The illusory cow →

October 14th, 2011

If cows can make optical illusions, maybe there is hope for the infinite monkeys with their typewriters.

I’m starting to feel relieved I didn’t manage to get any Olympic tickets

October 5th, 2011

No food or drink

No “electronic transmitting equipment” – do they really think they can ban all mobiles? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on a redesign of BYP’s homepage

September 28th, 2011

I've been working on a redesign of BYP's homepage http://bypuk.com and it's finally done!

And I've posted a making-of for the most difficult part of the redesign: getting the sidebar to show posts about the currently selected movie. http://fredsherbet.com/2011/09/using-ajax-with-wordpress/

Tech Companies Exploit the Way We Undervalue Privacy →

September 26th, 2011

Cory Doctorow talking about privacy. It's hard to get worried about something when the negative effects are too vague and far off. He likens it to smoking.

He also highlights the problem of education systems taking away children's privacy, while trying to tell them privacy is important. I guess it's an age old problem – we have to bring up our children, keep them safe and teach them how to live, but how do you also prepare them to be responsible adults? Responsible for their own safety, privacy and choices.

Letter to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education (and response) →

September 26th, 2011

This website epitomises the problem with pretty websites on Windows

September 26th, 2011

Try loading this website in all your browsers on Windows.

http://www.jaguarfuture.com/

  • IE can't load it, because it doesn't have good enough support of HTML5 and modern web standards.
  • FF has horrible resizing of images (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517294)
  • Chrome has horrible font rendering (maybe it's only when there's shadows). See the text on the right of this particular website.
  • Safari has horrible chrome and isn't a windowsey application. But at least the website looks right!

How many photos have ever been taken? | 1000memories →

September 21st, 2011

It's amazing how many photos are taken and kept. It's sad that so many of them are archived at low quality (by Facebook and Instagram)

FM 100 Hue Test →

September 17th, 2011

Via my little brother. I got a big fat Zero 🙂

Score your colour perception! I got 16, lower is better. Tell me your results if you do it!

Artificial Heart by Jonathan Coulton

September 16th, 2011

I bought my first Jonathan Coulton album today. He's gotten himself a real producer and studio time and professional musicians. It's good 🙂 Quite easy to listen to, and upbeat. It's got a really clean sound.

I also listened to him on a podcast with Merlin Mann, talking about the experience of entering a more professional world of music making.

Artificial Heart by Jonathan Coulton

Article About 'The Menace Of The Software Pirates' From 1985 →

September 13th, 2011