onfocus

Steven Johnson talks about one of his favorite writing tools: rereading a continually updated file with half-baked ideas.

Errol Morris on Walker Evans, photography, documentation, and history. This is part three of a seven part series from 2009.

This article is a good reminder to mix math games into the daily routine. We do some of this, but we have more fun with language than math.

You might need some fancier desktop wallpaper.

A very simple image optimizer that works well.

Great summer mixes by Mick Boogie and DJ Jazzy Jeff. (Volume III is out there somewhere too.)

Mat Honan is experiencing a nightmare cascade failure of interconnected services. This is a good reminder to back things up and make sure your passwords are unique for each service.

After I upgraded to Mountain Lion I had a problem with my circa 2009 Mac Pro favoring the internal Bluetooth device over an external D-Link adapter. This shows how to disable internal Bluetooth which did the trick for me. I can use my Magic Mouse again.

News filter by Mule. Their description: "It's a summary of the day's news, written by an actual journalist, with links to the best reporting in the world, published once a day."

A game designer lays out his existential frustration. I really like the idea of stepping back and stripping away the 'best practices' around an activity to find its core function. And then asking if that core function is meaningful. Excellent food for thought. [via torrez]

The Kleptones did some exhaustive research into the music that inspired Paul Simon's Graceland and put it all together into a fantastic mix and story.

This is a nice browser-based regular expression tester.

This handy browser app will format JSON so it's a bit more human-readable.

Not only words, but it's important to think about all of the digital artifacts of living. They're all moving toward the domain of companies in the name of convenience. This conversation explains some of the problems with that. [via waxy]

This list is about writing stories like those Pixar tells. But these are great rules that can apply to any form of communication.