People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Using The Cascade
Dilapidated
For this experiment, I put my resonator through Gearbox's extraordinary 'Bronze Master' effect and bathed the resulting signal in expansive reverb.
Due to the Bronze Master's perculiar ability to help you create unusual harmonics and the resonator's sensitivity to soft plucking, a broad range of murky, eroded sounds can be achieved. At low velocities the sound is distant and muffled; at high velocities it's lively and sharp.
Notes tend to crackle and disintegrate prematurely, adding some atonal texture. Having opted for a mournful chord progression - cycled extremely slowly - I think the overall effect is reminiscent of an instrumental to be found on a (somewhat progressive) black metal record. Enjoy!
Note: The track is nearly seven minutes long so you may have to wait some time for it to load, depending on your connection speed.
A Minute Of Listening
Bobby Howitzer
Pseudo-class Deception
Awaiting The Two Towers
Apple's UI playground
Metadata seven years later
Reading and typography
Being a generalist
John Lim of PHP Everywhere:
"I'm actually a generalist. I can code a bit in Javascript, I know some C++, PHP and a thousand other useless languages. A generalist is pretty good thing to be in technology, because computers and software changes so fast and if you spend too much time specializing you're already a dinosaur before you turn 40."
Personalization vs. customization
Amazon usability
Odd that I had never heard of Good Experience, a newsletter by Mark Hurst. Just discovered it today via Tomalak’s Realm. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon:
"For example, quite awhile ago we developed the 'similarities' feature - the one that says 'people who bought this also bought that.' In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they'd say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had."
Peter on IA
Peter Merholz, “Thoughts on AIfIA and Information Architecture”:
"As information architects know, explaining what they do, even to smart people in related fields, is difficult. Once given a clue as to what user experience is, folks can understand that improving the user experience of a product will be valuable. That will never be true of information architecture, which, by nature, is more abstract and subtle."
Late night with user interface web sites
Morality for and against war
From the BBC: “The international community has a ‘moral responsibility’ to avoid war with Iraq, the Catholic Church has warned.”
Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey (former Democratic senator) makes the moral case for war in Iraq:
"We know what a terrible thing we did after the Gulf War to encourage Iraqis to rise up and then not follow through in helping them. But you can't take the worst America has done and then cite it as reason not to try and do anything good."
Zopey OpenDoc
Jeffrey Shell is building an OpenDoc-inspired framework on top of Zope.
Leaky Abstractions
Joel on Software, “The Law of Leaky Abstractions”:
"If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened."