onfocus

Photographer, vanishing America.

Photographer, homes at night.

"Nothing focuses the mind of the reporter like being asked to specify what exactly they’d like to see done, and it’s much easier for a developer to scan a list with actual tasks right in the sentence construction." Good advice for personal to-do lists too.

Fun way to browse full-size images from Google Image Search results.

Nice tool for turning a word with unicode characters into the HTML equivalent.

adobe complimentary color tool

The history of Alfred E. Neuman (aka. Melvin Cowznofski). I always thought he originated with Mad Magazine.

These are fantastic. I love matchbox design.

"A Collection of iPhone Home Screens." I found this a while back but couldn't remember the name or how to get back to it because the keywords are saturated. My Google-fu was hot today, and I'm bookmarking for future reference.

This Java class is full of helpful functions for escaping and unescaping strings, and it can be used within ColdFusion (if you're into that).

"Cultivating a Late 19th-Century Style at Home." This seems to be an IRL manifestation of that thing.

Aha! This answers a question I didn't even know I had, but I've been unconsciously wondering. I thought this "look" came from the image-collecting Tumblr crowd. But apparently it's a thing IRL.

My son loved looking at and talking about these pictures of animals. You might need to skip past a couple with toddlers, but most are great for kids.

ooh, I'd like to try one of these for my working OSX drive.

Nice article about a couple good iPhone photography apps. [via merlin]

I love lists too, and I think they're going to be fantastic once everyone has them. I agree with Mat that lists will lead to fewer folks in my 'following' list, but 'listing' is lower impact so it might lead to more actual following.

Some samples of single-pane comics by H.T. Webster. Sadly, his collections appear to be out of print and there aren't any at nearby libraries.

Scan of the 1955 book with wonderful caricatures by Ronald Searle. [via peacay]

"So, this is why I say white supremacy is the only functional form of racism; the only kind that actually works."

"...you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not."

It's going to be that time of year again soon. These Thule chains look nice, but I'd rather see real people putting on chains in freezing weather in the demo, not spinning/floating CG.

Eight rules for writing a short story. [via merlin]

"The fundamental problems with the American health care system are all linked, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the vast majority of folks get insurance solely through their employers." Amen, and go Wyden! [via Kattullus]

"The problem is Twitter isn’t really open. For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use “Twitter” without an any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter’s centralized service." I'm not a fan of people pushing content to Twitter like it's an RSS reader for social reasons as well, but that's probably just me.

Oliver Sacks on Migraine Auras: "I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left -- dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors." I've had these and it's always amazing to read that others have experienced the same thing. [via Ironic Sans]

Helpful step-by-step guide to fixing deadlock problems in SQL Server 2005.

Modern take on classic propaganda posters: "Loose tweets sink fleets."

"This Friday, June 12, TV stations nationwide will cease broadcasting analog signals and switch to digital-only broadcasts...Starting Friday, I can no longer get TV on the radio." Didn't think of this, what a bummer. I've used this trick occasionally too, especially when the power goes out. [via MeFi]

"...new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace." That's Chris Messina paraphrasing Tim O'Reilly on Web 2.0 in general, applied to Facebook's new vanity URL feature specifically.

"I tried to alternate the charming children's covers with the creepy modernist covers, but I soon lost the ability to tell one type from the other." Excellent collection of early 20th century graphic design in Japan. Be sure to check out the previous post with book covers too.

Nice collection of YouTube videos featuring many Jazz legends at their peak in 1959. (My favorite is Horace Silver's Señor Blues.)

Nice post about commercial illustrator Frank Soltesz who drew cut-away illustrations in the 40's and 50's.

Cameron expands on the Economist article: "...while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core."

"...people who are members of online social networks are not so much 'networking' as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle'..."

SBJ's talk at SXSW about the future of news. "...in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it's important that we try to imagine how we'd like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years."

"Las Vegas casinos increasingly pay attention to their customers - their likes, dislikes, moods and patterns - in order to create an engaging experience." This was my favorite talk at Gel 2008.

"What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09."

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem."