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Web fonts – Jonathan Hoefler

An excellent 26-minute talk by Jonathan Hoefler of the Hoefler & Frere-Jones about how they think about designing typefaces and webfonts in particular. Today, as webfonts are buoyed by a wave of early-adopter enthusiasm, they’re marred by a similar unevenness in quality, and it’s not just a matter of browsers and rasterizers, or the eternal shortage of good fonts and preponderance of bad ones. There are compelling questions about what it means to be fitted to the technology, how foundries can offer designers an expressive medium (and readers a rich one), and what it means for typography to be visually, Read more

Art Website Sales Contract – Rafaël Rozendaal

Art Website Sales Contract is a document that I use to sell my websites. I think in moving images, and I don’t think moving images are objects. I place these moving images in domain names. Each URL is the title and the location of each art piece. These websites are public, their ownership is exclusive. Domain names are one of the internet’s few scarcities. They are unique, they can’t be forged or copied. This contract explains the rights and duties of the artist and the collector, to make sure the work remains intact as long as possible. It was drafted by Read more

Digital preservation – Rafaël Rozendaal

More and more I hear people talking on the subject of the preservation of internet art. It is a new medium and no one knows what exactly will happen. Will we still browse the web in 15 years? Will information be injected straight into our mind without any screens? Art works should last a long time. I love seeing old art, and I think it’s not until an artist dies that we get the big picture of their work. Many media came before the internet. Lots of those media were lost, and some were saved. Paintings, sculptures, books, celluloid, vinyl, Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: working with others

It is of course a truism, often repeated, that the Internet has been the basis for a revolution in (remote) interpersonal communications, collaboration and data sharing. It is probably safe to say that there would be very few of the Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) projects that exist today without the collaboration technologies the Internet supports. One of the many effects of the powerful tools FLOSS has put in to the hands of creative people is that it has potentially made them more independent. No longer are they reliant on specialists with access to expensive software and hardware to carry out Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Licensing: copyright, legal issues, authorship, media work licensing, Creative Commons

In this article, we will cover a few questions and principles of open content licensing. We will discuss why to use a license and how it helps to give a stable legal background to start a collaboration. As choosing a license means accepting a certain amount of legal formalism, we will see the conditions required to be entitled to use an open license. Using the comparison of the Free Art License and the Creative Commons, we will try to give an accurate picture of the differences that co-exist in the world of open licensing, and approach what distinguishes free from open licenses. Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Publishing your work

Self publishing is not a new phenomenon. It is the publishing of all media by the author/artists of those works rather than by established, third party publishers. Although self publishing has been around since the beginning of publishing , it has seen a huge increase in activity with the advancement of publishing technology and the World Wide Web. PDF: Publishing your work

Digital Artists Handbook: Working with graphics: Processing

You might have come across the ‘made with Processing’  hyperlink on the internet or heard ofProcessing before. Over the past six years it has become a real phenomenon, allowing creative mindsto access the digital world. Based on a rather simple syntax and minimal interface, Processingsmoothly drives beginners into the scary world of programming.This article is not a tutorial, but rather an attempt to give you a global idea of what the programmingenvironment is, looks like and why it was created. Should you decide it is the tool you need, thisarticle will hopefully provide enough pointers to online and offline resources Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Graphics

Image reigns supreme. From the thousands of films churned out each year from Nollywood, to the persistent recording of images by security cameras in London to the scaling of windows on your desktop computer, you are already a pixel pusher. But, how can you reign supreme over images? How can you become an active participant in the creation of graphics and move beyond passive consumption. While the distinction between amateur and professional is erased in the Youtube-record-a-video-get-rich-generation, the focus upon high-quality content controlling tools is key. What is the point of mastering verion 3.5 of Killer Graphics App 97’s fuzz Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Pure Dataflow – Diving into Pd

This article introduces the possibilities of the software Pure Data (Pd), explains a bit why it’s so popular among artists and shows what Pd can be used for. The goal is to help artists decide if Pd is a tool for their own work. Pure Data, or PD for short, is a software written by mathematician and musician Miller S. Puckette. It  has become one of the most popular tools for artists working with digital media. Originally conceived in the late 90s as an environment to create sounds and to compose music, it was soon extended by modules to work Read more

Free Computer Science courses from Stanford University

Stanford University offered three of their most popular computer science courses to the public this fall, online for free. The courses were so popular that Stanford’s doing it again in January. This time they’re offering 7 computer science courses: Computer Science 101 http://www.cs101-class.org/ Machine Learning (one of the offerings this past fall) http://jan2012.ml-class.org/ Software as a Service http://www.saas-class.org/ Human-Computer Interaction http://www.hci-class.org/ Natural Language Processing http://www.nlp-class.org/ Game Theory http://www.game-theory-class.org/ Probabilistic Graphical Models http://www.pgm-class.org/ Cryptography http://www.crypto-class.org/ And two entrepreneurship courses: The Lean Launchpad http://www.launchpad-class.org/ Technology Entrepreneurship http://www.venture-class.org/ No tuition, no textbooks, no set class times (students get a week to complete the assignments).

Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors

Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors is a short documentary explaining internet infrastructure, focusing on the art deco building 60 Hudson Street in Tribeca, which is now one of the most concentrated carrier hotels in the world. The internet has an “ironically very limited geography in terms of big strategic concentrations,” explains Stephen Graham, professor of cities and society, Newcastle University, in the short film. “The big affluent high tech information rich regions” is where the infrastructure is densely located. And 60 Hudson Street was especially ideal as a hub, given that the building was already designed to accomidate cables as it was first Read more

Digital Art Conservation

Initiatives http://www.arts.state.tx.us/video http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/avantgarde http://www.docam.ca/ http://forging-the-future.net http://www.imaionline.de/content/view/20/25/lang http://www.imappreserve.org/index.html http://www.inside-installations.org http://www.packed.be/ http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/ http://www.variablemedia.net/e/welcome.html Masters in the conservation of new media art http://www.hkb.bfh.ch/maconsrest.html http://www.mediaconservation.abk-stuttgart.de/ Media art archives http://www.gama-gateway.eu/ http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/ http://www.mediaartbase.de http://www.v2.nl Networks http://www.amianet.org http://www.eai.org/index.htm http://www.iasa-web.org http://www.incca.org/ http://www.langzeitarchivierung.de http://www.rhizome.org/art/ Organisations http://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org Tools http://www.fondation-langlois.org/visiteur/database/e/ http://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/shtml_sub/msqr.pdf

make an animated GIF online, quick & easy

Gickr.com lets you instantly create Animated GIF online, free, right now! Just upload pictures or grab them from your Flickr. Create funny flashy slideshows with you and your friends, cartoons, previews, banners, etc. Post them anywhere you can post pictures: MySpace, Bebo, HI5 etc. No need for flash. web: http://gickr.com Loads of similar services

No Layout – digital library for independent publishers

No Layout is a digital library for independent publishers, focusing on art books and fashion magazines. It is meant as a support for printed publications, allowing users to flip through full content on any screen without downloads or apps. A promotional and archive tool. web: http://www.nolayout.com/

Free DNS When You Need It

Dyn’s legendary free DNS service allows you to create a hostname that points to your home or office IP address, providing a easy URL for you to remember anywhere you have internet access. Dyn also provides update mechanisms for making hostnames work with your dynamic IP address, delivery of your DNS records to five DNS servers in five Tier 1 bandwidth datacenters around the world, fast propagation/reliable static IP caching for DNS TTL values and more. Website: http://dyn.com/dns/dyndns-free/

Journalism school teaches students pre-digital newspaper production techniques

While archeologists try to recreate what life was like 10,000 years ago, and historians try to recreate what life was like 1,000 years ago, journalists can’t even recreate how they published a newspaper 20 years ago. No one documented the details or saved the old equipment. (I had to buy some of it from creepy old men through Craigslist.) Journalists may write history’s first draft, but when it comes to covering their own history, they don’t even take notes. I can imagine college students 20 years from now asking their aged adviser… Your digital cameras didn’t just beam images to Read more

Directory of APIs

website: http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory

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Codecademy: A Slick, Fun Way To Teach Yourself How To Program

It’s a web-based, interactive programming tutorial that holds your hand and walks you through the basics of JavaScript. At this point it’s just getting started — the lessons only go as far as ‘While’ loops — but it clearly has loads of potential for one key reason: it actually feels fun. Website: http://www.codecademy.com

Golden Grid System

A folding grid for responsive design. Golden Grid System (GGS) splits the screen into 18 even columns. The leftmost and rightmost columns are used as the outer margins of the grid, which leaves 16 columns for use in design. Now, 16 columns sounds a bit much for anything other than huge widescreen monitors. This is where the folding, inspired by the DIN paper system and Unigrid, comes in. The 16 columns can be combined, or folded, into 8 columns for tablet-sized screens, and into 4 columns for mobile-sized ones. This way GGS can easily cover any screen sizes from 240 Read more

Programming Languages Reference Sheets

syntax for common tasks in a side-by-side format Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby Embeddable Languages: Tcl, Lua, JavaScript, Io Shell Languages: Bash, Zsh, AppleScript, PowerShell C Style Languages: C, C++, Objective C, Java, C# Pascal Style Languages: Pascal, Ada, PL/SQL, SQL/PSM Lisp Dialects: Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Emacs Lisp Type Inference Languages: Standard ML, OCaml, Scala, Haskell Declarative Languages: Prolog, Erlang, Oz Concatenative Languages: Forth, PostScript, Factor Computer Algebra Software: Mathematica, Sage, Maxima Numerical Analysis Software: MATLAB, R  

Great JavaScript Resources

As browsers and server-side platforms advance, and libraries new and old grow and mature, JavaScript evolves as well. We’ve put together a list of seven of our favorite JavaScript resources to help save you time and energy along the way. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro, we think you’ll find the sites below both informative and beneficial. If you know of other great resources, feel free to share them in the comments. Mozilla Developer Network: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/javascript JQAPI: http://jqapi.com JS Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net Eloquent JavaScript: http://eloquentjavascript.net Douglas Crockford JS Videos: http://www.yuiblog.com/crockford How to Node: http://howtonode.org DailyJS: http://dailyjs.com

Dropbox – brilliant for sharing files

Your files, anywhere Any file you save to Dropbox also instantly saves to your computers, phones, and the Dropbox website. 2GB of Dropbox for free, with subscriptions up to 100GB available. Your files are always available from the secure Dropbox website. Dropbox works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Works even when offline. You always have your files, whether or not you have a connection. Dropbox transfers just the parts of a file that change (not the whole thing). Manually set bandwidth limits — Dropbox won’t hog your connection. Website: Dropbox Website: Dropbox for ucl.ac.uk email address Read more

FLV players for your website

The OS FLV Player is an Open Source, embedable player for Flash native video files. The player provides a large amount of options that can be changed in the embed code. Also provided are a code generator written in javascript, a library of PHP functions and, of course, fully open source code! Website: http://www.osflv.com With over one million active users, the JW Player™ is the Internet’s most popular open source video player. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, MP4, MP3, AAC, JPG, PNG and GIF) and now supports HTML5 too. Additionally, the JW Player™ Read more

Self Publishing resource guide

Self publishing is not a new phenomenon. It is the publishing of all media by the author/artists of those works rather than by established, third party publishers. Although self publishing has been around since the beginning of publishing [5], it has seen a huge increase in activity with the advancement of publishing technology and the World Wide Web…….. Website: http://www.digitalartistshandbook.org/publishing

Beyond Privacy. New Perspectives on the Public and Private Domain

Our traditional notion of privacy is coming under pressure from a political system obsessed with security and control and a commercial sector avid for sales. More and more measures are being taken that conflict with our constitutional right to privacy. New technologies are being developed and implemented in order to keep an eye on citizens and collect data about their comings and goings. Societal resistance to this is relatively scarce, particularly in the Netherlands. At the same time people harbour fewer and fewer qualms about voluntarily revealing personal information in the media and on the Internet. Apparently the protection of Read more

The Ultimate Dropbox Toolkit & Guide

Dropbox, the app we all (at least many of us) know and love, has a plethora of advanced uses to make life so much easier in managing data between multiple computers and online. We’ve posted several roundups of tips and tricks for Dropbox and now we present our ultimate toolkit and guide. We’ve pulled all our tips and tricks together and added quite a few more. Additionally, share your Dropbox tips and tricks and we’ll update the list to share the fun with everyone. Dropbox? Not familiar with Dropbox? Let me start out by simply saying, Dropbox is awesome. I Read more

online tool for sharing photos, screengrabs quickly

Do you ever want to share some photos, mockups or screengrabs with somebody else online quick and dirty? Go to DropMocks, drag and drop your images, and you are done. You get an instant image gallery that displays in CoverFlow style, along with a short URL to share it. Website: http://dropmocks.com

Free alternative to Microsoft Office

The Document Foundation, which coordinates development of LibreOffice, a new, free and open office suite, has reached an important development milestone significantly ahead of schedule. LibreOffice 3.3 shipped this week; it’s the first, stable, road-ready version of the suite. A large, 100+ community of developers has been attracted to the project, and while it’s still clearly under construction, it’s an impressive showing in a short time. Website: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of “access Read more

Xpert Media Search and Attribution service

One of the main barriers to publishing and using open resources is copyright and particularly the use of third party images where the copyright status is uncertain. To help with overcoming this problem the Open Nottingham team created the Xpert Media Search and Attribution service, which is a ground-breaking website helping users to find creative commons or public domain media and automatically incorporate licence information into the resource. Routinely embedding open licences simplifies OER development, removes barriers to repurposing and publishing OER, and substantially increases the usability and accessibility of course materials. For the first time, broad audiences of OER Read more

Open Street Block – lat/lon coordinate convertor

OpenStreetBlock is a web service for turning a given lat/lon coordinate (e.g. 40.737813,-73.997887) into a textual description of the actual city block to which the coordinate points (e.g. “West 14th Street bet. 6th Ave. & 7th Ave”) using OpenStreetMap data. There are likely many applications for such a service. It should be quite useful any time you might need to succinctly describe a given location without using a map. Website: http://transit.frumin.net/openstreetblock/

Digital Bookmaking Tools: A Roundup

For those of us who aren’t code slingers, what’s the easiest way to build a digital book? I’ve noticed a small but growing number of tools, ranging from big guns like those on offer from Adobe to iPad-based efforts that aim to make publishing a touch and drag affair. Below is a list I’ve been compiling over the past few weeks. Some of these solutions get you an iPad app, some get you ePub, some are for web-based books. Website: http://newkindofbook.com/2011/04/digital-bookmaking-tools-a-roundup/

booru WebCam software

booru WebCam 2.0 will assist you in capturing images from your web camera, publishing them on your homepage, archiving them on your harddrive or storing them on the Internet. The program makes it easy to apply effects such as picture and text overlays to the camera image. The main purpose of booru Webcam is to increase the fun factor and usefulness of webcams! Party Cam: Use your web camera as a party cam, documenting the party to your local hard drive. You can later on look through the archive to find all the highlights from yesterday’s party. Or why not Read more

FLOSS manuals

FLOSS Manuals is a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools. They include authors, editors, artists, software developers, activists, and many others. There are manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source softwares, about how to do things (like design) with open source software, and manuals about free culture services that use or support free software and formats. Anyone can contribute to a manual – to fix a spelling mistake, to add a more detailed explanation, Read more

Introduction to web browers

Many of us these days depend on the World Wide Web to bring the world’s information to our fingertips, and put us in touch with people and events across the globe instantaneously. These powerful online experiences are possible thanks to an open web that can be accessed by anyone through a web browser, on any Internet-connected device in the world. But how do our browsers and the web actually work? How has the World Wide Web evolved into what we know and love today? And what do we need to know to navigate the web safely and efficiently? PDF: 20 Read more

The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity

There’s a question that has been bugging me for years: why are 99% of publicists and promotion/marketing people complete useless failures when it comes to blogs and online outlets? I keep waiting for the industry to figure things out and catch up, but it never seems to happen. So I’m taking the time to write this guide. If you work in online PR or know someone who does, this is a must-read — NOT because my observations here are anything other than obvious to the bloggers and editors you’re targeting, but because they’re clearly not obvious, or even known, to Read more