I picked up on this bookmarklet via a post on Matt Haughey's blog. I read a lot of webpages daily and this tool transforms that experience into something almost pleasant. It was created by arc90 and strips out the text of whatever page you are viewing and formats it so it's easier to read. Being able to get rid of all the clutter to get to the content I actually want to see makes me very happy. The image below compares a page from Wired.com against the Readibility version so you can see what I mean:

You can tweak the style to suit yourself when you create the bookmarklet. Perfect! Reminds me of the layout suck.com used back in the days of low resolution displays. Also, if you use Safari and sync your bookmarks with your iPhone you can use it on that device too:

'Readability' in Safari on an iPhone

Go treat yourself right now. Arc90 assures us it works in most modern browsers.

The Guardian reported that the Metropolitan Police said protests on 1st April would be "very violent" and that they were:

"... up for it, and up to it."
Metropolitan Police, quoted in The Guardian, 27th March 2009

There I was thinking that their role was to protect the public, not to take on an antagonistic stance which could be argued leads to an attitude where you perceive the people you serve as 'the enemy'. When you give a person power with the knowledge they almost certainly won't have to answer for their actions, give them a club,  a mask and turn them loose on the streets there are likely to be terrible consequences. This video shows Ian Tomlinson being assaulted from behind by a police officer. He died minutes later.

Update: here is an excellent post that puts the above in the wider context of police tactics.

1 original comment:

Spot on Mark.
We have witnessed our human rights get stripped off of us in the last 20 years or so and up until Obama brought some sense into the US, our governments were routinely using so called evidence gathered during torture sessions to convict people behind closed doors and without access to legal representation.
The (Met) Police never seem to learn that we pay their salaries and hence they are ultimately answerable to we the People. Steven Lawrence & Ian Tomlinson RIP.
To end on a positive note: at least we live in a society where we can expose the underbelly of the Beast.
Comment by Ifraz — 23 April, 2009 @ 10:05 am

This month sees the launch of a UK edition of Wired, a second attempt after the version that first appeared in 1995 flamed out. Personally speaking Wired piqued my interest in the web and the implications that a new communications technology held for society at large.

So what's changed?

• I had no internet access
• I didn't have an email address
• I certainly didn't have a laptop... but we did own a shared family computer
• I didn't have a mobile phone
• I'd never purchased anything from a website
• The job I do now didn't exist
• The company I work for didn't exist
• Google didn't exist

... I'm sure there's a lot more to add to this list, but just having a quick think makes me realise how much has shifted in those intervening years.

2 original comments:

Using and sharing digital media – photos, videos et al – is another thing you probably weren’t doing much of in 1995.
Comment by Simon Mustoe — 6 April, 2009 @ 11:25 am

I was a subscriber to the UK Wired first time round. Coincidentally doing some spring cleaning over the weekend, I unearthed the whole lot and read Edition 1 last night. It kicked off with the following statement from Marchall McLuhan:
“The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and ever institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing… you, your family, your education, your neighbourhood, your government, your job, your relation to “the others”. And they’re changing dramatically.”
One thing that struck me was that the idea of free online content was virtually unthinkable – people were preparing themselves for the inevitable subscription models once traffic hit a critical point. What do we have to lose by Douglas Adams is worth reading to give a broader perspective about this issue, from that time.
Another thing we didn’t have back then was content subscription or RSS: I think Pattie Maes got it wrong with her view of software agents being necessary to handle the unthinkable complexity. We just needed free RSS subscription.
Comment by Jason Ryan — 6 April, 2009 @ 1:35 pm

Funny haha, scary terrifying or an attempt to soften us up given I assume Google are working on this stuff already?

"Will CADIE herself at some point connect her own electromagnetic dots in some idiosyncratic manner which turns her into something we are no longer capable of understanding in any sort of productive way, much as that aforementioned toddler, waving at herself in the mirror, leaves primates forever behind in their own tragically limited world? We don't know. Did you really think we possibly could?"
The CADIE Team, 31st March 2009

One day.

Dan and Caroline get building