Accessing the user’s camera using only Javascript. No flash. Performance isn’t real-time on my old MacBook Pro, but it’s “good enough” for things like single shots (e.g. a Photo Booth).
5 years ago this would’ve been voodoo of a high caliber, now it’s one line of jQuery. (via Waxy)
Uses localStorage if available, to boot. The author suggests marking up your forms with rel=”persist” and that sounds reasonable enough to me.
A new subscription-based digital magazine from Marco Arment of Instapaper. Really looking forward to seeing where this goes. How can you not love a guy who not only understands this:
Usually, things are done the way they’re done for good reasons. But sometimes, they’re only done that way because nobody has questioned it recently.
… but is also willing to put his money where his philosophy is.
A crazy version of Conway’s Game Of Life using floating point numbers instead of integers. The results are disturbingly organic-looking. Could be images from a blurry microscope.
Click & drag your mouse to “draw” with a given set of text. I could see this being used to make some really cool JS-based generative art.
The demo explains it better than I can, and you really should check it out. This is a tool you should have in your utility belt.
A new initiative from the W3C:
Web Platform Docs is a new community-driven site that aims to become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation.
Ember is:
… a JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web applications that eliminates boilerplate and provides a standard application architecture.
Comes with Bindings, Computed properties, and Auto-updating templates.
Anna Debenham for A List Apart:
We can’t tailor experiences for every possible use case on every device, but we can use what we know about console web browsing to build a better overall experience. Like we’ve done by designing with mobile in mind, considering how a site could be used on a console can have a knock-on effect of making it easier to use overall.
Posting links to stuff like this is why I still keep a blog.
Hey, Verge: The classy thing to do would be to admit you overreacted and restate that you do not do the things Marco (didn’t really, but kinda) accused you of. The classy thing to do would have been to take it up with him personally, over email, or even a phone call, before you turned this into an internet pissing match. Instead you went apeshit in public, not unlike a child who just met an opposing viewpoint on the relative coolness of Batman .vs. Aragorn.
If you’d have just acted with a bit of editorial restraint, the story would’ve been this: Marco slightly insinuated that what you’re doing isn’t much different than graft, because you failed to mention the most blatantly obvious thing about a new product in a review. A silly, somewhat snarky, little dig by Marco at the pageview-centric Gadget Blogger culture. Nobody really cares, as this isn’t anything new either from Marco or from The Verge.
Instead this is the story: The guy who makes Instapaper insinuated that what you’re doing isn’t much different than graft, and you (and by extension your entire company) flipped the fuck out all day long simultainously playing the victim and attacking one guy. That’s all people are going to remember from this. You freaked, and now we really are wondering about your journalistic integrity.
Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within three hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online—and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers.
A honeypot for government and entertainment industry (aren’t they basically the same now?) spies that they just couldn’t resist.
Today I made a series of seemingly innocuous, though slightly filthy, joke tweets based on a vaginal rejuvenation cream being sold in India.
The Facebook thread (I have Twitter set to auto-post to Facebook) for the third tweet now has over 118,000 comments and 5,500 likes, and the comment threat is INSANE. This appears to have affected the posts of many, many people. The user who appears to be posting the majority of the comments (mostly replying with the single letter “r”) is identified as “Rahmi Özgündüz”, but that name (and the photo on the profile) belong to a Turkish soccer player. It’s possible he/she/it started this, but without more info it’s hard to say. Could just be a regular ‘ol database ID bug.
This has got to be the problem of the day for some poor Facebook engineer. Sorry, dude. Or lady.
Update: Ben Garvey has the idea that somehow a post ID has been duplicated across several different FB posts, which is making all of the comments be piled into one big thread. Sounds about right to me.
Update Two: The responses, at least the ones in a language I speak, are hilarious. They range from incredulous, to indignant to pleas for sanity to the uncaring universe.
A sort of counterpoint to App.net, Tent is a truly decentralized social media protocol. It even integrated with Tor to help those in nations that which to stifle free speech.
It’s a protocol, like HTTP or email, not just a service. It’s fully open source. This is interesting. I hope that it becomes more friendly and stable and active than, say, Jabber.
Garrett Murray on a troubling trend in Kickstarter projects:
At least once a week I receive an unsolicited request to fund a project. These messages are rarely offensive in and of themselves–they’re usually just information about the project and a paragraph or two of generic “please help us out” text–but they’re still spam. They’re usually sent to a blind carbon copy list, but occasionally someone will screw up and send it out via plain CC, exposing all the email addresses they’ve targeted.
This is spam, plain and simple. Kickstarter needs to decide if it’s the kind of company who wants to allow this (in order to potentially make more money in the short term, ala Facebook, at the expense of user satisfaction and damage to their brand) or come down hard on it (do the right thing for their users AND backers). I know what I hope they do.
Something I needed for a little project of mine.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how insanely good node.js is for doing simple tasks that I’d normally use a webserver (Apache) running a scripting language (PHP) and interfacing with an enterprise database (MySQL). If your server has to handle one, or even a handful of different kinds of requests, node should be where you look first.
This is some head-screwing, eyeball-hurting mojo. The tl;dr:
“I just made a tool to transform any javascript code into an equivalent sequence of ()[]{}!+ characters. You can try it here, or grab it from github or npm. Keep on reading if you want to know how it works.”
Being “A lightweight, easy-to-use jQuery plugin for fluid width video embeds.” (via @zeldman)
A repository of community-curated legal documents. Someone is going to try to troll this hard, mark my words.
Sounds like a good deal to me:
Just $2.99 of your Earth dollars.
Phil Nelson