onfocus

"As a personal archive tool, it's pretty impressive, as a shared space to find interesting bookmarks, it's problematic." I completely agree with Matt, and check out Maciej's comment after the post. It sounds like more social tools are coming to Pinboard.

I'm setting up bookmarking shop over at Pinboard. Hope to see you there!

ugh. Very disappointed that del.icio.us is closing.

Me too! I spent my money on hardware up-front, dammit. Don't nickel and dime me to death with software. (Yes, I know it's irrational.)

Fun new application by Simon Willison for finding conferences your Twitter contacts are attending. Nice design and use of Twitter oAuth.

Schell expands on his Gamepocalypse idea presented at the end of his DICE talk earlier this year. He makes dozens of predictions that all seem plausible, creepy, and somewhat fun.

"There is an error in most photography scaling algorithms." Wha? This is hard to believe.

I think we're safely out of spoiler territory now so I can post this great analysis of Toy Story 3.

Neven Mrgan has a great point: when a satire gets too close to the subject it's taking down is it still satire?

Great 50's comic art.

Frozen bananas in a food processor = ice cream? I need to try this!

Great idea, I'd use them.

Gina's timely conference tips for people like me.

API + No-Hurdle Accounts + Incentives = some krazy foursquare hacking. "...I think the combination of a poorly moderated and insecure folksonomy with incentives (e.g. badges, mayorships, free meals, etc.) is a fragile one. The greater the incentives, the greater the motivation for cheating." [via mathowie]

Looks like a simple way for a web app to send/receive SMS messages.

Not only did I post this link to delicious, I "liked" it at Google Reader, commented about it at Facebook, retweeted, dugg, and potentially verbed it in other ways that I might not be aware of. But yeah, more author tools--hear, hear!

A peek behind the curtain at Facebook with an anonymous FB developer.

"...Brad's work was altogether more messy and funny and human and passionate and complicated, just like the man himself. I can offer no more succinct summation of the man than that he was a good man and a good friend, profoundly funny and profoundly kind." Anil shares some memories of Brad.

"...the hero is the most damaging person on a team, particularly on a team that’s supposed to be writing high-availability or otherwise mission-critical software." Interesting analysis of team dynamics. [via jessamyn]

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation." Amit Singhal on how Google ranks Tweets for real-time search.

Rules for PR folks who want to work with bloggers. "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE."

"A Collection of iPhone Home Screens." I found this a while back but couldn't remember the name or how to get back to it because the keywords are saturated. My Google-fu was hot today, and I'm bookmarking for future reference.

This Java class is full of helpful functions for escaping and unescaping strings, and it can be used within ColdFusion (if you're into that).

"Cultivating a Late 19th-Century Style at Home." This seems to be an IRL manifestation of that thing.

Aha! This answers a question I didn't even know I had, but I've been unconsciously wondering. I thought this "look" came from the image-collecting Tumblr crowd. But apparently it's a thing IRL.

My son loved looking at and talking about these pictures of animals. You might need to skip past a couple with toddlers, but most are great for kids.

ooh, I'd like to try one of these for my working OSX drive.

Nice article about a couple good iPhone photography apps. [via merlin]

I love lists too, and I think they're going to be fantastic once everyone has them. I agree with Mat that lists will lead to fewer folks in my 'following' list, but 'listing' is lower impact so it might lead to more actual following.

Some samples of single-pane comics by H.T. Webster. Sadly, his collections appear to be out of print and there aren't any at nearby libraries.

Scan of the 1955 book with wonderful caricatures by Ronald Searle. [via peacay]

"So, this is why I say white supremacy is the only functional form of racism; the only kind that actually works."

"...you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not."

It's going to be that time of year again soon. These Thule chains look nice, but I'd rather see real people putting on chains in freezing weather in the demo, not spinning/floating CG.

Eight rules for writing a short story. [via merlin]

"The fundamental problems with the American health care system are all linked, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the vast majority of folks get insurance solely through their employers." Amen, and go Wyden! [via Kattullus]

"The problem is Twitter isn’t really open. For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use “Twitter” without an any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter’s centralized service." I'm not a fan of people pushing content to Twitter like it's an RSS reader for social reasons as well, but that's probably just me.