onfocus

"It's easy to say all of our choices and all the aspects of our identity can be shared if we don't face any serious social or personal consequences for doing so." [via jessamyn]

"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.

"As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?" [via davenetics]

"...asking users to input their email address and password from a third-party site like GMail or Yahoo Mail is completely unacceptable." This is still so true, and I'm surprised sites like Facebook haven't been shamed into changing their "Find People" features.

More photography in unusual environments: "When it thinks it's falling, the hard drive heads park themselves to prevent damage upon impact. Unfortunately, in zero gravity, the camcorder always thinks it's falling." [via waxy]

The hazards of commercial photography: "The doorway was about 12 feet away from the unit, so although I would be in the magnetic field, it wasn't strong enough to pull the camera off of my tripod."

A single script for hosting your own single OpenID identity. Easy to set up with Apache. (IIS with ISAPI_rewrite, hard.) Supports the sreg extension.

Here's the "sreg stuff" for OpenID. Avatars aren't mentioned in the spec.

Avatar auto-discovery standard. Seems like a natural fit with OpenID. This should be added to the optional sreg stuff.

this site maintains a database of md5 hashes and the original text. This is a good starting point for decrypting these supposedly one-way hashes. If you're storing passwords as md5 hashes, don't forget the salt.

danah starts a discussion about virtual walled gardens, gated communities, whatever you want to call them. Be sure to check out the comments. The central question to me is: "who owns the walls?"

Finding an acceptable "default deny" method for weblog participation. The most exciting developments in the weblog world right now are happening around OpenID. [via waxy]

Photographs of every advertisement in Times Square. [via kottke]

nice description of OpenID for mortals. [via joshua]

I've been doing this for the past few days and it's already come in handy with only five entries. I'm going to try to make it a habit for the new year.