Matt made this lovely website for spelunking and hyperlinking through the thousand episodes of Radio 4’s excellent In Our Time programme.
He’s also written a little bit about how he made it using some AI (artificial insemination) for the categorisation code.
James made a radio programme about “the cloud”:
It’s the central metaphor of the internet - ethereal and benign, a fluffy icon on screens and smartphones, the digital cloud has become so naturalised in our everyday life we look right through it. But clouds can also obscure and conceal – what is it hiding? Author and technologist James Bridle navigates the history and politics of the cloud, explores the power of its metaphor and guides us back down to earth.
The radioactive properties of React.
It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:
The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the
<input>tag itself. This means we can keep and style an<input>and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra<div>or<span>, to pull off a custom design.
The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:
Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to
@supports.
James has a new four part series on Radio 4. Episodes will be available for huffduffing shortly after broadcast.
New Ways of Seeing considers the impact of digital technologies on the way we see, understand, and interact with the world. Building on John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing from 1972, the show explores network infrastructures, digital images, systemic bias, education and the environment, in conversation with a number of contemporary art practitioners.
Sara shows a few different approaches to building accessible toggle switches:
Always, always start thinking about the markup and accessibility when building components, regardless of how small or simple they seem.
Accessible star ratings (progressively enhanced from radio buttons) with lots of animation options. The code is on Github.
An absolutely fantastic talk (as always) from Maciej, this time looking at the history of radio and its parallels with the internet (something that Tom Standage touched on his book, Writing On The Wall). It starts as a hobbyist, fun medium. Then it gets regulated. Then it gets used to reinforce existing power structures.
It is hard to accept that good people, working on technology that benefits so many, with nothing but good intentions, could end up building a powerful tool for the wicked.
A lovely profile of the lovely In Our Time.
In part because “In Our Time” is unconnected to things that are coming out, things happening right this minute, things being promoted, it feels aligned with the eternal rather than the temporal, and is therefore escapist without being junk.
Anyone remember the site After Our Time?
Stylish and accessible checkboxes and radio buttons accompanied by an explanation of the CSS involved.
No images were harmed in the making of these form controls.
Here’s a CSS file that will give you a bit more control over styling some form elements. The thinking behind the CSS for each element is explained nice and clearly.
We examine the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) originate from the activity of extragalactic civilizations. Our analysis shows that beams used for powering large light sails could yield parameters that are consistent with FRBs.
I’m guessing Paul Gilster may have thoughts on this.
A marvellous story of early twentieth century espionage over the airwaves.
In one proposal, hidden instructions were interspersed within regular, ordinary-looking messages by slightly lengthening the spaces between dots and dashes.
One might think sending messages to other stars would be a massive, expensive job. No. It isn’t. The Cosmic Call was essentially a crowdfunded hobby project.
This is absolutely fascinating—listen live to radio stations all over the world by rotating our planet in your browser.
There’s something really addictive about eavesdropping on the world’s airwaves like this.
I always loved the way that Gov.uk styled their radio buttns and checkboxes with nice big visible labels, but it turns out that users never used the label area. And because it’s still so frickin’ hard to style native form elements, custom controls with generated content is the only way to go if you want nice big hit areas.
We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis.
This is rather lovely: explore a network of nodes, each of which contains the audio of a child describing a dream.
Inspired by the concept of an 8th continent to which all children belong, RadioEight is an interactive soundscape dedicated to the hidden world of dreams.
Ah, how I wish that this were published at a long-lived URL:
The one part of the web that I believe is truly genius, and that keeps standing the test of time, is the URI. The Web gave us a way to point to anything, forever. Everything else about the web has changed and grown to encyclopedic lengths, but URIs have been killing it for decades.
And yet the numbers show we’re hell-bent on screwing all that up with link-shorteners, moving URIs without redirection, and so forth. As always happens in technology we’ve taken a simple idea and found expedient ways to add fragility and complexity to it.
We have made a radio reconnaissance of the star KIC 8462852 whose unusual light curves might possibly be due to planet-scale technology of an extraterrestrial civilization.
Nothing to report yet.