Linked List: January 2014

Special

Best column Gruber has written for a long time.

Edward Snowden Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

If he wins it will make up for the Nobel Committee’s mistake in 2009.

Ultra HD Video of Earth from International Space Station in Near Realtime

Watch our world change from space.

Animated Engines

Mechanical.

Mondrian Open Source Drawing Web App

Mondrian is a free vector graphics web app like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

How to Start a Project

Mark Steinmetz:

People want to feel like they are in control. Often, before even starting something new, people try to determine by various means how their project will turn out. It’s important, I believe, not to get ahead of things but to simply allow the outcome to unfold naturally. Trying to decide too soon what results you want will lead to rigidity and lack of surprise.

People want to feel like they have a grip on things and so using words to make sense of what you’re doing might provide a feeling of relief and control but be careful you don’t make your project less interesting by having it fit neatly into a scheme of words. Images have a power that is different from the power of words and they communicate in ways that words cannot. In today’s culture, words dominate our thinking and, used in a lazy manner, they help sustain a spectrum of fundamentalist thought. Being able to accept ambiguity leads to a better quality of life and better work.

Here’s one of Stenmetz’s contact sheets and accompanying essay.

Also found Steven Ahlgren’s work through Fototazo. Here are portraits of Unix co-inventor Dennis Ritchie and of a web developer.

Pirate Browser Circumvent Censorship

PirateBrowser is a bundle package of the Tor client (Vidalia), FireFox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon) and some custom configs that allows you to circumvent censorship that certain countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland impose onto their citizens.

Windows-only for now it seems. Looking forward to Linux and Mac OS versions. And it should be open source.

Light Table Text Editor is Now Open Source

Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we need a real work surface to code on, not just an editor and a project explorer. We need to be able to move things around, keep clutter down, and bring information to the foreground in the places we need it most.

Be Nice to Those Who Serve You

Yes.

Holder.js Client Side Image Placeholders

Found this in the latest version of Bootstrap which I’m using for a project at the day job.