1. Create a smart playlist to show songs added in 2009
2. Sort by playcount
3. Empirical evidence of music-listening behaviour results

There is a pretty bad sampling bias going on here, as these are all albums I discovered early in the year and, you know, had more time to rack up the play count. How could I do this better?

Here are my 26 ginger dwellings that I made with and for my bestest friends.

Blueprints at not martha (via Boing Boing).

And everything except the bread flour was from the farmers’ market!

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.

Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Read the rest at Amusing Ourselves to Death.

My iPhone broke. For the last two weeks, the home button has only worked with excessive force. Yesterday it stopped working completely. I took it to the sickningly perky genius at the Apple Store in Pacific Centre, and she told me she could fix it in twenty minutes. For $300. I gave her a look that said I’ve been hacking on Apple products since before the Gil Amelio dark ages. Respect me. I actually just said Erm, thanks. I’ll try and fix it myself.

So here are some photos of my iPhone coming apart on my kitchen table. This was a bit scary because my last experience opening an iPhone resulted in lots of itty-bitty electro-rubble all over the place, so first I gained confidence by looking at this.

After two tries, I was able to bend a couple little metal contacts so that they did more contacting with one another. It works now!

But I got fingerprints on the inside of the glass.

11:47pm, September 25th, Fortune Sound Club: Ascending the staircase of a popular new nightclub, secure on the guest list, stomach full of expensive Belgian waffles, I suddenly became nauseous. No, it wasn’t food poisoning. It was righteous indignation.

They wanted to swipe my identification into a computer and take my photo. The only other place I’ve had to do this to gain entry recently is the United States of America. WTF indeed. After a feeble argument with the girl at the desk involving privacy rights and such, I paid my cover and frowned at the camera, barely making eye contact.

The next morning, I got up early and emailed proprietor Rob Rizk…

I have to say that my first impression was soured by having my ID scanned and photo taken. I know a lot of places in Vancouver do that, and I avoid those places, although I reluctantly participated last night so I could be with my friends. I’ve nothing to hide, but I’m totally put off by over-the-top security. I’d feel similarly about having to walk through a big metal detector to get into your club. It’s super tacky.

To my surprise, he emailed me back within a few hours. He didn’t really address my concerns directly, but admitted that it is an unfortunately tacky requirement, and alluded to being pressured by the VPD and LCLB. He apparently forwarded my email to TreoScope, because they also replied. Here’s what I learned:

• They slurp your name, birthdate, and gender from your ID’s magnetic stripe
• They correlate that with your picture
• They can attach their own comments to customer records
• They can share those comments with other bars
• They can publish a “community alert” which flags you at all other bars using TreoScope
• The data is stored offsite by TreoScope
• The establishment can get aggregated demographic reports for marketing purposes

Ugh. Not a very customer-friendly system by design. Luckily, a ruling earlier this year, as well as pressure from BC Privacy Czar David Loukidelis, has forced TreoScope to make their policies a bit more privacy-friendly. I’ll pause while you read all of those links. The important bits are these:

• Customer information must be completely destroyed after a transitory 24-hour working period.
• However, if a customer is determined within the transitory 24-hour working period to be violent or otherwise undesirable from a safety perspective, that customer’s name, photograph, date of birth and gender can be kept, and shared with other bars using EnterSafe, for customer safety purposes.

Not bad—It’s a marked improvement.  The criteria here is decidedly ambiguous though, and there doesn’t seem to be any recourse if you find yourself flagged with a community alert. An owner with an axe to grind could potentially exaggerate the report and make a party-goer’s life pretty miserable. As long as one stays in the “desirable” category, then privacy seems to be more-or-less maintained.

This little dude might saunter around when you’re not looking. It’s the steampunk cousin of Luxo, Jr.

Look at these pretty pictures I made:

more, more, more, more, more

They’re made by a short program… programatically. It’s generative. So I guess it would be more precise to say that I didn’t make these pictures, but I made something that went on to make these pictures. And each time it is run, it makes a different one—no two the same! Not to sell myself short, my choices as a programmer did greatly influence their final design. I think of this as designing at the second degree.

One difficulty with designing at the second degree is not spending too much time designing the first degree—that is, the program and all of the facets of software engineering that could be poured into it. One must instead be thinking about the final visual outcome. It’s rightbrain vs. leftbrain, creativity vs. analysis. These dichotomies must be managed.

Luckily, there are some braindeadly easy tools that help programmers forget about things like buffers and pixels and multiple coordinate systems. Processing is one that I’ve dabbled with before, but it’s based in java and frankly java isn’t very cool anymore. These days I’m playing with NodeBox.

Desktop Backgrounds

A forest of 10! (zip)

If you’ve got a 1440×700 pixel MacBookPro screen like mine, then you can use these as desktop backgrounds. Set it up to cycle through them every couple of minutes and it’ll be magic.

Burger King was not so bold as to assert actual Italianness. They’ve used scare quotes as an apologetic hedge, or so it seems at first glance.

Immersed in American kitsch in San Antonio’s tourism epicentre, I kinda wanted to buy a snow globe-entrapped armadillo last week. But. This quote from Boing Boing’s recent interview with Joey Roth has been ringing accurate to me, and so I passed.

“Irony was the dominant approach a few years ago, and it’s still popular. I think it has no place in design, since physical resources are consumed when something is mass-produced, and a joke is only witty for so long.”

Not coincidentally, Joey has produced the nicest object in recent memory.