onfocus

"HistoryTag records the histories of specially tagged things, so you can see how they were made and how they live in the world." The Internet of Things is off and running. This is a great idea.

Joshua Schacter's latest project: tagging people's Twitter handles with skills they can perform. It's a way to see what people are known for among their peers. More tagging!

A nice collection of railroad company logos from 1845-2000. [via kottke]

Kurt Vonnegut to the member of a school board that burned his books: "If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own."

Does what it says on the tin. !important

"Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there."

"Cities cannot 'come to the end of their patience' because they’re not people. Mayors and local officials can come to the end of their patience. So can cops. But cities?" Analyzing and comparing the coverage of Occupy Oakland violence with Kent State coverage. [via bluishorange]

It's not a great idea, but if you want to write a regular expression to define a numeric range, this tool makes it easier than doing it by hand.

Andy put together a handy list of geeky Portland spots. Wish I could be up there for ROFLcon tomorrow.

A great blog about futures past has moved to the Smithsonian Magazine. Seems like a good fit.

huh, Corvallis has the largest percentage of bicycle commuters in the country.

Nice sampling of speedometer design.

Handy tool to unminify JavaScript.

"Sears used to sell houses by mail." Someone please put old catalog pictures side by side with modern pictures of those houses still in use.

"From now on, when I want to visit Facebook, I’ll be using the private browser setting in whatever browser I’m using." This is my new strategy too. What a hassle.

Oh boo! Google is going to change the name of Blogger to "Google Blogs". Sounds pretty bland to me, but I'm biased for obvious reasons.

Derek's original design for Blogger. I remember the code name: Blue Note. It'll be a shame to lose that personality, but corporations gonna corporate.

Handy chart that shows which browsers support various HTML5 form features.

I enjoyed this episode by Jesse, Adam, and the gang. I never really need to wear a suit, but it's amazing to the see the level of detail that can go into it.

This picture still looks like something out the future.

Disappointing exchange, and a textbook example of how not to respond to critics online. Like Derek I'm a huge fan of On the Media so, ugh.

The Internet Archive is now archiving physical books. "Brewster noticed that Google and Amazon and other countries scanning books would cut non-rare books open to scan them, or toss them out after scanning. He felt this destruction was dangerous for the culture."

"...Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship." Excellent rant about the ephemeral nature of Facebook (among other things).

This solid list of Sinatra slang is gasville. (Am I doing that right?)

Kids sing The Smiths.

"I thought I would die, severed from the tweetosphere, but I didn’t."