A milestone.
Lung transplant patients can't eat unpasteurized dairy products. Having a really hard time finding non-live yogurt. Any brand suggestions?
Farewell, Matt, we hardly knew you. Who do we think will be the next Doctor? Idris Elba? Ben Daniels? Jenna Louise-Coleman? ;) #doctorwho
The banality of "don't be evil", by Julian Assange: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html This is an ideological challenge that we must get right.
The Cheese Board Pizza Collective is pure Berkeley and I love it.
<a href="https://twitter.com/mheadd/status/340896167040802816">@mheadd</a> Stuff like this gives PHP a bad name (sadly). The $_POST search is no better: https://github.com/search?q=extension%3Aphp+mysql_query+%24_POST&type=Code&ref=searchresults
When I lived in the UK I could send money from one bank account to another, instantly, no matter which bank. Here they mail a check. Insane.
Fairphone is a fairtrade smartphone. http://www.fairphone.com/ A really worthwhile experiment, at the very least.
Not going to make it out here this year. Next year, though ...
In search of a new TV show to get hooked on, watching my first episode of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_(TV_series)">Fringe</a> and enjoying it immensely.
Thinking about how best to keep hold of my <a href="http://fitbit.com/">@fitbit</a> and <a href="http://fitocracy.com/">@fitocracy</a> data in my own <a href="http://personal-clouds.org/wiki/Main_Page">personal cloud</a> at <a href="http://werd.io/">werd.io</a>. #pcloud
The code for the <a href="https://www.edx.org/">edX</a> LMS and authoring tool have been released as open source: http://code.edx.org/ Curious to see how this affects, eg, <a href="http://moodle.org">Moodle</a>.
I'm an Ani DiFranco fan. That's my style of music: literate, powerful polemic set to angular acoustic guitar. I must have seen her play live eleven or twelve times now. Dar Williams, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Thea Gilmore, Jess Klein: all my cup of tea. I saw the Proclaimers at the Great American Music Hall just a couple of weeks ago.
Somewhere along the line, I managed to get into really dirty electronic dance music.
Spotify was my gateway drug. I've got a premium subscription, which allows me to run it on my phone, and I usually listen on the walk to and from work. Because I try and do the mile and a half in twenty minutes or less, I'm after high-tempo music; and because I'm the kind of person that gets sick of listening to the same thing over and over (or walking to work the same way), I've been using the radio function to find tangentially related music to my playlists. It's a bit like Genius mode in iTunes, but I'm not limited to music I actually own.
I guess I might have clicked "thumbs up" to the new Tegan and Sara album, which moves them from guitar folk-pop to eighties-inspired electro. (It's brilliant, by the way.) Somewhere in the mix, Skrillex's Bangarang might have turned up. And late at night, listening to music in a particular frame of mind on the way back from a night out at the Independent, I found Knife Party (of all things) and was hooked.
Spotify's model is pretty great: it comes close to how using Napster felt in the late nineties (except you pay, and don't get to keep the music when you stop subscribing). When I hear something I particularly like, I'll buy it on the DRM-free Amazon MP3 Store. I can try out virtually anything, anywhere, and easily discover new bands. It's one of the handful of paid online services I wouldn't want to do without.
But online music in 2013 goes so far beyond that. Soundcloud is a miracle: a place where anyone can upload and share any audio, and do. The tracks I embedded above are fully-sanctioned, fully-commercial audio that the artists have decided to release in a streamable form for free, because they understand that sharing is great marketing. If you discovered that you like either the Ani DiFranco or the Knife Party track above: you're welcome. And if you didn't, it's no skin off anyone's nose.
I remember listening to the Top 40 chart on BBC Radio One in the nineties, on a Sunday afternoon. I have no idea what's in the charts right now, and I can't imagine caring. I've got a great idea what my friends are sharing, what's being shared among my contacts. It doesn't matter what label they're on or who's doing their PR; it's all about the music. This track by my sister shows up in my feed right next to all kinds of famous artists, and it's available for anyone to discover in the same way.
With the freedom to share and discover, there's a new freedom of genre. I might be bemused by my newfound love of EDM, but I'm not surprised I found it. There's a big, wide, cultural commons out there.
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My OS X copy of <a href="http://spotify.com/">@spotify</a> died after a crash (worryingly), but it turns out the web interface works really well. I won't reinstall.
Homeland Security released some of the keywords it tracks: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/05/26/department-of-homeland-security-forced-to-release... Mostly not a surprise ("ricin", etc). But "social media"?
The evolution of the typewriter, in pictures: http://io9.com/the-curious-evolution-of-the-typewriter-in-pictures-509985235 My living memory starts with type balls.
A personal API. I'm not at all comfortable sharing at this level of detail - but it's undeniably interesting: http://x.naveen.com/post/51808692792/a-personal-api
Disappointed by Firefox's font rendering, which is a little bit interesting at the lighter end (but probably correct). Really don't want to create browser-specific hints.
National Day of Hacking Your Own Assumptions and Entitlement: http://nationaldayofhacking.info/ "We must first debug ourselves." Neat! /via <a href="https://twitter.com/anildash/status/340494994504835072">@anildash</a>
<a href="http://eschnou.com/entry/62-24951.html">@eschnou</a> <a href="http://waterpigs.co.uk/notes/1479/">@BarnabyWalters</a> Thanks for the warm welcome! Looking forward to building more and more into this.
<a href="http://aaronparecki.com/replies/2013/05/30/2/indieweb">@aaronpk</a> Date errors do make me wonder about relative datestamps and how best to represent them. (Canonical timestamps are better, I know.)
Really excited by indieweb comments. Impressive idea, and a pointer to what's possible with microformats and webmentions. http://eschnou.com/entry/testing-indieweb-federation-with-waterpigscouk-aaronpareckicom-and--62-2490...
Werd I/O © Ben Werdmuller. The text (without images) of this site is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
