Great talk from Clay Shirky that tells some of the history behind SOPA and why it's dangerous. "They [media companies] want us all back on the couch: just consume."

"Once the market matures, the pirates go away. They always do. Legitimate markets work better than pirate markets."

"Glue is a simple command line tool to generate CSS sprites." Handy!

Good description of a handy tool that helps test mail server settings.

The annual state of the world.

Not only a fun site to browse, but a good example of taking group Flickr content elsewhere for a new experience.

"Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give."

"Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!" This is both absolutely true and heartbreaking.

Does what it says on the tin. !important

"Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there."

This puts the concentration of media into perspective. [via mlkshk]

Time often uses a different cover in the US.

More thoughts on the UC Davis pepper spray incident and police militarization in general from a Davis faculty member. [via megnut]

"If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines." Hard to believe this happened in Berkeley of all places. By Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate. [via sacca]

"I hope publishers will see that conscious sharing is better than passive sharing, and that content delivery is better than app delivery." Me too. Quantity of traffic beats quality in many people's minds so I'm not optimistic.

Nice demo. I'm not sure I buy it yet. You still have to download the entire font to use a single icon. If you're using a large number of icons it might make sense.

Hello Brightness shortcut icon! This is great.

"Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students." A UC Davis professor is asking the chancellor to resign after the OWS pepper spraying incident.

You're probably already subscribing, but if not: this is the best podcast on the Internet. Merlin Mann and John Roderick discuss things. Humorous things.

We've been using alpha and beta versions of jQuery Mobile at Fuelly for quite a while now. It's great to see it reach this milestone.

ThinkUp is a great way to archive/search your entire Twitter history and get some nice metrics in the process. Congrats on 1.0! (Don't miss Anil's post about ThinkUp and Software with Purpose.)

Nice collection of designs patterns and examples for mobile devices.

This is a nice alternate theme for Google Reader. Better type. Better separation and texture. The best part is that it tones down the in-your-face-red G+ share button.

"The global brain is still in its infancy. We can raise it to help us make a better world, or we can raise it to be selfish, unjust and short-term in its outlook." Fantastic article by Tim O'Reilly describing a more practical form of global consciousness.

"Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade." Bret Victor on imagining more tactile experiences with technology.

Draw something. Get a matching unicode character back. Fun!

Nice tutorial about using shading and texture in web design.

Nice little hack for faster dynamic HTML with JavaScript.

Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr fame has put together some scripts to mirror your Flickr photos at a private domain. It uses Flickr auth and maintains privacy settings in the process.

Brian Lam from Wirecutter on those soon-to-be ubiquitous holiday gadget guides. Nice axe!

"Holy Fucking Shit, these are good." ok, then. Bookmarking for future use.

Interesting look at how MailChimp helps their employees write for different types of communication with customers. Their blog is laid back and funny. Their tweets are focused and to the point.

Some good information here about using Google's iOS Authenticator app to implement 2-factor authentication at any website.

Vint Cerf on Google: "...we couldn't run our system if everything in it were encrypted because then we wouldn't know which ads to show you. So this is a system that was designed around a particular business model."

This library uses an API to get up-to-the-hour currency rates.

"Cities cannot 'come to the end of their patience' because they’re not people. Mayors and local officials can come to the end of their patience. So can cops. But cities?" Analyzing and comparing the coverage of Occupy Oakland violence with Kent State coverage. [via bluishorange]

It's not a great idea, but if you want to write a regular expression to define a numeric range, this tool makes it easier than doing it by hand.

"And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more." Linked everywhere for good reason--this is an excellent take on the occupy wall street movement.

Chart: the top 1 percent has been doing ok for themselves for the past few years.

Hollywood should not control DNS. I can't believe I even had to write that sentence.

Great interview with Tom Waits at the Washoe House. He laments digitization: "They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone."