History of The Internet & World Wide Web
" A comprehensive and fascinating overview of the philosophy and history of the Internet. "
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Animated Gifs: A Throwback to Cinema’s Beginnings | JSTOR Daily
"For those unfamiliar with the term, an animated gif is a “single graphic file that contains a series of images which are displayed sequentially to give the illusion of movement.” Basically, it’s the same thing that initiated the movies. No really, it is."
How To Pay Attention — re:form — Medium
"As part of a short class for the School of Visual Arts’ newish Products of Design MFA program, I ask students to “practice paying attention” before our next meeting. There are no other parameters for this assignment, which students have a week to complete. Perhaps obviously, the idea is largely to see how they will resolve this overtly vague request. The class is called Point of View, and this assignment is a minor component, loosely tied to the process around a more significant project. I certainly believe that having an original, legitimate and honest point of view (for a designer or anybody else) involves cultivating the ability to see what others overlook. But the truth is that I include this assignment because it simply gets at a hobbyhorse of mine: our world has become an attention battleground. From looming billboards to glittering shop windows to the myriad distractions flowing through the pocket-sized screens we carry everywhere, vast and sophisticated efforts prod us to look in specific directions, at specific things, in specific ways. Taken together, they add up to a kind of war against seeing. I try to be part of the resistance. In fact, as a result of the class, I started to make an informal list of “how to pay attention” strategies — my own, those that students suggested, and others that I’ve read about or otherwise encountered here and there. To my delight, this list grew into something more than I’d anticipated, and started to take on the feel of something between a set of New Year’s resolutions, and a manifesto. Finally I decided that it seemed worth, as they say, sharing."
The Shape of Design - A book by Frank Chimero
Installing Node.js
"Download the Node.js source code or a pre-built installer for your platform, and start developing today."
Cory Doctorow on the Shape of Stories - YouTube
"Cory Doctorow lectures on "The Shape Of Stories" at Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD in July 2013."
How Movies Control Your Brain - YouTube
Lavish - Generate your own Bootstrap color scheme
"Generate your own Bootstrap color scheme from an image and customize to your taste "
Women Film Pioneers Project
"Women Film Pioneers Project features silent-era producers, directors, co-directors, scenario writers, scenario editors, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, and more to make the point that they were not just actresses."
Memex #001
"At the end of World War II, Dr. Vannevar Bush published "As We May Think", a short article which inspired inventors to create personal computers, the internet, and the web. In that article, he described an automated desk called a "memex" which provided fantastic abilities never before seen or even imagined. Sadly, Vannevar Bush's memex was far beyond what the analog technologies of 1945 could enable so it remained just a fantasy. The father/daughter team of Trevor F. Smith and Sparks Webb have gathered all available documentation about the memex and carefully fabricated the Memex #001 to match Dr. Bush's specifications. From the period wood to the click of the buttons, this machine feels like it was built 70 years ago. The internal camera captures documents and the two screens display the hypertext trails which made the memex famous. The buttons and lever on the custom built control panel provide the user experience that Dr. Bush would have had in 1945."
Maintenance | Memex #001
"The Memex #001 is a device which is designed to look and act as if was built in the 1940s for Dr. Vannevar Bush. Its design is inspired by the text of "As We May Think" and the memex illustrations from Life Magazine."
Design Principles
"Learn about design principles and see how they can be applied from architecture to product design."
Check if Jetpack Modules Are Enabled
"You may have code that relies on certain JetPack functions. If so, there’s a simple way to check if the module you need is enabled:"
Emoji Dick
"Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji. Each of the book's approximately 10,000 sentences has been translated three times by a Amazon Mechanical Turk worker. These results have been voted upon by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence has been selected for inclusion in this book. In total, over eight hundred people spent approximately 3,795,980 seconds working to create this book. Each worker was paid five cents per translation and two cents per vote per translation."
Creating a "Meet The Team" Page in WordPress | CSS-Tricks
"Almost every custom theme I develop with WordPress requires a Management Team or Meet the Team page. If I had to guess, I'd say that I've built just around 50 different setups. It occurred to me that their must be many other WordPress developers out there creating similar systems as well. For this reason, I'll share the approach I typically use to build and manage a "Meet The Team" page in WordPress."
How to Master the Art of “Effective Surprise” and the 6 Essential Conditions for Creativity | Brain Pickings
"One of the greatest preoccupations not only of our culture but of our civilization is the question of what creativity is, dating back to the dawn of recorded thought. But one of the most compelling in the past century comes from the influential Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (b. October 1, 1915), celebrated for his contributions to cognitive psychology and learning theory in education. In 1962, Bruner published On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (public library) — a wonderfully dimensional exploration of “the act of knowing in itself and how it is shaped and in turn gives form to language, science, literature, and art,” exploring not the biological mystery of left-handedness but the metaphorical mesmerism of the left hand, which has traditionally represented the power of intuition, imagination, and spontaneity: The title of the collection comes from Bruner’s childhood fascination with the symbolism of the right hand as the doer and the left as the dreamer, and it is this toxic divide between the two that he sets out to counter with equal parts insight and irreverence. Articulating the same essential concern that Susan Sontag echoed two decades later in lamenting how the artificial divide between intuition and intelligence limits us, Bruner pits himself “in the role of a would-be mediator between the humanist and the scientist” and gently guides the metaphoric left hand to tickle the right, which has become “too stiff with technique,” into creative awakening."
The Future of the Web Is 100 Years Old - Issue 21: Information - Nautilus
"“There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web,” declared a 1992 foundational document from the World Wide Web Consortium—meaning that there is no central server or organizational authority to determine what does or does not get published. It is, like Borges’ famous Library of Babel, theoretically infinite, stitched together with hyperlinks rather than top-down, Dewey Decimal-style categories.1 It is also famously open—built atop a set of publicly available industry standards. While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way? The web has played such a powerful role in shaping our world that it can sometimes seem like a fait accompli—the inevitable result of progress and enlightened thinking. A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web."
MacWindows: OS 9 emulator works on Mavericks
"Two readers report success with running SheepShaver/Chubby Bunny OS 9 emulation software in OS X Mavericks. The bundle (preconfigured with OS 9) enables the old pre-Intel Mac OS 9 ("Classic") applications to run on OS X Intel Macs. The current build was updated for OS X Mountain Lion last fall by Jon Gardner."
The Web Template Verification Service
"Themecheck.org is a quick service that lets you verify web themes or templates for security and code quality. This service is free and compatible with Wordpress themes and Joomla templates."
WordPress Theme Universe - themes and websites built with WordPress
"There is a showcase of sites built with most popular 192907 WordPress themes. This project gives you the opportunity to see how to implement your favorite theme"
Feminist Hacker Barbie
"Help make Computer Engineer Barbie better! Barbie's new book tells girls they need boys to code for them. Help Barbie be the competent, independent, bad-ass engineer that she wants to be."
How a 13-year-old’s one-line blog post became a worldwide meme - The Washington Post
"Internet virality works in very mysterious ways. If you needed further reminder of that, behold the improbable story of this quote: 'I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met' The line, according to long-standing Internet legend, comes from the book “Paper Towns,” an earlier novel by John Green — the author of “The Fault in Our Stars.” Accordingly, like much of Green’s more quotable work, it’s been memed, sketched, illustrated, collaged, hand-lettered, imposed over artsy out-of-focus photos, printed on luggage tags, printed on T-shirts, tattooed on actual bodies, and generally reproduced on blogs and Web sites the Internet over. Green himself sells a poster of it in his online store: Until recently, text on the poster attributed it to him. Except — as Green confessed on Tuesday, in a charmingly honest YouTube clip — the sentence never appears in “Paper Towns.” It never appears in anything Green has ever written."
Ze Frank and the poetics of Web video | Newman | First Monday
"This article initiates a poetics of Web video by considering the central features of one kind of video on the Web, the amateur videoblog, in terms of its functions, which include various affordances of use, and constraints, which include economics, technology, and viewing conditions. It takes as its central example an American videoblog called The Show With Ze Frank, which ran from 2006–2007, and which drew a passionate community of fans into collaborating in its creation. This article considers amateur Web video as a potentially democratic space for media production, offering an alternative to commercial media that involves ordinary citizens as participants and champions their creativity."
The Blogging Software Dilemma | Matt Mullenweg
"The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?"
The 10 Best Subliminal Ads Ever Made - CBS News
"Subliminal advertising -- placing fleeting or hidden images in commercial content in the hopes that viewers will process them unconsciously -- doesn't work. Recent research suggests that consumers do sometimes respond non-consciously to cues they aren't consciously aware are there. Subliminal exposure to the Apple brand seems to make people more "creative" than if they are exposed to the IBM brand, for instance. But extremely brief stimuli that consumers are unaware they're looking at is still unlikely to give them the urge to go shopping. You're probably not feeling the urge to buy a bottle of Absolut right now, even though the joke in the ad above is that the words "Absolut Vodka" are hidden in the ice cubes (click to enlarge). Nonetheless, people remain fascinated by allegedly subliminal messages in ads -- even though if something is truly subliminal you shouldn't be able to identify it, by definition. Most "subliminal" ads are happy accidents, or people seeing what they want to see. But some appear to be deliberate, or at least too good to be true."
The Ghost in the MP3
""moDernisT" was created by salvaging the sounds and images lost to compression via the MP3 and MP4 codecs. The audio is comprised of lost mp3 compression material from the song "Tom's Diner" famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. The video is the MP4 ghost of a corresponding video created in collaboration with Takahiro Suzuki. Thus, both audio and video are the "ghosts" of their respective compression codecs."
Press Play — Press Play — Medium
"This course, Press Play, aspires to be a place where you make things. Good things. Smart things. Cool things. And then share those things with other people. The idea of Press Play is that after we make things we are happy with, that we push a button and unleash it on the world. Much of it will be text, but if you want to make magic with a camera, your phone, or with a digital recorder, knock yourself out. But it will all be displayed and edited on Medium because there will be a strong emphasis on working with others in this course, and Medium is collaborative. "
Technology Trends in Education « Research on Technologies for Engineering Education
"We used the predictions from 2004 to 2010 (i.e., from seven Horizon Reports), which cover the period 2004-2014, to analyze the technologies that have impacted education in the past or are likely to have an impact in the future. The analysis was carried out using these reports, as they are among the most widely used in education, and no other source of similar data has issued annual reports for a longer period of time. As such, these are the only predictions that allow a temporal comparison that reveals technological meta-trends. These reports are very referenced and cited, but no previous metatrends analysis has been conducted using the predictions from these reports."
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Lorelle's WordPress School
"Lorelle's WordPress School is a project to teach you how to learn to use WordPress from beginning to intermediate levels. Reading assignments are published on Lorelle on WordPress in the WordPress School category. This site is open to all participating in the 2015 WordPress School on Lorelle on WordPress."
Le Gouffre
"Le Gouffre is the first animated short film produced and directed by Lightning Boy Studio, a young creative team based in Montreal. The film tells the story of two spirited travelers who come across an incredibly wide chasm on their journey and decide to build a bridge to cross it. Released in February 2015, the project had first gained a lot of attention following the huge success of its Kickstarter campaign, which allowed the creators to finance the movie’s post-production. Many were impressed by the passion and determination of the small team of three animators, who spent more than two full years creating the 10-minute film. As of now, Le Gouffre has been selected in more than 40 festivals around the world and won six awards, three of them for “Best Animated Short”. For the complete list of selections and awards, please head over to the Awards page. Below is a short making-of video showing the journey behind the film."