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"My job is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn't hit you. Your job is to keep me from having to use it." … "To get trust, you have to give trust. To get people who will go all-out for you, you have to make sure that when they fuck up, and they will, that the total amount of blamestorming is "yeah, that was pretty fuckin' epic dude. Now, let's figure out how to not be epic like that again." If you want people to be honest with you, you have to be honest with them. Even when they don't like it. Even when it's bad news. Especially when it's bad news."
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"It's very easy to fix the easy problems first. So it is easy to get seduced into fixing only the simple issues you find. As a result, the most serious usability problems tend to persist over a long time. "
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"Any interactive object that isn't perceived as being interactive, isn't."
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"So, over the weekend I finished up the first pass at the woedb, a searchable and linkable index of every single Where On Earth (WOE) ID published. Each WOE lists basic information like name and place type, as well as child locations and adjacencies and all the various aliases for that place. You know… linked data. As of this writing, there are about 5.5 million entries." I heart Aaron Straup Cope so much.
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"Social objects are the artifacts that bring people together around shared interests or topics. They are the content assets around which communities form and grow. For a community-driven site like YouTube, the social object is the video. For a community-driven site like Flickr, it is the photo… Because the social object is what brings people to a community-driven application, its screen design matters a lot. The object needs to presented appropriately and framed with lightweight actions that allow people to share, curate, and discuss."
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"Designing with information shadows means using devices, such as RFIDs, that may have specific, limited functionality and capabilities. However, as with the FedEx example, designing with information shadows often requires global service design. Information shadow user experience design must simultaneously consider (1) what happens when every object is automatically tracked and (2) how to associate those objects with all available digital information about them."
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"…a new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence. Lovers of the look, feel, and quality of old fashioned manual typewriters can now use them as keyboards for any USB-capable computer, such as a PC, Mac, or even iPad!"
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"Both of these activities enable, as they do for me, blogging all dog-eared pages (hat-tip to Mike), which feels like a new thing. Public commonplace books. "
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"JavaScript Blacklist is a simple extension for Safari 5 which blacklists scripts from a configurable list of domains." Defaults include those goddamned double underline hover things. Installed!
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"…it all depends on the situation, the characters, and how obnoxious the listener feels like being that day."
links for 2010-06-15
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links for 2010-06-13
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links for 2010-06-12
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"on all of its platforms, Apple has far from exceeded expectations it has itself set for typography. Just take one look at the Fonts panel that appears in any Cocoa app (e.g., TextEdit) to see what I mean. It hasn’t changed in nearly a decade, and it’s still far more difficult to use than it should be." I have been complaining about this years. Yes.
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"This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work."
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links for 2010-06-03
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"The eZ430-Chronos is a highly integrated, wearable wireless development system that comes in a sports watch. It may be used as a reference platform for watch systems, a personal display for personal area networks, as a wireless sensor node for remote data collection, or simply as a watch… The integrated wireless feature allows the Chronos to act as a central hub for nearby wireless sensors such as pedometers and heart rate monitors. The eZ430-Chronos offers temperature and battery voltage measurement and is complete with a USB-based CC1111 wireless interface to a PC."
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links for 2010-05-28
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A framework created by a professor and students at purdue university, using an iPhone application and wordpress plugins. Focuses on delivering three types of services: books, tours, and atlas.
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"The Ubimark Iphone App is a free iPhone/iTouch/iPad location aware client that connects Wordpress posts to specific locations. It enables your phone to pick up information about your current location and its surroundings that you or other people have blogged about. It works with any WordPress blog using the GeoMashup and Ubimark plugins."
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"Ubimark is an information environment created by Dr. Sorin Adam Matei and his students at Purdue University, in which information fixated in or on physical objects is connected to digital and Internet resources. The environment employs a number of digital codes called ubilinks, which are encoded using a variety of conventions (bar or 2d code) to store information on or in physical objects (primarily print materials, but extensible to any physical objects, from household appliances to historical monuments)."
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Ubimark
Purdue Professor Embeds Hyperlinks In Printed Books
People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That’s the idea behind Sorin Matei’s project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.
A video of the pilot book, Around the World in 80 Days:
Mr. Matei, an associate professor of communication at Purdue University, says that the initial book is just “an exercise in pushing the envelope as far as we can,” and that scholarly publications will be available in the future with the embedded feature.
links for 2010-05-25
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"Rubberhose transparently and deniably encrypts disk data, minimising the effectiveness of warrants, coersive interrogations and other compulsive mechanims, such as U.K RIP legislation." File under 'pray you never need this.'
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"Using SASS, or any other equivalent CSS extensions, defining functions and variables lets you set up a grid while you stay away from anything less than semantically correct."
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links for 2010-05-21
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Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space.
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