MetaFilter posts tagged with text

#..this is my area....#

grobstein — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:52:39 -0800

Your World of Text is an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor. The changes made by other people appear on your screen as they happen. Everyone starts in the same place, but you can scroll through the world using your mouse. Put any letters at the end of the URL to go to a new world. For example, http://yourworldoftext.com/mefi. They all start off blank. If you use something hard to guess, no one will be able to visit your world unless you tell them about it. (About)

Get your schadenfreude here

reenum — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:53:08 -0800

Recently, there have been a host of websites that delight in exposing the inanity and stupidity of our society. There is the granddaddy, Overheard in New York, which recounts silly conversations heard in the Big Apple, as well as a host of similar sites. There are now a variety of such websites, dedicated to different aspects of our society. First, there are the ones targeted at different groups: STFU, Marrieds, STFU, Parents, STFU, Believers, and My Roommate is Such a Dick. Then, there are the ones that expose the silliness and inanity in our communications: Texts From Last Night, My Drunk Texts, Passive Aggressive Notes, and Lamebook. Relationships and sex loom large as well: Disgusting People I Have Made Out With, Why My Ex Sucks, and I Bang the Worst Dudes. Finally, there is just plain bad luck or failure: F My Life and FAIL Blog. Bonus: Awkward Family Photos and Hot Chicks With Douchebags

Text Utilities

grumblebee — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:06:23 -0800

"Text Utilities" is a useful browser-based tool for geeks. It's a web page that does all sorts of operations on text, e.g. escape/ unescape, hashing, regexp testing.

Video Games, One Moment At A Time

flatluigi — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:19:41 -0800

Moments _{A small blog by Mister Raroo}

Cartype - gives a whole new meaning to E-type

1f2frfbf — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:51:30 -0800

Cartype has a huge repository of vehicle logos and other related typography. In addition, you can see collections such as shield and crest emblems, emblems with animals, and hand-painted type on cars. They cover European automotive history from the near mythic to the exotic. They also cover American iron from the old to the malaise years to the cutting edge of new.

Not Just Rectangles Anymore

netbros — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:28:01 -0800

The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. You can make text wrap around curves, zig-zags, or whatever you want. All you have to do is draw the left and right edges, then copy the generated code to your web site. From the folks at The Idea Shower who brought us Read It Later.

Games that Never Existed

flatluigi — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:13:59 -0800

The Loneliness Engine and other invisible games.

You Betcha

digaman — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:41:01 -0800

This f*cking election. A babble tower.

A three minute fairy tail

oxford blue — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 06:14:58 -0800

Boy meets girl, you know how it goes. The catch? They're made from Myriad Pro. This short TED talk by someone called Rives was cute, and whimsical enough to make me smile. I hope it makes you smile as well.

Contemporary Art

netbros — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:25:27 -0800

Hilda Magazine ― prose, poetry, illustrations, photography, video, and music from a wide assortment contemporary artists. [contains some nude art images] The magazine also includes links to some individual artist's personal sites. Following are presentations that I found particularly compelling or interesting: Niklas Goldbach Wheat Würtzburger Constantin Hartenstein Levi van Veluw Heidi Mortenson Sigurdur Gudjónsson Janaina Tschäpe Brenda Hillman Mary Mattingly Mikko Rantanen Lenka Clayton Jörg Piringer Robert Hodgin If you only look at one thing on Hilda, be sure to check out Magnetosphere, one of many of Robert Hodgin's experiments with the programming language Processing. Hodgin, van Veluw, and Mattingly have been previously featured on the blue.

Chris Harrison's gorgeous visualizations

cortex — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:54:59 -0800

Word Spectrum; SearchClock; Digg Rings; Bible Cross-references: the gorgeous analytical vizualizations of Chris Harrison. See also his research projects, including a webcam-driven headtracker riff on Johnny Chung Lee's Wii-hack (previously).

stop crying kindle fanboy

taz — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:16:24 -0800

Some are calling it the "Kindle Killer". (Demo launch video at engadget.) Plastic Logic's new e-reader, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, does promise to offer a lot that Kindle and most other other popular e-readers don't, like a larger display, big enough to provide a newspaper or magazine layout; touch-based markup and annotation; the ability to read standard documents and other file types without conversion; (promised) Wi-Fi connectivity (including the ability to transfer documents between readers); and last but not least, a screen display that you can hit with a shoe, and isn't that something we've all been waiting for during these tense times? But in the Plastic Logic vs Amazon Kindle smackdown, "Plastic Logic says they don't plan to compete with Kindle directly, instead, it's targeting business mobile professionals with 'a lot of documents already,' not those who will get all their content from the Amazon store." Heh. The question on everyone's lips, of course, is what about price? Wired reports that while pricing has not been announced, "officials said the reader would be "priced competitively" with devices such as the Kindle, which currently costs $359". Other questions? The NYT touches on issues of privacy, mentioning that, "as an electronic device, newspapers can determine who is reading their paper, and even which articles are being read. Advertisers would be able to understand their audience and direct advertising to its likeliest customers" and wonders "how much people will pay for a device and the newspaper subscription for it". (emphasis mine)

"Schools should continue to require library research so they can see how old folks used to Google stuff."

Kattullus — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:12:42 -0800

The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.

The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses: Defending the Library of Google, The Future in the Past and Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.

The Apostrophe Engine

Fizz — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:29:42 -0800

A poem that builds upon itself and grows as the world wide web grows. The Apostrophe Engine is a website operated by Bill Kenney and Darren Wershler-Henry. It is the source of the poems in apostrophe, a book published by ECW Press in 2006. The home page of the Apostrophe Engine site presents the full text of a poem called "apostrophe", written by Bill in 1993. In this digital version of the poem, each line is now a hyperlink. How it works. When a reader/writer clicks on a line, it is submitted to a search engine, which then returns a list of Web pages, as in any search. The Apostrophe Engine then spawns five virtual robots that work their way through the list, collecting phrases beginning with “you are” and ending in a period. The robots stop after collecting a set number of phrases or working through a limited number of pages, whichever happens ﬁrst. Next, the Apostrophe Engine records and spruces up the phrases that the robots have collected, stripping away most HTML tags and other anomalies, then compiles the results and presents them as a new poem, with the original line as its title ... and each new line as another hyperlink. At any given time, the online version of “apostrophe” is potentially as large as the Web itself. The reader/writer can continue to burrow further into the poem by clicking any line on any page, sliding metonymically through the ever-changing contents. Moreover, because the contents of the Web is always changing, so is the contents of the poem. The page it returns today will not be the page that it returns next week, next month, or next year.

Second Life Twitter Typewriter

brownpau — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:36:53 -0800

Giant Twittering Typewriter in Second Life. Type here (SLURL) and press the carriage return and it posts to here. Yay. [via]

Read it or hear it? Say it or type it?

desjardins — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:43:59 -0800

Enter text, get an mp3. Make a call, get a text. Talk into your phone, send a text.

Wellcome Images

hortense — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 01:19:52 -0800

Wellcome Images This collection of thousands of high-quality images includes anatomical images, rare books and manuscripts, posters, photos, and more. Also includes galleries on war, witchcraft, wellness, and other subjects.

Avatar Shakespeare

janetplanet — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 15:41:43 -0800

Avatar Shakespeare Lady Macbeth Interpreted by Dame Microsoft Mary

Your favorite keyboard sucks.

ontic — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 18:27:26 -0800

Dasher is text input informed by information theory. It's also trippy. David MacKay recently gave a talk in the Google TechTalks series. You can download a prototype at the official site. Plenty useful, but perhaps also a new metaphor for writing?

A Better Way to Read Text Online?

gottabefunky — Sun, 13 May 2007 23:03:33 -0800

A Better Way to Read Text Online? By reorganizing text into cascading patterns, more circular (even vaguely poetic) than the usual dull horizontal layout, visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) increases online reading comprehension and efficiency while reducing eyestrain. Among high school students, who read with the format over an entire academic year, the VSTF method increased both academic achievement and long-term reading proficiency by more than a full standard deviation over randomized controls. Try it out. (Any login works)

IntraText Digital Library

Wolfdog — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 06:06:49 -0800

IntraText Digital Library - a few thousand texts in English and many other languages in a heavily hyperlinked concordance format.

We hold thefe truthfs to be felf-evident...

Miko — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:59:43 -0800

Paleography: Reading Old Handwriting, 1500-1800. And don't forget to use your new skills to save the accused woman from the Ducking Stool.

Treasure My Text in public.

feelinglistless — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 10:01:52 -0800

"Treasuremytext allows you to store SMS Messages (text messages) from your mobile phone online [...] generates a realtime RSS stream of saved messages for viewing by others.: "You gotta realise what u want from me, i ain't here for you to walk on, i'm happy the way things r goin but don't really know where i stand." [Incidentally much of the text here is NSFW.]

I[][']m defina[a][i]tely going to used[d] this[][][found on del.icio.us/popular]

grumblebee — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 19:05:21 -0800

I like to write in a plain-text editor, and I've finally found a way to track edits! I've just started col[][l]aborating on a k[k]new book. This si[i][y]stem will come in handy. [][][thanks, Internet!]

Computational calligraphy

Wolfdog — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 05:45:55 -0800

Caligraft - computational calligraphy.