Yearly Archives: 2012

Retraction

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This American Life are this week dedicating an entire episode to retracting their earlier episode “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” (an episode that became the most popular podcast in their history).

Ira writes:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

Mike Daisey has employed the ‘I’m not a journalist‘ defence: “My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”

The blame really does lie with the journalistic entity though, and in dedicating literally a whole episode of This American Life to apologising for and explaining their mistake, they will surely not lose, but gain trust and respect. Continue reading →

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This is clearly a work of genius! Like Falling Down for the me generation.

Loveless, jobless, possibly terminally ill, Frank has had enough of the downward spiral of America. With nothing left to lose, Frank takes his gun and offs the stupidest, cruelest, and most repellent members of society. He finds an unusual accomplice: 16-year-old Roxy, who shares his sense of rage and disenfranchisement.

Out 6 April 2012.

(via)

Please stop

Aside

This is one of my pet hates.

It’s sad that marketers have figured out how to get their brand into my timeline, even when I have chosen not to follow them. And even sadder that it works.

The Curator’s Code

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The Curator's Code — symbolThe Curator’s Code is a standard for attribution — a way of providing credit to the creators of content being shared online, and those who helped you discover it.

Curation is something I do a lot, and something I have thought about in detail. The fact that so many users of sites like Tumblr and Pinterest share content without providing a simple link back to the originator (and sometimes even going to some effort to remove a credit or copyright notice from an image) is maddening. An initiative to combat this problem is very welcome. Continue reading →

Posted in Web

Newspaper pictograms

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Newspaper pictograms

London-based graphic designer Stephen McCarthy reimagined what newspapers would look like if they were purely in pictographic forms.

In his project ‘Pictograms: The Newspaper’, McCarthy reinterpreted a whole newspaper (namely, ‘The Sun’) in pictographic content.

Designer Reimagines News As Pictograms, So Don’t ‘Read’ All About It – designtaxi.com

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Another fascinating Kickstarter documentary project.

Wikipedia is a corrupt political environment, and it should be disrupted.

“The Encyclopedia Game” is a documentary film about Wikipedia vandalism. The film focuses on the stories of a handful of Wikipedians who have managed to be banned from the site for one reason or another. All have been accused of some sort of vandalism or disruption. Are they guilty? Are they innocent? Or is the truth more complicated than that? This is a quirky character documentary with fascinating stories that shed light on the inner workings of Wikipedia, the world’s largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia.

Filled with enthralling stories of Wikipedia vandalism, quirky and eccentric characters, and offering a look behind the scenes of the world’s most used and trusted source of information, “The Encycopedia Game” is at once amusing, intriguing, and endearing.

The Encyclopedia Game

More of the interview with ‘Cognition’ below. Continue reading →

MPlayerX: A superior alternative to VLC for Mac users

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The best thing about the poor VLC 2.0 is that I’ve discovered the much nicer MPlayerX (free in the Mac App Store).

MPlayerX logo Like VLC, MPlayerX is open source and plays a large variety of file formats, but unlike VLC it looks like it belongs on a Mac. In fact, it looks and behaves a lot like QuickTime. I especially like that all the chrome fades out when your mouse is off the window, leaving just the video.

There are other features that I didn’t realise I was missing out on. For example, it remembers where you are in a video when you close the app so you don’t have to go searching for your place next time you start it up. Also, if you are watching a series that is logically named, it will automatically start playing the next episode for you. You can turn that off, but it’s a feature I appreciate. So far, my only annoyance has been the limitation that you can only resize the player from the bottom-right corner. Still, at least it respects the media’s aspect ratio — something VLC can’t do any more!

MPlayerX screenshot

Continue reading →

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Known locally as “Point Bob” or “The Point”, Point Roberts is a geopolitical oddity, only being a part of the United States because it lies south of the 49th parallel, which constitutes the Canada-U.S. border in that area.

Point Roberts USGS map

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The Transparency Grenade

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A weapon of greater transparency for greater corporate and governmental transparency.

The Transparency Grenade Created by Julian Oliver for the Studio Weise7 exhibition in Berlin, this conceptual gadget for the information revolution is based on a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade.

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

Continue reading →

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Playfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka “text adventures”).

Playfic

Behind the scenes, Playfic simply takes the game source you enter and passes it to the commandline Inform 7 compiler, and views it in the browser using the open-source Parchment interpreter that plays the games. Playfic’s just the social glue tying them together.

This seems like a great way to get started with IF!

Continue reading →

Solar updraft tower

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Arizona should be getting some of these sci-fi eco monsters in 2015.

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Solar updraft towers combine three technologies to produce power: the greenhouse effect, the chimney effect and wind turbine. Sunshine heats the canopy at the base of the tall chimney causing air to flow upwards towards the turbines at the base which then convert that flow into electricity. The solar tower requires low maintenance, no feed stock (uranium, coal etc.) and emits no pollution.

(via Arizona getting colossal solar updraft tower in 2015 – digitaltrends.com)

Continue reading →

WordPress Users Wales meet-up: Wednesday 29th February

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WordPress heart logo The second WordPress Users Wales meet-up is on Wednesday 29th February at The Promised Land, from 6.30pm. As before, register with Eventbrite.

Apparently this is a traditional date for women to make marriage proposals, so there is the potential for the night to take an unexpected turn!

Joel Hughes will be talking about the ‘Developer as Blogger’ and Nicky Getgood ‘WordPress for Hyperlocal’ and her work at Talk About Local. Continue reading →