onfocus

"Sears used to sell houses by mail." Someone please put old catalog pictures side by side with modern pictures of those houses still in use.

"From now on, when I want to visit Facebook, I’ll be using the private browser setting in whatever browser I’m using." This is my new strategy too. What a hassle.

Oh boo! Google is going to change the name of Blogger to "Google Blogs". Sounds pretty bland to me, but I'm biased for obvious reasons.

Derek's original design for Blogger. I remember the code name: Blue Note. It'll be a shame to lose that personality, but corporations gonna corporate.

Handy chart that shows which browsers support various HTML5 form features.

I enjoyed this episode by Jesse, Adam, and the gang. I never really need to wear a suit, but it's amazing to the see the level of detail that can go into it.

This picture still looks like something out the future.

Disappointing exchange, and a textbook example of how not to respond to critics online. Like Derek I'm a huge fan of On the Media so, ugh.

The Internet Archive is now archiving physical books. "Brewster noticed that Google and Amazon and other countries scanning books would cut non-rare books open to scan them, or toss them out after scanning. He felt this destruction was dangerous for the culture."

"...Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship." Excellent rant about the ephemeral nature of Facebook (among other things).

This solid list of Sinatra slang is gasville. (Am I doing that right?)

Kids sing The Smiths.

"I thought I would die, severed from the tweetosphere, but I didn’t."

"The last thing fans of these programmes want is to be confronted with the cruel reality of what life was like in late Victorian and Edwardian England..."

"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant." heh, Umberto Eco weighed in on the Mac vs. PC war in 1994 by comparing the organization of operating systems with the organization of religions.

"The green children of Woolpit reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century..." [via Best of Wikipedia]

Hooray, Alan Taylor's new photography / journalism weblog is live!

Nostalgia-drenched photorealist still life paintings.

Nice browser extension that embeds site previews on Twitter. (It works better than that sounds.)

"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"

Fantastic engravings from an 18th century book on religious practice across the world.

Nice description of the terrifying uniform plague doctors wore in the Middle Ages.

"As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities." Great hypothesis. Hard in practice.

Paintings that capture alchemists, messy labs and all.

"It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish."