stuffin.space is a real-time 3D map of all the crap floating in circles around planet Earth, much of it put there by us.
Read the restThe website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.
About the author
My name is James Yoder; I'm an alumnus of FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 624 and an incoming Electrical and Computer Engineering freshman at the University of Texas at Austin.
Read the restIt uses Full-Text RSS and PDF Newspaper to extract the article's content and produce a clean HTML copy. It then relies on Headless Chromium to generate the PDF. To avoid situations where an article will use an extra printed page for a small overrun, Simple Print produces 3 PDFs with slighly varying font sizes and keeps the copy with the fewest pages and largest font size.
Bethany Heck's Font Review Journal is dedicated to criticism of fonts, and itself very handsomely typeset by Phil Moody. The latest in-depth review is of Lucas Sharp's Ogg.
Read the restMy goal isn’t to prescribe a number score or valuation on a typeface — rather, I want to celebrate, analyze, demystify and inform designers who are looking to improve their typographic choices. I won’t be reviewing any fonts here that I don’t personally use and see value in. Designing a typeface is a herculean effort that takes hundreds of hours and often years of time to refine and complete. My aim is to show appreciation for these works of art through thoughtful discourse, aesthetic studies and historical context. There is often a gulf in the communication between the type design community and the designers who put their work to use, and I hope this site serves as a sort of bridge to bring the two practices to a closer understanding of each other.
From the front page alone:
• Over 80% of Maine Fathers’ Affection Is Directed at Their Wood Piles • Heroic Man Saved Dying Pit Party by Cranking Some AC/DC • This Innovative Chef Took the Traditional Maine Baked Bean Supper and Made it Cost $85 • Expert Panel Concludes Maine Didn’t Used to Be Like This.
Read the restAugusta — Experts presented their conclusion to a years-long study of how Maine is now, compared to how it once was, and the results are alarming.
“Weren’t like this back in the ’70s,” lead researched Brian Richards said in a prepared statement.
“Didn’t used to be like this at all. Terrible now. Don’t even hardly recognize it,” Richards said. Richards grew up in Thomaston, but has since moved north.
“Time was, if you had a few beers and a cop pulled you over, he’d just follow you to make sure you got home alright,” he said.
Upload the text of a nondisclosure agreement to NDA Lynn, and it will warn you if it spots common traps used to harm signatories.
How can a robot review an NDA?
As it turns out, NDAs are in essence very limited in their scope: certain information is to be exchanged for a given business purpose, and this information is to be kept confidential for a certain period. This limited scope makes them well-suited to automated analysis. There are after all only so many ways to say that information must be kept confidential and that leaks shall be judged by a court in California. Hence: NDA Lynn, an automated legal analysis employing support vector networks and other machine learning technology to answer that simple business question: “Can I sign that NDA?”
It's fascinating leverage of contracts' general dependence on rigid, courts-tested language, and a tool for spotting bad ones out of the gate. But I wouldn't use it to validate NDAs as good. Always get competent advice when money and consequences are on the line. (NDA Lynn is, of course, a lead generator for a human lawyer who specializes in the IT field.) Read the rest
The EarthWindMap not only animates our homeworld's air currents, but you can drag, zoom and warp the view to create unique projections of its surface.
Readspike is a simple news aggregator: just the headlines, with no social networking or other bullshit getting in the way. It's by Blackspike, a British design agency.
The best yet in its class, beautiful and simple, with a good taste in sources. But I find something about it hard to read. It might be too beautiful, if you see what I mean? News aggregation is a complex design problem. Multiple columns, in particular, serve a different god.
People often say this sort of site is like RSS without all the things that make RSS useful, but I think it's like RSS without all the things that make RSS painful. The next step here, though, would surely be the ability to pick your sources. Read the rest
A classic favorite of Boing Boing editors, the Useless Machine has been implemented as a website for your button-pressing pleasure. Read the rest
When long-lived websites close down, they often give little notice, sending archivists scrambling to rescue its work for posterity. About.com, the venerable topic-mining hive abruptly put to death, seems to be a counter-example: a faceless mountain of bland, undifferentiated, half-plagiarized content that no-one seems sad to see vanish. Its own CEO—who once spoke contemptuously of it before being convinced to take the job—has a plan to make something new and interesting out of the remains.
"I got a phone call from Joey Levin, who is the CEO of IAC. He asked, 'What do you think of About.com?'" Vogel said during a recent interview with Business Insider. "My answer — in perfect arrogance — was 'I don't.' Who thinks of About.com? Nobody."
Levin persuaded him to come in for a job interview anyway, and Vogel walked out convinced he could help turn the company around. Now he is CEO of About.com, and to save it he's trying something that sounds crazy.
He’s shutting down the entire website in early May. In its place, he's launching a half-dozen new sites.
"This is either going to work and be a great success or we're going to crash the plane as we're flying it and this is going to be a horrible failure," Vogel says he told IAC.
About.com was one of the earliest big web successes to cash out: to Prime Media in 2000 for $690m, then to the New York Times in 2005 for $410m, IAC in 2012 for $300m, and now to the deep void—but also the hope that the staff and infrastructure can be used to make something better. Read the rest
The good news is it is funny. The bad news is it is a GoDaddy ad. Read the rest
Check out txt.fyi, a toy "publishing platform" I made. I put that phrase in quotes because it's designed to be as lightweight as possible: you type in text and hit publish, and your work is live on the internet. From the "about" page:
Read the restThis is the dumbest publishing platform on the web. ... There's no tracking, ad-tech, webfonts, analytics, javascript, cookies, databases, user accounts, comments, friending, likes, follower counts or other quantifiers of social capital. The only practical way for anyone to find out about a posting is if the author links to it elsewhere.
But it is legible, no-nonsense static hypertext, good for short stories, not-short-enough tweets and adventures and all your numbers station or internet dead drop needs. Here you can scream into the void and know the form of your voice is out there forever.
Search engines are instructed not to index posts and I'll do my best to make sure this isn't used as a tool by spammers or other abusers. Nonetheless, posting will be turned off if anything bad grows out of it.
Use Dumbdown to format posts: #header, **bold**, *italic*, `code`, quote, and hyperlinks in the format [link](http://example.com). Try !hacker and !professor and !timestamp too. ...
Long live the independent web!
Twitter's wonderful, but it's also horrible a lot of the time &endash; especially for the people using it. And we all complain about it, too! Anil Dash weaves the obvious and not-so-obvious threads of criticism into a billion dollar gift for Twitter. It comes down to these five key points: Read the rest
