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🔗 محو القاهرة.. تدمير ذكريات المدينة

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تتبدل معالم القاهرة سريعا ومعها تنهار ذاكرتنا الجماعية عن المدينة؛ على مستوى المهتمين على الأقل؛ وعندها ستكون المدينة في أضعف حالاتها. إذ يمكن للحكومة وقتها أن تبدل ما تشاء في معالم المدينة، أن تتعامل معها بلا روح ولا أفق يتفهم تراثها. وقتها سنكون خسرنا معركة الذاكرة والحفاظ على تراث القاهرة، لذا لا بد أن تتعالى الأصوات الرافضة للاستهانة الحكومية بالمدينة وتراثها. وأن نسعى لشرحه لغير المتخصصين والعمل على توعية غير المهتمين لتوسيع مدى ذاكرة المدينة وخلق رأي عام رافض بناء على وعي. هنا فقط يمكن أن تكون بداية وقف المحاولات الجارية لمحو القاهرة.

🔗 Decker

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HyperCard clone that works inside the browser. Creates portable HTML files.

black and white screenshot

Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior. You can try it in your web browser right now.

🔗 The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive

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The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive was launched to collect various documents including identification papers, official records, letters, diaries, manuscripts, maps, photographs, films, and audio recordings that were under threat of loss, damage, or confiscation. Such items were digitized and made widely available on a website open for users inside Palestine and abroad in Arabic and English, to shed light on the different aspects of Palestinian life, history, and legacy. A visitor can browse the Archive through exploring the different collections offered by hundreds of Palestinians to be safely saved for future generations. One can also navigate the website through topics that summarize many aspects of Palestinian life such as culture & arts, resistance & struggle, displacement & diaspora, social & organizational movement, everyday life, education & extracurricular activities, women, and others.

🔗 What is Textmode?

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Textmode is a broad term for art made with a monospaced font on a uniform grid.

Textmode encapsulates art like ASCII, ANSI, PETSCII and many others which have their own specific restrictions.

🔗 Peek - an animated GIF recorder

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Very useful!

Peek makes it easy to create short screencasts of a screen area. It was built for the specific use case of recording screen areas, e.g. for easily showing UI features of your own apps or for showing a bug in bug reports. With Peek, you simply place the Peek window over the area you want to record and press "Record". Peek is optimized for generating animated GIFs, but you can also directly record to WebM if you prefer.

🔗 The hidden potential of bicycles

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This is far more the case in poorer countries.

The average modern person, by one calculation, spends more than 1,600 hours a year to pay for their cars, their insurance, fuel and repairs. We go to jobs partly to pay for the cars, and we need the cars mostly to get to jobs. We spend four of our sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering the resources for the car. Since the average modern American, by one estimate, travels 7,500 miles a year, and put in 1,600 hours a year to do that, they are travelling five miles per hour. Before people had cars, however, people managed to do the same – by walking.

🔗 The Melbourne treemail phenomenon

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"Dearest Golden Elm", wrote one correspondent earlier this month, "I finally found you! I see you every day on my way to uni, but I had no idea of what kind of tree you are. You are the most beautiful tree in the city and I love you."

About 3,000 emails have been sent to individual trees in the last two years. This didn't start out as an exercise in sentiment, but a hard-headed attempt by Melbourne city council to manage an urban forest in decline - as a result of drought, by 2009 40% of the 77,000 trees in Australia's "garden city" were struggling or dying.

🔗 Ireland’s smoking ban 20 years on: how an unheralded civil servant triumphed against big tobacco

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Proponents suspected – but could not prove – that the group was a proxy for the tobacco industry. It responded by enlisting support from health boards, the Asthma Society, the Cancer Society, academics and unions that represented hospitality workers forced to breathe secondhand smoke.

“A really significant coalition emerged that was bigger than the tobacco industry and vintners combined,” says Young.

🔗 Mona Chalabi on storytelling, the power of data, and covering Palestine

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It’s funny how a lot of people viewed me as a rigorous journalist on every other topic. And when it came to this, all of a sudden there was this disbelief in my method of research. There was this suspicion that all of a sudden it wasn’t rigorous. I think that really, really speaks to the very, very, very deeply entrenched biases that exist around this subject.

🔗 The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

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Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced an expansion of access to their digital archive, in that they’ve made nearly 88,000 images free to download on their Open Content database under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). That means “you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.”