Friday Round-Up #002
A bit of a mixed bag this week, from movie news to a flashy bit of data-handling by Foursquare. There’s been so many interesting links popping up over the last week or so that I thought I best keep it brief, otherwise I’d go totally overboard!
- Robert Downey Jr. Returning as Tony – This is today’s big headline for me. I loved the Avengers movie and if the franchise lost Downey Jr. then chances are they’d lose the rest as well. It’s a two-film deal, one of which will be Avengers 2. The other hasn’t been announced, but I’d put money on it being Avengers 3 rather than Iron Man 4; I doubt we’ll seen RDJ in another Iron Man film.
- How Ryan Tomayko explained REST to his wife
- Surrender Your Say – I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen about this smart social media campaign. Experience Tourette Syndrome via Twitter by allowing this site to Tweet on your behalf – with no control over when or what it makes you say.
- Test your .htaccess file easily – Use media queries and image tags within SVG for a fantastic way to handle images responsively. This came up just as I was contemplating the way I use images on my own site.
- Foursquare Time Machine – Great visualisation of everywhere you’ve checked in, and an insight into where you’ll go in the future. Time Machine looks fantastic and makes some clever (and fairly accurate, in my case) assumptions based on your behaviour. Brilliant use of information.
- Billion-pixel view from the Curiosity Rover on Mars – These unbelievable views of Mars, taken by the plucky Curiosity Rover, give a real sense of Mars as a place, as-in somewhere you could actually stand and walk around and pick things up. No longer an abstract concept, but a real place. Stunning.
- Introducting the Leap Motion – Hot damn, this looks good. From an ergonomic point of view, I can’t imagine this being very practical for use on your everyday computer. Killer arm-ache in 5 minutes, as with all touchscreens. But this technology applied to other uses would be fantastic. Equipment in hospitals, classrooms, even vending machines. Welcome to Star Trek.