Ted Roden

Have you wanted to try out Fancy Hands? Have one task on the house. All you have to do is Tweet. (Tell your friends).

thommy:

These videos are so great. The first one from Seattle is the best. USA!

A while ago a switched from using de.licio.us to using pinboard.in. I did it tentitively and decided that I should still keep a mirror of everything on del.icio.us. So I wrote a simple script to take what I posted on pinboard and post it to delicious. Someone reminded me of it today, so I figured I’d mention it here. If you’re interested in that type of thing, you can find it on github.

johnzanussi:

jayrobinson:

The coolest HTML5 presentation ever. Download Google Chrome to watch and enjoy.

Twitter is in the process of open sourcing their “distributed, fault-tolerant graph database.” Huge?

If you’ve never used aardvark, you’re missing out. It’s a really great service. (Most of the time).

Pretty nice grep-like tool. Especially if (somehow) grep is tailored enough for a programmer. Among it’s touted features:

Command name is 25% fewer characters to type!

Get it while it’s hot!

Dashboard posts are now accessible from the Tumblr API, and there’s a shit-ton more coming to the API over the next few weeks days.

While I’m sure you guys will concoct plenty of things we haven’t even begun to imagine, the things we’re super-excited to see are any …

You heard it here first! Also, can anyone get this to work?

officiallyrad:

“It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”

Plastic cards had not been invented, so Mr Shepherd-Barron’s machine used cheques that were impregnated with carbon 14, a mildly radioactive substance.

The machine detected it, then matched the cheque against a Pin number.

However, Mr Shepherd-Barron denies there were any health concerns: “I later worked out you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you.”

muxtape:

“Why would we voluntarily increase our reliance on expensive, scarce wireless bandwidth delivered by abusive thugs when we are awash in cheap, commodity storage that grows cheaper every day and which we can buy from hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of retailers?”

“Hard problems can’t be solved with technical denialism.”

Isn’t it fairly hardcore denialism to suggest our wireless bandwidth won’t get better?

One way or another we will have access to much faster wireless internet speeds. It’s also not going to keep getting more expensive. Sure, we’re going to take it on the chin for the next couple of years… but bandwidth will not be a limiting factor.

MediaBistro asks the question. What do you think? Is my job “necessary?” (Also, do people speculate on the necessity of other jobs? Feels strange!) Vote there, answer here: How Necessary Is The NYT’s R&D Department?

matthewb:

Following extensive testing, Joe Leech and Fiz Yazdi conclude that users do scroll beyond the fold in the vast majority of cases, and that cramming all of the content above this imaginary line might actually have the opposite effect:

The surprising thing we learnt was that actually having less above the fold (one large content block as opposed to 2 smaller ones) encouraged exploration below the fold.

Perhaps I’m dense, but how is that surprising?

It seems obvious that if there is more content above the fold, people will do less scrolling below… probably because they got whatever content they wanted.

That’s like saying, “surprisingly, when we put all the words in the first half of the book, people stopped reading the second half.”

I’m not saying it’s good design to put everything above the fold. I’m just saying this finding should have been obvious, not surprising.