Mottr.am

10k Apart

2010-07-30T11:55:12Z

A competition to design a web app in less than ten kilobytes of code, though you can use external libraries, which is a bit of a swizz.

I can’t believe it’s been eight years since the last edition of The 5k, the original, rather more rigorous comp. that, in a roundabout way, introduced me to the Game Neverending, which had a chatroom with photo-sharing built in, a handy feature which eventually morphed into Flickr.

The Secret Law of Page Harmony

2010-07-29T12:17:11Z

From a fascinating essay on book design and page harmony.

CLI-Lover

2010-07-23T18:27:23Z

A piece for Lifehacker on taking notes at the command line.

E-Blogs

2010-07-22T14:55:38Z

Each day, we select blogposts from 5 countries: The United-Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain. We have them translated into 5 languages.

Cause List

2010-07-19T14:16:59Z

Donny made a site that shows you what’s going on in courts of law across England & Wales, right now; I knocked up a stylesheet to make the data a bit more readable.

Bob George

2010-07-09T12:21:30Z

Please click through to the website to stream this audio.

I'll be buying several copies of the Mirror tomorrow to get my hands on Prince's latest, 20Ten.

It will, of course, be a profound disappointment.

And I mean profound.

I've been listening, obsessively, to Prince almost every day since 1987, when, aged ten, I heard Sign "☮" the Times.

Unfortunately for me, that was the year that Prince hit his peak.

Of course, I've had the joy of seeing him live, of exploring the back catalogue, of trading bootleg cassettes with fellow fans in the pre-internet age, of filling hard drives with obscurities and live shows since the dawn of Bittorrent, even of shaking Prince by the hand after watching him play for three hours straight in a New York nightclub, backed by the Family Stone!

But every year since 1987, Prince has disappointed me--a teeny tiny bit, with Lovesexy, a hell of a lot, with shameful pap like The Chocolate Invasion--and every single year, for twenty-three years I have let myself believe that this new album will be the return to form, the one that realigns his recorded output with the continuing brilliance of the live sets.

And then I buy the tabloid, or sign up to the website, or do whatever silly thing it is Prince wants me to do to get my hands on his new record, only to have my hopes dashed by weak songs or, worse, anaemic rehashes of unreleased material that I've loved in bootleg form, or seen live.

Oh well.

The song above is Prince at his sloppiest, sleaziest and strangest, doing a perfunctory practice run-through of Bob George at Paisley Park on April 5th, 1988, during a rehearsal for the Sign "☮" the Times tour.

At the end of the recording, Prince says, 'We're getting away with murder...'.

He wasn't then, but he will be tommorrow.

Unless...

Conway's Game of Life in HTML5

2010-07-08T09:03:55Z

Fluid Images

2010-07-06T13:12:19Z

I rejigged the CSS for One Thing Well last night, making it semi-fluid, responsive to changes in browser window width and better suited to viewing on iPhones and iPads.

I ran into one problem: how to resize wide images for smaller browser windows without affecting small images?

Handily, when Tumblr resizes large images, it appends the width of an image to its filename–eg.,tumblr_guagfduyfa_500.png–so I could use CSS attribute selectors:

img[src$="_500"] {
width:100%;
max-width:500px;
}

img[src$="_400"] {
width:100%;
max-width:400px;
}

Now, if the width of the containing <article> tag drops below 400px or 500px, the image will shrink to fit in all modern browsers.

French Lunch

2010-06-30T14:42:55Z

Mutt and Gmail

2010-06-30T10:56:29Z

I wrote a how-to for Lifehacker on using the venerable MUA mutt with Gmail, including a ready-to-use config file primed with handy keyboard shortcuts.

Today's Guardian

2010-06-09T10:00:40Z

Phil Gyford has invented a lovely new way of reading today’s The Guardian on the web, bringing the ’finishability’ of the print version online.

Help Me Help My Friend In DC

2010-05-21T14:39:54Z

A stunning thread at Ask MetaFilter in which user fake asks for help in getting two friends out of a very sticky situation–they’re Russian women who’ve paid a huge sum to arrange a visa into and work in the US, but on arrival the work has evaporated, replaced by instructions to meet an unknown man in a strip club. Not good. As the thread progresses, there are generous offers of help, expert advice, a terrible setback, and then… well, just read the thread.

Welcome to Cameron land

2010-05-06T15:06:50Z

"David Cameron cites Hammersmith and Fulham council as a ‘model’ of compassionate conservatism. So what can the actions of Tory councillors here tell us about how the party would behave in government?" In short: like complete and utter shits.

MultiMarkdown-CMS

2010-04-23T16:57:23Z

An alternative to the various static site generators.

Camerwrong

2010-04-23T13:26:22Z

Please click through to the website to view this video.

Via Giles.

Special Tea

2010-04-20T11:08:14Z

From Chai Why? The Triumph of Tea in India as Documented in the Priya Paul Collection.

The Three Magnets

2010-04-16T17:36:48Z

howdoeshomeopathywork.com

2010-04-16T13:24:28Z

Sometimes single serving sites still make me laugh.

TalkTalk on The Digital Economy Bill

2010-04-09T13:34:14Z

If we are instructed to disconnect an account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we’ll see them in court.

Vote for Policies

2010-04-08T16:05:58Z

Choose policies you favour, and find out which party matches your beliefs. The survey is limited to six parties–including two on the far right, but none to the left of the Greens, oddly–and very brief, omitting foreign policy entirely. (I’m mostly Green, and, surprisingly, they’re the party in the lead after 50,000 surveys.)