Michel Vuijlsteke's weblog

FT Alphaville » George Clooney roils the Bitcoin market
Bitcoin – the virtual currency — has had a tough time of it lately. Having recently gained some mainstream prominence and become the world’s fastest appreciating currency, Bitcoin has also had to contend with political scrutiny, a Black Friday and now — a hacker-induced flash crash, of sorts.

10 Myths About Introverts || CarlKingCreative.com || Los Angeles, CA
Who'd a thunk? "It can be terribly destructive for an Introvert to deny themselves in order to get along in an Extrovert-Dominant World. Like other minorities, Introverts can end up hating themselves and others because of the differences. If you think you are an Introvert, I recommend you research the topic and seek out other Introverts to compare notes. The burden is not entirely on Introverts to try and become "normal." Extroverts need to recognize and respect us, and we also need to respect ourselves. "

EFF and Bitcoin | Electronic Frontier Foundation
…and it all came crashing down: "For several months, EFF has been following the movement around Bitcoin, an electronic payment system that touts itself as "the first decentralized digital currency." We helped inform our members about this unique project through our blog and we experimented with accepting Bitcoin donations for several months in an account that was started by others.

However, we’ve recently removed the Bitcoin donation option from the Other Ways to Help page on the EFF website, and we have decided to not accept Bitcoins. "

What is your biggest secret you keep from everyone?
Wow. "I may be a pedophile but I am not a monster. I am a human being goddammit and I am fully aware of my situation and how I am doomed to never know how my greatest fantasy, my greatest desire would feel when fulfilled."

IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com: Well, This Is Disappointing
I don't know, but my penis just put his hands on his head and walked around the room. Then he sat down to stare out the window while sipping his coffee. Because there's so many questions, my friends. So many questions.

Display’s New Kingpin: Facebook’s No. 1 | Digital – Advertising Age
Facebook doesn't really have to try to become the biggest player in digital media; it simply is.

Behold: Facebook’s Secret Photo Sharing App
The app seems to be a combination of Instagram, Color, Path, and even Path’s new side project, With. The last two are particularly interesting since those two projects are the work of Dave Morin, the former lead of Facebook’s Platform team. And while Path is tied in closely now with Facebook integration, With went with Twitter. Also worth noting is that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was once approached by Mark Zuckerberg about working at Facebook way back in 2004, after they caught wind of his first take on a photo sharing service. Systrom declined the invitation, and now Zuckerberg is a Instagram user (which also connects to Facebook).

The 100 greatest non-fiction books | Books | guardian.co.uk
After keen debate at the Guardian's books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date. See how closely it matches yours and tell us what we've missed

Hoban Cards
Fucking hipsters. Stukken van mensen vragen voor kaartjes die er gewoon hip uitzien omdat ze een mooi filmpje hebben gemaakt met een DSLR, en omdat het een oude drukpers is en dik papier. Enfin bon, als ze de mensen zo zot kunnen krijgen…

Small Group Of People Dominate Some Internet Discussions
An analysis of political and philosophical newsgroups found that half of all replies were directed at just two percent of thread initiators. In related news, bear shits in wood.

Why did Apple choose Twitter over Facebook?
Twitter will be deeply integrated into iOS 5, bit not Facebook. Why? There are surprisingly many answers. Among them: Apple and Facebook have contradictory priorities for customer content, and they are increasingly app platform competitors.

Game, Set, iMatch
Notice how Facebook is missing from these and many other words we’re hearing these days.

Facebook Sees Big Traffic Drops in US and Canada as It Nears 700 Million Users Worldwide
Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year. Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million

What Happens When A Canon Shooter Uses A Nikon
10 year Canon shooter tries the Nikon system for the first time at a wedding.

Outrageous and Courageous: The Myth and Legend of Shecky Greene
"Frank Sinatra saved my life once. He said, "Okay, boys. That's enough." – Shecky Greene

internet k-hole
Internet K-Hole is an image blog consisting mostly of anonymous snapshots and Polaroids from the 1970s through the 1990s presented at random without description or context that go on for ever and ever and ever. (Some images NSFW.)

"Literally Unbelievable"
Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook

YouTube – Black Sabbath – War Pigs (Live in Paris 1970)
The mighty Sabbath unleashing War Pigs.

Contenu de notre intervention sur Facebook « JournalisteWeb.be
Le Café Numérique avait invité Marina Aubert et deux Community Managers, Florence Manente et Marie Van Humbeeck, à intervenir ensemble sur le thème « Réussir sa page Facebook ». Voici une reprise détaillée de l’intervention.

xkcd wikipedia steps to philosophy
(Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy")

4.10.7.2 Common input element attributes — HTML Standard
The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.

ASCII by Jason Scott / FaceFacts
Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship.

Changes to Big Picture comments – The Big Picture – Boston.com
As you may have noticed, we switched commenting platforms this weekend. All comments on the Big Picture are now powered by Facebook.

Facebook Comments Epitomizes Everything I Hate About Facebook
It’s a piece of crap, but it’s just barely good enough and easy enough that it’s not worth wrestling with alternatives. Facebook Comments is basically Facebook writ small: while it’s maddeningly mediocre lowest-common-denominator crap, it’s not quite bad enough not to use.

NYT vs HuffPo, cont. | Felix Salmon | Analysis
The big picture here is that the NYT is obviously feeling very threatened by the Huffington Post, and is reacting by lashing out blindly in a fit of name-calling, rather than actually trying to learn from what the HuffPo does well.

Audio Demos – Paris Smaragdis
Audio editors are pretty lousy, you can’t use a graphical interface to do anything useful when editing sound mixtures. In this demo we present an audio-driven interface which allows a user to vocalize the sound they want to select and an automatic process matches that input to the most appropriate sound. Once the selection is done then we can manipulate sounds independently and then throw them back in the mix.

Lost Garden: GDC 2011: The Game of Platform Power
In our industry, history repeats itself again and again, but each new generation of developers often fails to learn past lessons.  Platforms in particular have a well established life cycle and their relationship with a developer changes as they mature.    Yet, I regularly see developers completely caught off guards as their new favorite platform suddenly stops being their friend and starts treating them as a harvestable resource.  Don't be surprised.  This is the way of things and it has happened dozens of times in the past.My small hope is that by naming and illuminating some of the common phases and practices of platforms, developers will be able to better deal with the inevitable shifts.  I would like nothing better than smart game developers to divorce their businesses from the platform life cycle and build direct relationships with long lasting communities of passionate gamers.

CSS3 linear gradients
CSS3 comes to the rescue with the CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3: part of this module defines CSS gradients, which allow us to create any gradients we want using only CSS. In this article I will explore how to use linear and repeated linear gradients, which are supported across Opera 11.10+, Firefox 3.6+, Safari 5.03+ and Chrome 7+.

My talk from the LIFT conference, Geneva, February 2011 | Dangerous Precedent
with the internet the concept of the nation-state as something bounded by distance is beginning to die. We now have many nations within each other, bounded not by distance, but by culture and values

Ik houd de boeken die ik lees bij op Facebook, maar iRead aldaar ligt al een tijd plat op zijn gat, en ik ben al mijn reviews kwijtgeraakt (awoert!).

Ik las vanmiddag bij Lilith over Goodreads, en met pijn in het hart, want ik ben een groot fan van Librarything maar het doet (voor mij) niet wat ik dacht dat het zou beloven te doen, heb ik mezelf een account aangemaakt bij die Goodreads.

Mijn pagina staat alhier, en kijk: nog een plaats om vriendjes te maken! Ik heb er al drie: een twee drie!

Wat zeg ik, van de maand? Van het jaar, tot nog toe!

Ik was vanmorgen in Facebook aan het rommelen (voor het werk! voor het werk! om sociale dinges te tonen!), en zowat tegelijkertijd kreeg ik een mail die me wees op wat ik net ook gezien had:

Wahey! Wee! Joechei!