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Fresh links for May 18th through May 24th

2012-05-24T10:58:59Z

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Plan a Trip Through History With ORBIS, a Google Maps for Ancient Rome – How come it took three weeks for me to hear about this mapping hack to help you understand travel routes and expenses in Ancient Rome? Maps, history, digital humanities — what's not to love? I only wish this existed for other time periods. Imagine how useful it would be for people writing historical fiction!
Criminal Creativity: Untangling Cover Song Licensing on YouTube – A few interesting things here, including the little-known fact that you need a (nearly impossible to get, if you're an ordinary person) synch license to post a cover song on YouTube, and that ContentID can now identify cover songs, up to and including drunk guys belting out "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the back of police cars.
Brodustrial: WWJD? – Via jwz: an industrial music performer discovers he's booked to play alongside some really nasty bigots. Asking, "What Would Jello Biafra Do?" he ends up calling out the racism and sexism of the other bands' lyrics, videos, and album art in a PowerPoint presentation — while opening for them. It's good viewing, but NSFW.
bootlegMIC | Open Music Labs – A better mic for your iPhone, inspired by the crappy sound of all the concert videos on YouTube. Sold as a kit, the bootlegMIC is a small electret mic that plugs into your phone's headphone jack. Gain adjustment is done by swapping out resistors til you find one that works for your phone and use case.
DJ Rupture’s Sufi Plug Ins – Great post about Western assumptions built into music software such as Ableton, and some plugins that challenge those assumptions.

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My mostly-mobile Internet workflow

2012-05-14T01:25:21Z

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

One of the biggest changes to my Internet use over the last year is that I no longer spend all day in the office sitting in front of a computer. It used to be that if something interesting caught my attention, I’d open it in a browser tab and in the next slow patch — perhaps over lunch, or during that long dark teatime of the soul that happens around 4:30pm when you’re watching the clock, or the far more pleasant beer-time of the soul that happens when you stay at the office after everyone’s gone and actually get some productive stuff done — somewhere in one of those times, if I felt the urge, I could easily whack out a blog post if I felt the urge.

These days, I mostly check Twitter on my phone, and just reading links that get posted there turns out to be a bit fraught, let alone actually doing anything with them. All too often, when I click on a Twitter link, I wind up on a page that’s been “helpfully” (please visualise my sarcastic airquotes) “optimised” for mobile users, which means I have to click through a suggestion that I install their special app (no thanks!) before winding up on a dumbed-down version of the site’s front page. Any link to the actual article I wanted to read in the first place is, of course, absent.

Assuming I can get to the article, what I can do with it is more limited, too. My Twitter client of choice includes a cut-down browser which is great for quickly checking out ephemeral links, but opening in “real” Safari requires a couple of clicks. (You can do it by default, but that is overkill for most links, so I choose not to.) Once in Safari… well, a mobile browser is no place to get real work done. Nevertheless, I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to bash my newly-mobile-centric Internet workflow into shape, and since I’m rather proud of it, I thought I’d post it here.

The key parts are:

Pinboard — a bookmarking service which I started using as replacement for Delicious, and which has the feel that Delicious did back in the good old days, before anyone invented the term “folksonomy”.
Instapaper — one of several “read later” apps (the main other contenders are Pocket and Readability); one of the features that endears it is that it integrates well with Pinboard and with other apps I use.
WordPress — this blog runs on it, and I’ve got a bunch of handy plugins installed (and wow, sometime when I wasn’t looking, WordPress plugins got really useful).
ifttt — “If this, then that”, a glue application that connects various online services based on triggers.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

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Fresh links for May 12th through May 13th

2012-05-13T02:29:54Z

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Argentina makes history with new gender identity law – After passing a groundbreaking gender identity law on Wednesday, Argentina, which became the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage, now leads the entire world when it comes to trans rights.
Pinboard.in for the iPhone and iPad – How to get a Pinboard bookmarklet on your iOS device. Uses a similar technique to the Instapaper bookmarklet install.
Bookmarklet Viewer for iPhone and iPad – A generalised solution for adding bookmarklets to your Safari bookmarks on iOS.

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