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Adactio Go to the source

So, remember when I posted all those episodes of Simon Singh’s Five Numbers radio series on Pownce so that they’d have permanent URLs? Yeah, well, so much for that . Fortunately Brian had saved all the MP3s. I’ve posted them on S3 and huffduffed them all. I can be fairly confident that Huffduffer won’t be going the way of Pownce, Magnolia, Geocities, and so many more . Anyway, if you want to listen to the fifteen episodes of the three radio series’ on mathematics, you can subscribe to the podcast at http://huffduffer.com/adactio/tags/five+numbers/rss . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Beer o’clock in Brighton begins shortly after work ends on a Friday evening. That’s when the geeks of Brighton unshackle themselves from their keyboards and monitors to congregate in a pub. If the weather is good, it’ll be a sunny pub . Last friday the Clearlefties descended on The Eagle where we were joined by Ribotians and others. Glenn showed up and we proceeded to geek out on our usual favourite topics; microformats and data portability. He had spent the day hacking on a Firefox plug-in. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

The newest episode of Radiolab has the highlights from one of their occasional live events. This one revolves around the deliberately contentious premise of television vs. radio. AV Smackdown … The Podcast on Huffduffer Seeing as Huffduffer is all about audio rather than video, you can probably guess that I’ve got a soft spot for radio. Not that I have anything against the moving image; it’s just that television, film and video demand more from your senses. Lend me your ears! and your eyes… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

After I started rewarding machine tagging on Huffduffer with API calls to Amazon and Last.fm, people started using them quite a bit. But when it came to displaying tag clouds, I wasn’t treating machine tags any differently to other tags. Everything was being displayed in one big cloud . I decided it would be good to separate out machine tags and display them after displaying “regular” tags. That started me thinking about how best to display machine tags. One of the best machine tag visualisations I’ve seen so far is Paul Mison ’s Flickr machine tag browser , somewhat like the list view in OS X’s Finder… Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

Back in January I was part of a double bill with Jon Tan , entitled Skillswap goes typographic . It went down really well so I thought I’d better tie it all together here. My talk was on “Facing up to Fonts” the blurb for which went as follows: Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up. Richard will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein. The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited step in the right direction… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I just got back from a geek event down the street: £5 App . I had fun talking about Huffduffer . You can download the slides or see them on Slideshare . I was all set to record the presentation using Audio Hijack but, while I remembered to click “hijack”, I stupidly forgot to press “record.” Sorry. The evening finished with a call for more entries to the 5K App competition. To spur us on, we were shown some pretty amazing lightweight demos. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

While I was in Nashville for the Voices That Matter conference , I sat down for an enjoyable little chat with Nikki McDonald. It began with a discussion of my uncanny resemblance to Severus Snape before moving on to more webby matters. I also had a great three-way chat with Christopher Schmitt and Steve Krug . Christopher has posted up a transcript of the conversation If you’re not completely sick of hearing me natter on and you are in Brighton on Tuesday evening , come along to £5 App where I’ll be babbling about Huffduffer . I know it clashes with the Flash Brighton screening of Sita Sings the Blues but you can watch that online anytime, right? Tagged with video speaking interview huffduffer £5app sussexdigital … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

While I was in Nashville for the Voices That Matter conference , I sat down for an enjoyable little chat with Nikki McDonald. It began with a discussion of my uncanny resemblance to Severus Snape before moving on to more webby matters. I also had a great three-way chat with Christopher Schmitt and Steve Krug . Christopher has posted up a transcript of the conversation If you’re not completely sick of hearing me natter on and you are in Brighton on Tuesday evening , come along to £5 App where I’ll be babbling about Huffduffer . I know it clashes with the Flash Brighton screening of Sita Sings the Blues but you can watch that online anytime, right? … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

After I wrote about the hoops I had to jump through to get Amazon’s API to output JSON (via XSLT ), Tom detailed a way of avoiding JSON by using XML-RPC . That’s very kind of him but the truth is that: I like dealing with JSON and the XSL transformation is done by Amazon, not me; that wouldn’t be the case if I used XML-RPC. Anyway, having successfully created a Huffduffer - Amazon bridge using machine tags , I thought I’d do a little more hacking. Instead of restricting the mashup love to Amazon, I figured that Last.fm would be the perfect place to pull in information for anything tagged with the music namespace. Last.fm has quite a full-featured API and yes, it can output JSON… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

After I wrote about the hoops I had to jump through to get Amazon’s API to output JSON (via XSLT ), Tom detailed a way of avoiding JSON by using XML-RPC . That’s very kind of him but the truth is that: I like dealing with JSON and the XSL transformation is done by Amazon, not me; that wouldn’t be the case if I used XML-RPC. Anyway, having successfully created a Huffduffer - Amazon bridge using machine tags , I thought I’d do a little more hacking. Instead of restricting the mashup love to Amazon, I figured that Last.fm would be the perfect place to pull in information for anything tagged with the music namespace. Last.fm has quite a full-featured API and yes, it can output JSON. To start with, I’m using the artist.getInfo method for anything tagged with music:artist=….. Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Over the weekend I was looking at the latest additions to Huffduffer . I noticed that Xavier Roy was using machine tags to tag a reading by Richard Dawkins . What an excellent idea! I set aside a little time to do a little hacking with Amazon’s API . Now you can tag stuff on Huffduffer with machine tags like book:author=steven johnson , book:title=the invention of air or music:artist=my morning jacket . Other namespaces are film and movie . Anything matching that pattern will trigger a search on Amazon and display a list of results. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I’m back in Ireland for a little while. ‘Tis the season for merrymaking, munching mince pies, imbibing wine and—if you’re a geek—fiddling with code. That’s what I’ve been doing, sitting by the fire with my Macbook on my lap, hacking on Huffduffer . I’ve been messing around with Google’s Chart API . I thought it would be nice to have some discreet little sparklines on profile pages… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

The Last.fm hack day took place in London yesterday . Much nerdy fun was had by all and some very cool hacks were produced. Nigel made a neat USB-powered arduino-driven ambient signifier à la availibot that lights up when one of your friends is listening to music. Matt made Songcolours which takes your recently listened-to music, passes the songs through LyricWiki , extracts words that are colours , passes them through the Google chart API and generates a sentence of cut up lyrics ( Hannah’s was the best : love drunk home fuck good night ). The winning hack, Staff Wars, is a Last.fm-powered quiz that allows people to battle for control of the office stereo—something that could prove very useful at Clearleft . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Huffduffer is written in HTML5 . For the most part, this is no different to writing in any other flavour of HTML, just with a simpler DOCTYPE . For the time being, I’m not using any of the new structural elements like section , article or footer . I am, however, making use of the audio element. Browsers that don’t understand this element—that would be most of them—aren’t left with nothing. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

It seems that quite a few people like the signup form on Huffduffer . This pleases me. I share Luke W. ’s rallying cry that Sign up forms must die! While I wasn’t able to kill off the signup form on Huffduffer entirely, I was at least able to make it human-friendly. Ideally what I’d like to do is build a signup form that has one text field— What’s your URL? —and use that single piece of information to derive login credentials (OpenID), identity (hCard) and relationships (XFN)… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I’ve just returned from delivering a day of DOM Scripting training in Manchester. The workshop went well but, given the significant distance between Brighton and Manchester, the journey there and back took quite a while. I passed the time on the train doing a little bit of hacking, all the while listening to my Huffduffer podcast which I had loaded up with stuff I thought I might be interesting. Nothing makes a train journey go faster than stimulating the mind with some audio nourishment. I’m very happy to report that the quality of stuff being huffduffed is extraordinarily high. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Back in April, I wrote: I’ve been thinking about maybe putting together a podcast — just an RSS feed — that points to interesting inspirational talks, sort of like Jon’s Found Sounds podcasts but for spoken word instead of music. Well, as soon as I started trying to do that I discovered that, contrary to what Tim Bray says , creating an RSS feed by hand is a pain in the ass. So I decided that I would automate the task of creating an RSS feed complete with enclosures . Then I realised that if this was going to be useful to me, it might well be useful to other people looking to create podcasts of found sounds. So I made a website: Huffduffer The term Huff-Duff derives from the abbreviation HF/DF. It refers to a technique, widely employed during World War II, to triangulate the position of radio transmissions. … Read the rest here