you.

Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avia (RFC1149)

The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram’s edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed.

Royal Bodies

…I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung.

Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. “Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay.” For more information please reread.