websocketd
Phil Nelson Sounds great. (via Jesper)
Structure.io homepage refresh
So, we just launched an update to the Structure Sensor homepage, and it features some neat HTML5 / CSS3 tech. I’m pretty happy with it. It required me to learn a few things, which I’ll hopefully have time to write about here soon.
It also marks the first time I’ve ever encoded video in WebM! It was easy thanks to Miro Video Converter and FFMPEG.
Exploring canvas drawing techniques
A very well put-together interactive tutorial and examination of drawing using the HTML canvas tag. Even if you’re pretty up on things, you might learn something new.
On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star
Christopher Buecheler on Penny Arcade’s really sad job posting earlier this week:
You don’t want that job. There is no upside to taking it. You’ll be worked like a dog and paid like shit while you’re doing it, while Khoo, Krahulik, and Holkins continue cashing their trade show checks.
Robert Khoo is a brilliant businessman, and such businessmen excel by finding the sucker and exploiting him or her.
Don’t be that sucker.
Never be that sucker.
MK-ULTRA Games, Inc.
The latest awesome games studio to come out of the Toronto indie scene is headed by my old friend, and publisher of exp. Magazine, Mathew Kumar. I am dead chuffed.
See also: Kotaku’s coverage of their first (forthcoming) game, Knight and Damsel.
Knock
Knock twice on your iPhone to unlock your Mac. $3.99 on the App Store, and a really nice site that commits one major sin: Hijacking the user’s scroll momentum to guide them through the sections. This is happening a lot these days.
We did some demos of this at Occipital for the Structure Sensor website, based (as I assume Knock’s is) on Apple’s animation-heavy Mac Pro site. It looked really cool, but in the end it never “felt” right. After demoing it to a friend of mine his only feedback was “Just let me scroll.” It’s good advice.
Cabel Sasser’s talk at XOXO
A tremendous and upbeat talk about endings, having a cliche meltdown, and the best time of your life. Really can’t recommend this one enough.
Mock Response
A super simple, but super useful, little service that returns various HTTP status codes based the URL called. Helpful tool for testing how your app responds to every HTTP status.
Dnsyo – A DNS propogation tester
Looks like a handy little tool if you’re in the website business, and it even has a pithy one-line description:
In short, it’s nslookup, if nslookup queried over 1500 servers and collated their results.
Bonus points for being open source and installable via pip.
Who I Am and Where To Find Me (SITREP October 2013)
Hi there. I’m Phil Nelson. I code up hot-shit HTML5, CSS, and Javascript user interfaces for [Occipital][occ]. We just launched the Structure Sensor, the first 3D sensor for mobile devices. I built the website. Real proud of it.
I design cool-looking stuff for fun and sometimes profit, and post it to my Dribbble account. I really like video games and play them on Steam sometimes under the username murderthoughts. Most of the time you can find me on Twitter [@philnelson][twit]. I also lurk on App.net, and post stuff on my Tumblr pretty regularly. If you like being alternately delighted beyond belief and crushingly depressed then you’re in the right place.
I also write far too infrequently here at extrafuture.com. Which you are reading. Right now.
Introducing Harp – the static web server with built-in preprocessing
Imagine you were choosing between PNG or JPEG for an image you wanted to serve. You would simply pick the right format for that use case because web servers support either, you need only drop the file in. That is exactly what Harp does with modern web languages. Want to use Stylus? Just name your file with a .styl extension. Prefer LESS’ syntax? Just drop in the LESS source files and go to work. Or use a combination of both, Harp doesn’t care. Harp knows to compile and serve main.styl when main.css is requested, OR main.less if that file exists instead. It’s that simple.
That’s a hell of a pitch, and it’s only about 1/3 of the whole thing. Read the whole post.
W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web’s standards
This is pretty close to the worst possible thing they could’ve done:
Here’s the bad news: the World Wide Web Consortium is going ahead with its plan to add DRM to HTML5, setting the stage for browsers that are designed to disobey their owners and to keep secrets from them so they can’t be forced to do as they’re told. Here’s the (much) worse news: the decision to go forward with the project of standardizing DRM for the Web came from Tim Berners-Lee himself, who seems to have bought into the lie that Hollywood will abandon the Web and move somewhere else (AOL?) if they don’t get to redesign the open Internet to suit their latest profit-maximization scheme.
The Structure Sensor is the first 3D sensor for mobile devices
So I joined Occipital in February of this year after they put me under NDA and showed me The Structure Sensor. We launched the Kickstarter campaign yesterday. $330k in under 24 hours. We’re beaming.
I built the website. It’s responsive as hell. Pretty proud of it. Thanks to my new friends at Mondo Robot in Boulder for the assist.
Semantic UI
Yet another HTML/CSS/JS framework, but built so that the classes are understandable in english. It’ll create some HTML bloat, but it has a certain Applescript-y charm to it.
The site is pretty snazzy, too. Very readable, very smooth.
Yahoo Files Suit Demanding Greater Accountability from the U.S. Government
I doubt it’ll do much good, but I’m really glad to see Yahoo! trying something.
Schneier on Security: Our Newfound Fear of Risk
We’re afraid of risk. It’s a normal part of life, but we’re increasingly unwilling to accept it at any level. So we turn to technology to protect us. The problem is that technological security measures aren’t free. They cost money, of course, but they cost other things as well. They often don’t provide the security they advertise, and — paradoxically — they often increase risk somewhere else. This problem is particularly stark when the risk involves another person: crime, terrorism, and so on. While technology has made us much safer against natural risks like accidents and disease, it works less well against man-made risks.
I kind of just want to quote this entire piece, but I’ll let you head over to Bruce’s place for the rest.
New Zealand bans software patents
This is great news for Kiwis. I really hope that their results inspire the similar movements in the US, UK, and elsewhere.
LICEcap
Awesome GPL app for making animated GIFs from sections of your screen. Hokey smokes. (via @waxpancake)