onfocus

Some practical strategies for teaching empathy to kids.

"Try this the next time you meet a little girl. She may be surprised and unsure at first, because few ask her about her mind, but be patient and stick with it." [via kottke]

"The truth is that individual health insurance is not easy to get." I second this. When I was a young, single, childless freelance developer I also found that insurance was difficult to get. I can't imagine what it would be like now that I'm older with a family. I'm lucky to have an awesome employer who provides insurance but we should fix this problem. [via rafe]

"If I had to give you a single piece of managerial advice, I would say: 'Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos'." The author of Being Geek on managing software geeks.

Kellogg's: not the best source for parenting advice.

A nice alternative to a standard AJAX poller that takes network latency and server errors into account.

Interesting take on Montessori-inspired apps: "In a Montessori classroom, children work from the concrete to the abstract. I fear that exposing young children to virtual Montessori materials may hamper this important developmental process."

Tax patriotism is on the rise!

Gloves that work with an iPhone. Great idea!

This post is a great antidote to all of the benchmark lists you see that tell you where your child should be. [via caterina]

Interesting discussion about different approaches to managing an online community.

A quick behind-the-scenes look at "20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web" that explains some of the unique features of HTML5.

Nicely designed "book" about the Web.

Interesting experiment that creates web icons with pure CSS.

In the early 80's Tim O'Reilly wrote a book about Frank Herbert? And the full text is available online? Yes and yes. [via MeFi]

Optimizes PNGs by dithering colors and limiting the palette. [via nelson]

This is the command line PNG optimizer that Google Page Speed uses to compress images.

New Dads have biological changes too. [via Daddy Types]

Nice list of board books for kids to revisit.

"This demo is an implementation of a full 8-bit color cycling engine, rendered into an HTML5 Canvas in real-time." Nice look at the lost video game art of color cycling to show movement.

Great list of design laws to keep in mind. Seems that users are waging a constant battle against Hick's Law. [via glass]

Yes, please. [via middleclasstool]

"The goal is not to prevent them from making mistakes, but to allow them to. Risk assessment, trust development, value determination, responsibility, self-direction — all of these very important skills grow out of the opportunity to explore, to experiment, to make mistakes and correct them."

"I spoke with Haughey this week about how he grew Metafilter from a side project into a profitable venture. In our conversation, he stressed three main things: build the site you want to use, listen to the community, and stay small."

"Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home." [via MeFi]

"What to do when all else has failed to change your kid's behavior." [via kottke]

"More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them..." [via schneier]

"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play." [via Daddy Types]

"Superfeedr is Real-time Feed Parsing in the Cloud." Great idea that could help build specialized aggregators. Bummed it's ATOM at the end. I'd prefer RSS.

This blog connects Mad Men episodes with advertisements and details from the time. [via kottke]

"In its final days before crashing into the surface of the moon on June 11, Japan’s KAGUYA explorer has been shooting high-definition footage of the lunar terrain from low altitude."

A father teaches his children the ancient art of rhetoric. "It was as if I’d given them advertising immunization shots."