Mottr.am

Penguin iPad Book Concepts

2010-03-09T19:28:37Z

Please click through to the website to view this video.

Watching this demo of Penguin’s post-book concepts for the iPad, which features interactive books for kids, travel guides and the like, I was struck by the possibilities for fiction. Imagine a novel with text that changes depending on your location, chapters that reorder themselves according to the time of day, or characters who forget their umbrellas and get soaked if it’s raining where you’re reading.

I’m really hoping for something to match what BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates did to the printed novel. But I wouldn’t mind a good mystery which overlaid a treasure map on the real world, or even a Choose Your Own Adventure for grown ups with chapters unlocked by solving ARG-like puzzles.

Of course, there will be location-aware iPad equivalents of Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection, too. If you’re in range of a Starbucks, our heroine might sip thoughtfully from her Frappuccino, but nibble pensively on the Sandwich of the Week when there’s a Pret A Manger over the road. Enter the franchise in question and your iPad will ping, signalling the arrival of a promotional coupon in your inbox. Oh, well.

Blocking Adverts with a Hosts File

2010-03-06T11:49:56Z

Since fixing up my Eee PC, I’ve been trying out lightweight browsers–conkeror, surf, uzbl–that don’t block adverts, so this hosts file has come in handy. I’ll be sticking with browser plugins on the Mac, so I can easily whitelist the ad-supported sites I visit regularly, but if you’re using a minimal browser, it’s well worth a go.

Michael Foot 1913-2010

2010-03-03T13:33:32Z

Why Can't You Just Enjoy It For What It Is?

2010-03-01T14:44:35Z

Of all the varieties of irritating comment out there, the absolute most annoying has to be “Why can’t you just watch the movie for what it is??? Why can’t you just enjoy it? Why do you have to analyze it???” If you have posted such a comment, or if you are about to post such a comment, here or anywhere else, let me just advise you: Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Shut your goddamn fucking mouth. SHUT. UP.

Moff

pwsafe

2010-03-01T14:33:22Z

A nice, simple command line password generator and manager.

Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ

2010-03-01T12:35:14Z

Left wing atheists are more intelligent than right wing God-botherers. Fancy that.

Surf

2010-02-27T18:57:27Z

Surf is a very minimal Webkit- and GTK-based web browser. It will ‘display web pages and follow links’, but not much else. I’m using it as an SSB for Gmail on my Eee PC, but might just give it a go as my main browser.

Virtually Violent Gordon Brown

2010-02-25

Please click through to the website to view this video.

CG PM commits the acts of violence described in Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party.

Update 26/02/10: Animated news: blurring the line between fact and fiction?

Using Bash's History Effectively

2010-02-25T14:02:22Z

$HISTIGNORE looks to be incredibly useful. Via Simon Willison, whose readers supply more tips in the comments.

Add an ExpressCard solid state drive to some MacBook Pros

2010-02-24T16:52:15Z

I had been planning to upgrade my Macbook Pro to an internal SSD, but this is a much cheaper, much easier way to achieve the same speed boost.

Conversations in HTML5

2010-02-19T14:42:27Z

So, I needed to know how to mark up a dialogue in HTML5. Turns out each side of a conversation should be wrapped in plain old p tags, and the names of the speakers, stage directions, &c. should live inside span, b or i tags. Hmmmn. You could be forgiven for thinking that the cite tag would be a more meaningful way to mark up a speaker’s name, but this is considered poor form. Even though it makes sense, and has been common practice for years, possibly due to the fact that the HTML 4 spec recommends this very use of cite (by mistake, apparently). There was a dialog element in HTML5 for a while, which could’ve come in handy for marking up dialogue. Some people didn’t like this new element one bit. Some other people liked it, and wanted to invent even more elements to go inside it. This argument was settled by throwing the dialog element away, and never speaking of it again. The moral of this tale? Buggered if I know.

A new global visual language for the BBC's digital services

2010-02-17T20:28:06Z

A lengthy, fascinating look at the BBC’s forthcoming digital redesign, and the processes behind it.

Automatically switch to normal mode in vim

2010-02-17T18:39:39Z

When learning vim, it’s really hard to resist the temptation to stay in insert mode and use it like a normal text editor. Add the following to your .vimrc, and vim will enter normal mode after a few seconds of inactivity, effectively forcing you to use it properly: au CursorHoldI * stopinsert.

The Dropbox API is Coming

2010-02-17T18:18:17Z

Quickoffice Mobile Connect Suite launched last week, with an intriguing new feature: Dropbox integration. Point the app at your Dropbox, and you can create, edit and delete files there; in a second or two, the changes you make take effect in the Dropbox folder(s) on your computer(s).

That’s pretty cool. And I reckon it’s a sign of some very exciting things to come, too. Here’s why: in order to do its stuff, QMCS must be using the as-yet-unreleased Dropbox API.

At present, there are many great ways to keep stuff on your Mac synchronised with your iPhone, with the emphasis on ‘many’: I have to use a total of four applications, and a pair of user accounts, just to make a directory of plain text files on my Mac available in two of my favourite iPhone apps, WriteRoom and Simplenote. Which is silly. Synchronisation and cloud storage should be platform and application agnostic.

When the Dropbox API launches–it’s due in March, apparently–it could well put an end to per-app sync solutions, and offer instead synchronisation that ‘just works’: sign up for one account, and all your files, whatever their format, will be accessible from any application that supports Dropbox, on any device.

Can’t wait.

todo.txt-web

2010-02-16T10:00:00Z

“A simple, iPhone-friendly web interface for todo.txt-cli, written in PHP and spiced up with a wee bit of jQuery.” Fiddly to set up securely, perhaps, but better than using todo.txt over SSH from TouchTerm (iTunes) or mobileterminal.

Domestic Robocop

2010-02-16T09:00:00Z

Please click through to the website to view this video.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

Keiichi Matsuda

Pinboard Notes

2010-02-15T18:00:32Z

Pinboard now lets you ‘bookmark’ notes: paste in some text, add a title and some tags, and the service will provide you with a URL for your note. In other words, it’s a bit like Gist with far fewer fancy features, and tied to your existing Pinboard bookmarks.

This means you could easily use Pinboard as the backend for a weblog. Not sure why you'd want to, but you could.

Mapenvelop

2010-02-15T11:00:00Z

Envelopes that let you ‘post it from the exact place’ by Beste Miray.

+_1

2010-02-14T17:57:39Z

Enamel on canvas, Victor Timofeev.

A Calculus of Writing, Applied to a Classic

2010-02-14T17:09:52Z

A short profile of Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Amazon UK/US), who applied techniques from his work in search recommendation and keywords to writing fiction.