Detailing every Doctor Who adventure from ‘An Unearthly Child’ in 1963 right up to ‘The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe’ Christmas Special.

remember, there are still 106 episodes missing from the BBC archives.

I wish we had a time machine.

Benjamin Keen has made a bookmarklet based on Lennart Schoors’ responsive design test page I linked to last week.

Just drop this HTML document in the same folder as your index page and open it – it’s dead simple, really!

File this under “why didn’t I think of that?”

Peter Gasston on the updated syntaxes for CSS3 gradients. Time to update those LESS mixins fellas.

Orangutans at a Milwaukee zoo could soon be video-calling their primate friends via tablet computers. The hairy tech fans have been playing with iPads since they were first introduced to them in May.

So, when apes rise, you’ll know whose fault it was.

Joni Korpi:

Instead of enabling media queries in the browsers that don’t support them, like Internet Explorer 6–8, I chose to simply serve them the Narrow Layout.

It’s an approach that’s very similar to how I’ve chosen to handle old IE’s lack of support for Media Queries. As in accept that browsers are built differently and don’t polyfil to try and make them act the same.

I’m spending this week writing content for my Fashionably flexible responsive web design workshops in Australia in February and an article on a related topic for Smashing Magazine. Digging through the archives, I found something Jeremy wrote back in 2005 in response to the (then new, now current) A List Apart design.

When you nail a layout to a set number of pixels, you’re bound to alienate some people. It’s inevitable.

Sometimes it’s just nostalgic to read old articles, but you can find real gems. This is one. Read it in the context of what we now call responsive design.

From Joni Korpi, designer of Golden Grid System and Less Framework:

Give your grid an infinite number of columns, so that no matter how wide you make your viewport, more and more columns come into view. Imagine you’re looking at an infinitely wide honeycomb filled with columns instead of hexagons.

How many times can I like this way of thinking about design?

Dutch airline KLM is taking some of the surprise out of air travel with Meet & Seat, a new program that will let passengers pick who they sit next to using social networking tools.

Good job I’m not on Facebook.

On the BBC:

The 1965 and 1967 episodes star William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, the first two actors to play The Doctor. They are among more than 100 instalments which were not retained by the BBC.

Great news for Doctor Who fans.

I’ve tried several sketching apps and styli, but this one looks like a winner. I ordered one earlier. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Via Marco Arment, who’s written a review too.

Jane Wakefield, writing for the BBC.

An increasingly popular web language will be the next big target for cybercriminals, according to a security firm. HTML 5 is being developed to improve the look of websites, remove the need for plug-ins such as Java and Flash, and bring the storage capacity of the cloud to the browser.

Emphasis mine.

This is potentially going to be quite painful,” said James Lyne, director of technology strategy at the security firm (Sophos). The fact that HTML 5 allows more data to be stored in the browser means firms and cybercriminals could create super-cookies to track people’s web behaviour.

You mean like Facebook?

Gowalla’s founder Josh Williams:

Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well. Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla’s user data.

I’m happy for everyone who’s happy about Facebook acquiring (I hate that term) Gowalla. For me, the best part of this news is that Facebook won’t get their hands on my data and that there’ll be easy ways to extract it. If the Foursquare guys are watching, now’s a good time to work on those import tools.

Typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler:

I drew an ‘E’ this morning.

At Pivot, the AIGA Design Conference in October. If you’re at all interested in fonts and webfonts, before you do anything today, watch the video.

Cennydd Bowles:

Some of the best-known examples of the content out design principle are blogs from today’s leading digital lights. These sites feature expert typography, harmony and balance. They are undoubtedly beautiful. They also look terribly similar.

Cennydd makes a good point, that “It’s impossible to perceive content and presentation separately. The two combine to create something more valuable: meaning.” but I can’t agree with the quote above without examples.

In addition, passengers are given the right to opt out from a control with scanners and be subject to an alternative method of screening.

This can only be good news, but I wonder how quickly (if at all) this will apply to UK airports. The last time I tried to opt out of a backscatter scan in Manchester, where they have been trialling these machines, I was told “no scan, no fly.”

Via: Daring Fireball

Mark Boulton:

The template > slot > ad mental model is engrained both in advertisers, planners and web sites. Providing space for ads needs to be broadened into multiple spaces for one ad concept. This requires closer collaboration between advertisers and web sites, designers and marketeers and sales teams.

This is exactly the issue I’ve faced in my redesign work for STV. My solution, and one that seems to been accepted, has been to:

• Develop a custom grid for STV based on the size of MMU units
• Design a series of page regions to accommodate a fixed number of same-size ad slots to help with adaptive layouts
• Use min-width on ad containers
• Serve leaderboards above the 768 breakpoint only

With STV’s permission, I’d love to publish some of our solutions.

Thomas Forsyth made ten bespoke brass nuts for Build. Here’s a short film about how he did it. It’s inspired.

Via: Simon Collison

John Foliot commenting on Divya Manian’s aforementioned ‘Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value’

Web Developers: don’t believe this rubbish — it is the opinion of one, slightly mis-informed young lady who has failed to really understand what she is advocating.

Divya Manian writing for Smashing Magazine:

Mark-up structures content, but your choice of tags matters a lot less than we’ve been taught for a while.

Divya makes some good points, but overall this article just leaves a bad after-taste.