Letters Remain

Category: technology

  • How to Internet: Reading

    One of the first problems you’re likely to run across as someone who’s now finding lots of interesting things on the internet is that you’re amassing more stuff you want to read than you’ve ever had before and it’s getting hard to track. If you’re like I was for about five years, this will likely…

  • How to Internet: Staying Current

    For the uninitiated, phrases like ā€œSubscribe to this Blogā€, ā€œRSS feedā€, and ā€œFeed Readerā€ are just so much noise. So hereā€™s a very short explanation: you use a “feed reader” to “subscribe” to a blog using its “RSS feed”. Make sense? To use a slightly more analog story, you can think of this whole thing…

  • How to Internet: Dividing Attention

    There’s a huge cornucopia of stuff on the internet, far more than even the most adept writer could hope to survey with even a full book on the topic. My goal is not to tell you what to pay attention to. Rather, I hope to give you some interesting places to start and some guideline…

  • How to Internet: Why?

    The first thing you might be wondering, is why? Why is he using “internet” as a verb? First of all, welcome grammar Nazi. But one of the first rules of the internet is that new words and usages are acceptable, even fashionable. If you can’t accept that, you probably shouldn’t really learn how to internet.…

  • How to Internet: Introduction

    When Lloyd asked me to fill in, I was a bit stumped. Because the content I post to Link BananaĀ isĀ similar to the stuff that Lloyd posts, and I already struggle to keep that full–I didn’t really want to put that stuff here. I also didn’t really want to ape his style, as I’d almost inevitably…

  • Login Is Not a Verb

    We do not signup, login or checkout when we buyĀ products online. We do not startup, shutdown or backup our computers.Ā The reason: these words, primarily used in computing contexts, are not verbs. These are just some of the “bad bad verbs” featured on a site dedicated toĀ “informing people about words that are not verbs, even though…

  • Art in 140 Characters

    Is it possible to encode and compress an image to such a degree that the raw data can fit in a single Twitter message (140 characters) that, when decoded again, is still recognisable? The answer to the questions is a resounding Yes, as confirmed by a coding challenge inspired by Mario Klingemann’s attempt to compress…

  • Child Development: Content, Not Medium, Matters (Why Sesame Street Beats Teletubbies)

    Debates have ragedĀ over the last couple of years on the effects (detrimental or not) of television, computer games (violent or not) and the Internet on a child’s cognitive development. Taking excerpts fromĀ a review article that providesĀ an excellent summary of theĀ topic, Jonah LehrerĀ makes it clear: for a child’s cognitiveĀ development, the medium doesn’t matter but the content…

  • Dark Patterns: Evil Design Patterns

    I’ve looked at design patterns many times before: persuasive patterns, anti-patterns and interaction patterns. The missing link: dark patterns. According to Harry Brignull–the designer who really started the discussion on this topic–dark patterns can succinctly be described as “user interfaces designed to trick people” or “dirty tricks designers use to make people do stuff”. Brignull…

  • Preventable Startup Mistakes (That Caused the Downfall of Seven Startups)

    Verifiable, Wesabe, Storytlr, TwitApps, Vox, Swivel and EventVue: All companies or products that no longer exist after preventable problems caused their downfall. 37signals collects their stories so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes, presenting a set of brief post-mortems on failed startups. The recurring issues seem to be: solving problems that the world isn’t…