A stub is a short article which rounds up little bits of information that I’ve found throughout the week. These may be web or computer related, or they may be more general things. It’s more a personal log than an actual article, reminding me of things that I may’ve forgotten, but some of it may be of help to someone else!
As is always the way, this week has been far busier than the week before it!
This week:
- A project to create a ‘DRM Chair’, which self-destructs after being sat on tries to point out how crazy DRM is, and how we wouldn’t accept it in other forms. Amusing and interesting, if not a little bit of a waste of time.
- If their description isn’t hyperbole, the Famo.us HTML5, app framework is very impressive. I’d be interested to play around with it and see what it could do!
- Surprised to see a beta of Opera’s mobile browser (sporting a new WebKit engine), so quickly after the announcement of the switch. It’s not too shabby either!
- Further rumours of the Apple watch emerge. It looks promising, and sounds like they’re actually putting some work into it, but will it be better than Pebble?
- As with all new and exciting technologies, it’s easy to forget the accessibility issues that may come with new interfaces, whether that’s touch, gesture or speech.
- China doesn’t like the look of Android’s impending domination worldwide, I wonder if we’ll be seeing a competitor to Android come out of China in the next few months or years…
- The Mars rover hits a glitch! It would be very disappointing if they can’t resolve the issues!
- I was very amused by this, it’s not the first company or person that I’ve seen exploiting Facebook’s “Promote this post” feature horrifically (nearly every post is promoted for instance), seeing these people getting bitten by their own lazy ad campaign is a little satisfying…
- We’re getting ever closer to camera’s which truly see what we see, or even what we don’t see, this sensor from Canon makes a radical difference.
- Flat UI seems to be a fork of Bootstrap and some other projects to create a nice, modern looking (a little Metro-ish sadly), design framework. Try it out!
- PPK, the owner of QuirksBlog who publishes a wealth of knowledge on several web technologies and the browser-compatibility for them has done further testing on mobiles. Interesting to see what’s safe to use!
- The gesture “Punch to Zoom” amused me no end, it seems like hand recognition will be the flavour of the year in terms of interface control, as Microsoft seems to be pushing it with Windows 8.
- Sticking with Microsoft, they’ve been fined because a “technical error” caused them to remove the “Browser Choice” box, sneaky. While I think the “Browser Choice” box is probably a bad idea, and leads to further confusion, it’s important to give browser developers a fair chance.
- Facebook is to begin rolling out a new design for it’s news feed, while the space for ads is indeed bigger, and inevitably was a large part of the redesign, it does look nice. More minimal than we’ve seen from Facebook before.
- Ubuntu chief, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t have time for elitist Linux users who don’t want the masses using Linux. I’d agree with this, Ubuntu is a great OS and very usable by the average computer user. Where I’d stop agreeing is if the power-user features were lost.
- A study about whether games make people violent has concluded that while they do, many other things including crispy bacon and snakes make people violent too. This amused me no end, but I fear that just the conclusion about video games will be separated and the rest forgotten.
- Once a funny, seemingly useless currency, BitCoins have gained credibility, but the sites which were once not at threat of being attacked, which dealt with BitCoins, have now suffered a DNS Hijack.
- I think there’s a lot of this in many industries, but especially a fast moving one like the Web industry. Many fall into ruts, and end up using outdated ways and having a very strong opinion about why everything newer is worse. Instead, keeping an open mind will probably keep you in your industry longer.
- Facebook were clever enough to find a bug and patch it before it was discovered publicly…but not before they attacked the security hole themselves! Very good way of using a bug to test your service.
- A proposal that the EU will vote on may ban online porn in the aid of gender equality, while this is admirable, pornography could account for nearly half a billion pages on the Internet, I’d be impressed to see them ban and block all of those.
- There’s clearly a surplus of Google employees when they reveal a concept project, the Google Shoe.
- This weeks ShopTalk show was with Jeff Starr, writer of books and websites including subjects such as .htaccess and WordPress, they discuss many interesting topics, including sexism still floating about in the industry, the Opera to Webkit announcement and interesting new workflows incorporating Git. ShopTalk #57: Jeff Starr
- And finally, Physicists have create a vortex knot, similar to tying a smoke ring. The video of it is very impressive, as is the technology they used to achieve it!
andrewBridge 