onfocus

Hey, nice idea: public unit tests.

Background bird chirping in a YouTube video is mistaken for content under copyright. Highlights of a broken system ensue.

Horrible one-star Amazon reviews. [via MetaFilter]

"The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation."

Obama knows basketball. Nice to see a more casual side of Obama.

Jason Fried on being open to new ideas: "So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it."

"I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year." Great idea, a physical copy of your Pinboard/Delicious links.

"After using all the UI richness available for such a long time to make beautiful and differentiated products, app designers have realized that the user's work, not their own, is the star of the show."

I'm talking weblogs with a few other old fogey edge cases.

Interesting method for storing scroll position in window.name so it can be set via the back button.

lia put together this record of a Twitter conversation about the current state of Flickr and photo-sharing in general. Depressing: "...nobody cares about lasting value anymore. it's all about what's going on right this second."

Sharing music one track at a time. This is a fun site.

This app is a good replacement for the cumbersome iTunes podcast manager. It downloads podcasts directly, no syncing required.

Handy tool for cleaning up data in a CSV file or spreadsheet. Tasks like removing columns are a bit tedious, but GREL is an interesting way to transform data.

A list of companies that have become successful without VC funding.

Excellent thoughts on community moderation. "This is why community moderators have real power; they need that power to intervene, educate, and refocus the community's exuberance on more substantive content. People will fight you almost literally to the death over their right to be entertained, and to entertain others."

Hilarious gallery of terrifying horse mask pictures contributed by Amazon users. [via mlkshk]

Handy query to get a quick inventory of a database.

Everyday Carry. Pictures of what people carry in their pockets. [via torrez]

I agree that cutesy error messages are irritating. I'd rather see a more serious "we're on it" notice.

Great collection of miscellaneous tech tips. I have a bunch of these in a text file too. I should make them public like this.