Unordered List #1

  • I recently got back from a 2 week holiday, and the accompanying period of self-reflection that always comes when I a) have a bit of time off work, b) get some time away from an internet connection and c) end up with some time to think instead of "read". 1
  • In an attempt to bring my drafts:posts ratio into a balance that feels a bit more like I'm getting something productive done, this is a new format that I'm playing with. The idea is pretty simple - instead of a big post, its an unordered list of 'noteworthy things'. The ones that I get past 'noteworthy' to 'actual written notes' will get turned into links to the actual 'notes'.1
  • Websites are as big as Doom. I know that it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, that web apps, media files optimised for retina displays and video are all pushing the average waaay up, but still…
  • How to get the Prince love symbol, if you should want to drop it into a piece of text. (I wonder how many website owners are trying to figure out how to turn this into an embedded font for their sites and adding to the kind of load the previous article is talking about…)
  • The million dollar answer to the question about what was the important information on the San Bernadino iPhone - nothing of much use. So - money well spent then. (I wonder how much Apple spent on legal and PR consultancy to prepare for the court case that never happened.)
  • Lego Milennium Falcon Coffee Table. Awesome…
    • The old1 UCS1 Millennium Falcon Lego set is now highly collectible, and is now changing hands for sums well into 3 figures.
    • If you're going to have a set like that, then you probably want to a) let people see it, b) keep it very safe, and c) keep the dust off it.
    • If you can come up with a better way of doing that (or a better coffee table design), I'd love to see it.
      I'm pretty seriously tempted to try to do something similar…
  • Everything the tech world says about marketing is wrong. If you work in "media", then I think you should really know all of this. (I'm not so sure that I would say that everyone I know in media would.)
  • This is an interesting story about a man who set up a motel purely so that he could spy on the guests in what was justified as a kind of sociological experiment. It might have been because I was staying in a motel at the time I was reading it, but I thought it was a powerful story.
  • This video is a much more fun one; 'the most satisfying video in the world'. (I think the knife ones are my favourite parts.)
  • M.G. Siegler has noticed that his CDs are probably not reflective of the value they once had. Something I've been occasionally reflecting on. (Update: I still tend to buy CDs first, and still haven't made my mind up about whether my DVD collection is going to go digital, or if I'm going to migrate over to Netflix/Amazon Prime, or I'm going to start building up a Blu-Ray library.)
  • Apparently, a CD that cost £15 in 1996 would cost the equivalent of £26 today. Or to put it another way, two and a half months of access to your favourite subscription music service.
  • Photo-realistic renderings of people's poor attempts to draw bicycles are strangely fascinating


  1. I use the scare quotes because the stuff that I read in in-between moments on my phone are so far removed from the kind of reading that I do when I have a book or magazine in my hand that I wish there was a different verb to describe it. "Gaze"? "Graze"? ↩




  2. Disclaimer: Maybe. ↩




  3. Yes, you can still get a Lego Millennium Falcon, but the old one was much bigger, and so much cooler that the £100+ to get the 'baby toy' version feels like enough of a compromise that I would probably feel bad buying it for myself. ↩




  4. Ultimate Collector Series ↩



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Written by Scott Thompson On In