From a Daring Fireball reader, I love this quote on how outdated the “floppy disk” metaphor used in pretty much every application for Save My Data is.

I help out in an elementary school, sometimes in the computer lab, and always get a laugh out of how there is absolutely no way to convey to a bunch of 8 year old kids which button they should click to save without physically pointing it out or describing the one next to it.

80 Photographies de Tokyo en HDR

A really beautiful collection of HDR photographs of Tokyo, one of my favourite cities. The vibrancy and life of the city really struck me while I was there; completely different in tone and texture to a European city. The HDR technique really seems to capture some of that feeling with it’s saturated colours and surreal look.

If you don’t want to look through all eighty, I made a gallery of my favourites.

TOC 2010: Arianna Huffington, ‘Publishing Is Dead; Long Live Publishing!’

Self-expression is the new entertainment. So, you know, we used to never question the fact that people could be sitting on a couch for seven hours watching bad TV. Right, and nobody said, “why are they doing that without anybody paying them?”

Clay Shirky also speaks about how passive consumption need not be the primary means of entertainment in Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, one of my favourite of his talks.

Seen Not Heard—How obscure security makes school suck

Though watching students at home through the webcams of their school-provided laptops may be mercifully rare—I mean, what the hell were those teachers thinking?—running a school like a hotbed of violence does no favours to the kids there.

Written by a recent graduate of Virginia’s public school system, this article describes the draconian measures on offer at his old school, which he says made the children feel more paranoid, not more safe.

Harmony — Procedural drawing tool

A quirky, wonderful drawing program. This is just my playing with the brushes, but even so I find the interplay of form just magical.

It’s written using JavaScript and Canvas, so you’ll need a non-IE browser to play along.