We have the facts and we’re voting…. The MetaFilter election night thread, full of happiness.
# metafilter, obama, politics, usa
Suzanne Vega writes wonderfully on Luka, Tom’s Diner and being a ‘two hit wonder’.
« »I made two new websites! jackmottram.com is a fancy modern homepage which lets you see what I’m up to all over the web, and Work collects stuff I’ve written in the newspapers and magazines.
« »Goodreads is a website that lets you track what you’re reading and share reviews with others.
« »Me And Billy Bob: artist Jillian MacDonald has a thing for Billy Bob Thornton.
« »Rid yourself of the wildly annoying warning that pops up when opening newly downloaded applications in Leopard.
« »Greg Wilson was the first British DJ to mix on the telly. (Via Andrew.)
« »Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online. Or it will be, soon.
« »Watchification compiles the best telly available online, mostly from the BBC.
« »In Twin Peaks: locations from the series as they are now. More In Twin Peaks provides background info.
« »Mark E. Smith reads H.P. Lovecraft. See also: Mark E. Smith reads the football results.
« »My friend Al Seed has a new website, all about his current movements within the world of avant garde performance.
# fooligan, performance, seed, theatre
Howl, rewritten for MetaFilter
# funny, ginsberg, metafilter, poetry
Nicola Atkinson Does Fly is doing some fascinating public art stuff in Abbeyview, Dunfermline. And, unlike most pesky artists, she has a great website and project weblog.
« »A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set,,. The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points. « »
DJPremierSalutesJamesBrown – TheFoundationofHipHop_2Cd`s Mp3 Album Download–ace mixtape, the first mix pure James Brown, the second songs that sample him. I hardly ever listen to Hip Hop, but this has been on permanent rotation.
« »Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger. It’s funny that, ten years after Barger coined the term weblog, his tips now apply more to tumblelogs than weblogs, as most people understand those terms.
« »Excellent Stirling gallery The Changing Room is moving to new premises after ten years.
« »The BBC’s iPlayer now works for folk with non-Windows computers, by streaming content online. Unfortunately the selection of programmes is absolutely rubbish, and you can only watch for a week after broadcast.
« »The Secret Life Of Machines, every episode of Tim Hunkin’s wonderful series on technology,
« »The hyper-reality of fiction techniques has transformed the way we consume the news. A good piece on the strange narratives in the news.
« »Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Looks tasty.
« »Fantastic photographs from the set of Twin Peaks by Richard Beymer (aka Benjamin Horne). I like the one of Bob enjoying a cup of coffee.
« »Yesterday in the pub, I told noted internet ventriloquist Mr. Trippy (aka Stewart Home) about the wild knitting pattern filesharing scene, today his MySpace blog posting on the topic has garnered some 250 comments. Which I can’t read because my new computer won’t load MySpace.
« »I love the fact that COBRA–the cool and scary name for the committee that meets in cases of national emergency–stands for something terribly dull. I wish I could tell you how I found this out, but suspect that doing so would bring shadowy forces to my door!
« »Weblogging editor thingy MarsEdit 2.0 has lots of lovely new features, including very slick integration with Flickr. (It might just tempt me away from the TextMate blogging bundle.)
« »I’ve always sympathised with the Archers Anarchists (who believe The Archers to be a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and that all supposed cast members are BBC stooges), but the discovery that the ‘actress‘ who ‘plays’ Emma Grundy is terribly pretty has tipped me over the edge into anger. BBC, stop your lies now! Emma Grundy is quite obviously a right dog!
« »Suitably butch books–by Conrad, Hemingway, Stevenson–are now available in fag packet form. (Via Smallist, an excellent weblog about wee stuff.)
# cigarettes, design, literature
This program is an implementation of the well-known Othello or Reversi board game. For the time being Tothello is the best program in the world playing reversed Othello (anti reversi) on 8×8, 7×7, 6×6, 5×5 and 4×4 boards. Enjoy the art of the reversed games with this ultimate player!
« »The Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration contains records and images of 868 literary illustrations that were published in or around 1862, providing bibliographical and iconographical details, as well as the ability for users to view images at exceptionally high quality.
« »Her Noise – The Making Of–a film about the 2005 show at South London Gallery.
« »Alexander “Sawney” Bean(e) was the storied patriarch of a forty-eight member clan in 16th century Scotland brutally executed for the mass murder and cannibalisation of over a thousand people. Not really, obviously.
« »Productions of Waiting For Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame directed by Beckett himself in 1985.
« »Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. (240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.) I want to be pencils when I’m dead.
« »Lost voices of Victorian working class uncovered in political protest poems
« »Â» Kill Your Idols–a documentary on New York music from post-punk to the recent past.
# documentary, music, NYC
Horses eat a lot
prances in the lovely field
They are beautiful.
–haiku by a pupil of Bloomfield Elementary School
An amazing demo of a touch-screen interface by Perceptive Pixel
# interface, touch, video, wow
Off The Flickr Grid Step 4: Running the Import Script–Paul Bausch is documenting the process of grabbing his photos and metadata from Flickr, then building them into his own site.
« »AITOR THROUP–fantastic fashion design, illustration.
# design, drawings, fashion, illustration
Performancing is a full-featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox.
« »Crazy lady complains about neighbourly noise; schoolkids respond, belatedly, on the neighbour’s behalf.
# neighbours, noise, web
A Red Cat’s Journey, Enhanced by iTunes–Ry Cooder used a CD burned with iTunes’ Sound Enhancer feature to master his new album.
« »The html-movement-library is a web-based repository of short video clips and images by various performers who use html tags… as a starting point for generating movements.
« »Is The New documents every instance of the phrase “is the new” encountered from various sources in 2005.
« »The Ad Generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language.
« »Smashingtelly – the best full length free tv programs on the web, updated every day.
« »FIGHTING THE FRONT–users of Second Life kick the Front National out of the game.
# demonstrations, politics, second life
Soviet Roadside Bus-Stops are beautiful.
# photography, russia, street furniture, USSR
Tumble is a lightweight, minimalist, blosxom-like thingy for making a tumblelog. It’s nothing to do with Tumble, as in the site you’re reading, which is powered by WordPress–drop me a line if you want the templates.
# blosxom, meta, tumble, tumblelogs, wordpress
I have a wee page on twitter. (I’ve been tinkering with using it antisocially to put a status message on Submit Response, down here.)
« »Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse Audio CD– Here are excerpts from two of the six Norton Lectures that Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard University in the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968.
# borges, lectures, literature, poetry
Evgen Bavcar is a photographer. He is also blind. (via Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, a reliable source of esoteric knowledge.)
« »SonicSwap Boink does a variety of iTunesy things, but I’m using it to grab cover art for albums not in the iTMS. Works well.
« »OmniGrowl is an expandable framework for sending Growl Notifications for applications that do not natively support Growl. Pretty notifications from iCal ahoy!
« »You Spin Me Round, a rather lovely acoustic cover of the DoA classic on MeFi Music.
« »Empathic Painting, an interactive painterly rendering whose appearance adapts in real time to reflect the perceived emotional state of the viewer.
# art, empathy, painting, recognition, technology
The Domesday Book is now online. Conspicuously absent from all the press coverage: it costs £3.50 to download a page. Which sucks.
« »Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv–A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner’s closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque.
« »My friend Tim is raising money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust by going white water rafting. You can sponsor him here, if you like.
# charity, cystic fibrosis, friends
CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience–a Firefox extension that provides ad-blocking, links to alternate search engines, links to bookmarking services and lets you filter search results. Good stuff.
« »1000 FACES OF WALTHAMSTOW which contains, er, 1000 faces of Walthamstow.
« »Tumble is now powered by WordPress. Everything seems to be working okay, although many posts are incorrectly tagged, which I’m in the process of fixing. If you see anything peculiar, do send me an email. (I already know that the URLs are a bit ugly – anyone know how to get rid of the /index.php/ bit?)
« »Zooomr–Flickr clone with Google Maps-based geotagging. Unfortunatley, it’s quite shit, but might be worth keeping an eye on.
« »In the spirit of WriteRoom, here’s a haxie that lets you get rid of the Menu Bar in OSX. Haxies are a little suspect, so proceed with caution.
« »Here’s an interview with Kerso about his trainers and clothes. (He’s a friend of a friend, and I’ve witnessed his wardrobe in the flesh–truly awe-inspiring.)
« »Apologies for the recent outage, this entry at Submit Response explains what went wrong.
« »tumbleicio.us is, as you might expect, a site for “reviews, how-to’s, and more–all on tumblelogs”. It’s brand new, so there’s no content–worth keeping an eye on, perhaps.
« »The Tumblelist–the canonical listing of tumblelogs. It never really caught on, did it?
« »A recent comment on Submit Response: err yec i apear to luvmuz lasy sovmuz yec? how wud yew like tew suck meh yec merc yerc smeckers (I have no idea what it means.)
« »My Wandering Wiki: MarkdownDragAndDrop–convert Markdown text into XHTML, PDF, LaTex.
« »VideoDownloader is a Firefox extension that, well, lets you download video from YouTube, Google Video and more than 60 other sites.
Try it out with the lovely videos listed here, ranging from Basquiat painting to Borges lecturing.
# art, extensions, firefox, video
Locomotive: In one self-contained application, it gives you a fully functional Rails development platform.
In other words, it’s MAMP for Rails. Talking of which, here are some instructions on getting Locomotive talking to MAMP’s MySQL.)
« »The Father-Daughter Purity Ball–quite spectacularly creepy daddy-daughter virginity-pledging event. I don’t know if it’s aimed at religous people or perverts.
« »A little video clip of Alva Noto playing live at the AV.06 festival, Newcastle.
« »Memories pour from 43 year old chairs like sweat from a glass blower’s arse. (See also, and also.)
# architecture, furniture, memory
I almost won an iPod Shuffle today. Sadly, my campaign on behalf of the humble pencil ( the one gadget I can’t live without) lost out to a slightly more hi-tech device.
# apple, gadgets, guardian, ipod
Jumpcut: Minimalist Clipboard Buffering for OS X–a new version. After Quicksilver, this is the app I use the most. It stores a clipboard history and lets you paste past items via a command key combination. Absolutely essential.
« »chris blogs: Celebrating One Year of Anarchaia–The time has come, and today experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin’ is a whole year old! (Anarchaia was the inspiration for this site. )
« »The irony mark (French: point d’ironie) is a punctuation mark that purports to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level.
# irony, language, punctuation
Tab Mix Plus is a must-install Firefox extension: tons of tabby goodness, and a reliable session manager in one. (It replaced three extensions I used to use, and Firefox is running much more smoothly now, too.)
« »10 Banned Albums–artist/musician Brian Joseph Davis took ten banned records, set fire to them, then played them, resulting in some surprisingly lovely sounds.
« »FoxiPod is a dinky little app combined with a Greasemonkey script that makes downloading an MP3 and adding it to iTunes a one-click process. Slight downsides: it’ll only work on pages with a direct link to MP3s, and it doesn’t tell you where it downloads files to – ~/Music/download.
# download, firefox, itunes, MP3
Pete Doherty and the KLF — The Samaritans have today recruited 600 extra staff to deal with an expected surge in calls as troubled fans come to terms with today’s revelations about rocker and teen icon Pete Doherty. In a surprise press conference today, the men behind Doherty’s career reveled themselves – and admitted that the Libertines, Babyshambles, the tales of drug use, the armed robberies and the affair with supermodel Kate Moss have all been part of one of the largest hoaxes in British history. The men behind the scandal – Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty…
« »Eighteenth-Century E-Texts The catalogue includes most of the electronic editions of eighteenth-century works publicly available on the network.
« »NEW YORK NIGHT TRAIN: KID CONGO POWERS PT 1 – audio reminiscences, Cramps-era scrapbooks, an exhaustive discography, and, um, a recipe for enchiladas from the legendary guitarist (and lovely bloke).
« »The Socratic Method – wonderful account of a teacher using the Socratic method to lead a group of children to understanding binary arithmetic.
« »3121, Album release date and singles announced – out on March 21st, just in time for my birthday ;-)
« »Channel 4 News Podcasts – the first is a special half-hour report on the links between cannabis use and mental health problems by Jon Snow. Good to see them putting in real effort to provide a podcast rather than just repurposing existing material. Good too to see more professional podcasting (it’s a mystery to me how the whole thing took off on the back of half-arsed amateurish content, which is what 99.9% of podcasts seem to be).
« »Glasgow Explorer is a new weblog pointing to stuff to see and do in Glasgow. For a folksonomical user-generated tag-based mashup alternative, try my little page, The Glasgow Now (please note: all buzzwords in this sentence were typed with a raised eyebrow).
« »Capital and Stratification within Virtual Community: A Case Study of Metafilter.com – MeFi user Quatermass’ MA dissertation, applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class and capital to an online setting.
« »www.myspace.com/knittaplease – knitted ‘graffiti’. I can’t decide whether I love or hate this.
« »Tracking the Lincolnshire Poacher, a BBC Radio 4 documentary on Numbers Stations.
# BBC, documentary, numbers, spies
EGOBURGER Winter 2005/06 – a new quarterly online magazine type thing edited by Torsten Lauschmann, with art, music photography, essays, &c. (I have a photography, audio and text piece in the next issue, coming in Spring.)
« »they came from the stars, i saw them are a band. One of them is in my house at the moment (though not threatening me to make this post this post nor nothing).
« »Alistair Cooke’s bones ‘stolen’ …body snatchers allegedly surgically removed his bones and sold them for more than $7,000 (£4,000) to a company supplying parts for use in dental implants and various orthopaedic procedures. Bloody hell.
« »MAN DATES GAL ON INTERNET FOR SIX MONTHS — AND IT TURNS OUT SHE’S HIS MOTHER!
« »Prince videos at VH1, including Te Amo Corazon, the new single, video directed by Salma Hayek. In other news, Prince just signed a deal with Universal, who will be releasing new album 3121 next year.
« »This is a test of posting via the Atom Actions plugin for Quicksilver. And it worked. Almost. Sadly Atom Actions will insert a post into Movable Type, but won’t rebuild the site, nor can one set a category for the post. So I probably won’t be using it here, though it might come in handy in future.
« »The Infancy Gospel of St. Thomas, a wacky, zany, roustabout account of Jesus Christ’s childhood! (More texts are available on the Early Christian Writings site.)
# christianity, gospel, religion, texts
The London Review of Breakfasts is a wonderfully-written diary of breakfasts eaten and enjoyed. (My favourite place to breakfast in London is Maggie’s Cafe, next to Lewisham train station – there’s nothing spectacular about the food, and the coffee should be avoided at all costs, but the staff and regular customers are a bunch of lovely loons who will have you laughing into your bubble and squeak. The Workers’ Cafe on Upper Street, Islington comes a close second, this time for eavesdropping on old gents trading tales of strikes and marches.)
« »Snö is a useless application that makes snow fall over your desktop. Snö is the Swedish name for Snow. (It is also a pretty screensaver).
« »3121.COM – Prince’s next project, just a teaser page at the moment. See also, the cryptic splash page at the NPG Music Club.
« »“China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795″, Royal Academy, London — a passionate review by Dan Hill. If your read this and don’t want to see the exhibit as soon as is humanly possible, I’ll eat my hat.
« »MAKE: Blog: Laser etched Powerbook! – laser etching anything on a Powerbook is quite fabulous, laser etching a tarsier on a Powerbook is just… perfect.
« »Tired of the Soup du Jour? Some Problems with ‘New Formalism’ by Nick Evans, who has a show coming up at Sorcha Dallas which, in part, looks set to explore further the issues he discusses here.
# art, formalism, glasgow, theory
Darren’s urban exploration documentation.
# exploration, glasgow, spooky
20 Jazz Funk Greats – cracking MP3blog from folk who are members of that site it is verboten to mention of which I am also a member, yeah?
« »UNO’s main goal is to enhance aqua interface consistence, by making all elements look & feel as one. – I am almost moved to tears by what this has done to my computer. Thanks Bonaldi!
« »Welcome to the Official Site of Muammar Gadafi – it’s basically a weblog. Between this and the Pentagon podcast, my mind is reeling.
« »DRUIDSTREET V. – it’s only a tumblelog made with Backpack. Web 2.0 singularity approaches.
« »Greatest Internet Moments, 100 of them. Half wondrous nostalgia (Pokey the Penguin!), half, ‘Huh?’. For me at least. Possible proof that the web was much more fun in the 1990s.
« »Rag & Bone – very, very nice clothes. Fucking awful Flash website (why do fashion labels always do that?)
« »fumblings: A Response to Michael Sharpe – I can’t summarise this piece by Honey on ME and CFS, just go and read it.
« »Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. – they’re not doing to badly, either. It’s very fast, and has a nice sidebar feature for accessing bookmarks, history, downloads. (Bit flakey when it comes to forms, though.)
« »Today I noticed that a del.icio.us user called lstryder has been using the del.icio.us for: feature to send me links he thinks I might like. Since I don’t recognise the username, I bookmarked lstryder’s del.icio.us page and marked it for:lstryder with a note asking him/her to get in touch. At present, lstryder is the only person who marks stuff for: me, but I rather like the idea of using the for: feature as a little messenger thing, because a) I don’t use iChat/AIM/MSM/Jabber/whatever, and b) posting to delicious is so quick and easy. (Doubtless everyone else on del.icio.us already does this, but hey ho…)
# chat, del.icio.us, web
The Long Blondes are playing at the nightclub this Sunday. Lazy hack description: a bit Elastica-ish. The entire band have really nice noses, too, judging by the photos page. Important in a band, good looking noses, I’ve always thought.
« »backstage bbcsearch by jim – fast searching of BBC RSS feeds, very nicely done.
« »Yahoo! Maps – it’s incredibly slick and has a totally wild set of APIs, but if it only has one country out of the 193 on earth it’s not much fucking use, is it? I mean, I get why they might not be able to get the data to map, say, Turkmenistan. But Europe? Come on. (Sorry, but it annoys me that web companies think that they’re based in one country, so retro.)
« »Fuck this article: the Yugoslav lexicon of swear words . Ne vrediš ni pola pizde vode!
« »‘I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund – a second round of the anti-ID card pledge. 10,000 of us have already made this pledge, please join us.
« »I couldn’t resist linking to a PC that is a) called Jack and b) a thin client.
« »@rchers @narchists. The Archers are real – there is no cast. I believe, I believe.
« »SHEMAGH WRAP INSTRUCTIONS for one of my possible halloween costumes.
« »Here he comes to save the day! Not having used a mouse since the 1990s, it now seems to me that only someone with an extra arm could use one happily… I suspect mine will go back to the shop within a week.
« »So having the correct German haircut would be a really good enhancement to one’s Heer impression.. The things you find when looking for a photograph to show the barber. See also.
« »Tom Coates on the BBC Annotatable Audio project. Which is terribly, terribly exciting.
« »Magistrate convicted for giving wife Rolex he found in Tesco’s Using records from his supermarket loyalty card, police were able to prove that he had visited the Tesco store in Poole, Dorset, within two hours of the watch’s real owner on January 16, 2002.
« »