Firefox 1.5 is available for download now. I advise upgrading, so you can experience eightface in all it's glory. For some reason the nav bar on the site wasn't working properly in earlier versions. ¶
I believe that Hell has in fact frozen over; there is a new version of Fontographer available. Man, I was using the last version to make fonts seven or eight years ago (you can still download them). That said, the pricing model seems pretty dumb -- considering FontLab is probably more powerful and costs less. ¶
If you're one of those people that buys CDs and DVDs in spindle form, finding cases for people can be tough. I've wrapped them in paper before, but it usually looks pretty lame. Here are a variety of techniques for creating a paper cd case. If you're in the market for real cases, make sure you check out Jewelboxing. ¶
What a difference 30 years will make. A side-by-side comparison of the 1963 and 1991 versions of Richard Scarry's The Best Word Book Ever. I borrowed these books so many times from the library when I was a kid. They had to have been the earlier versions, judging from the amount of tape on them. ¶
Cameron Moll is soliciting comments to form the bulk of an upcoming article based on the idea that good designers decorate, while great designers communicate. His eight things I wish I'd known when I started are required reading. I'm still moving out of the decoration phase, but I'd say less is more and whitespace is your friend are good rules to live by. ¶
Here's the eighth 5Q interview for Seal Club (and the second in my blue and orange series), featuring Dave Shea of mezzoblue. ¶
Changes are afoot at eightface, I can’t help it. This week, we bid farewell to Bastard, the white grungy/erasure theme that landed the site on DesignShack and CSS Beauty. In all honesty, it was just supposed to be a place-holder design while I dug around inside the WordPress guts. The new layout is called Tool (feedreaders, this would be your cue to launch that rusty browser). It’s based on the Bastard, so there may be odd remenants kicking around for a little while.
Most of the template is in place, the only major thing left is the footer, right now it looks kind of flat and ugly. Parts of the design were heavily influenced by Matt Brett’s current layout; mostly the nav-bar and some of the CSS hover stuff (you could say the grunge, but that’s my territory too). The nav-bar is all one image, that’s uses some clever positioning via styling.
The template started on a whim yesterday afternoon, but there have been a few other major changes over the last week. I’ve introduced a portfolio page, mostly to figure out what I’ve actually produced. I experimented with the live archives plugin, but find that it chugs a bit. The other major change was replacing Jerome’s keyword plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior. It has a lot of nice-friendly options built-in.
A couple of interesting WordPress plugins that I've come across in the last day or two: LightPress is a front-end for WordPress that activates as a plugin and aims to speed up database queries and make a clearer distinction between program logic and layout. Edit Comments allows you to give a short-window to allow commenters to changes to typos, etc. ¶
The Mathematical Magic of the Fibonacci Numbers. A solid introduction to one of math's cooler patterns. If the Intelligent Design folk were smart, they'd go after the patterns in nature. Unfortunately, intelligence isn't one of their strong suits. ¶
It’s been about a month since the last desktop change, so I was itching for something new. I’ve been combing through some of my old stuff, trying to put together a portfolio page and found this wallpaper that I never finished. Made it in March of 2004, seems fine to me. Also had the presence of mind to make it at a nice big resolution, so there are a few different size options.
Download: Hello Goodbye
Glorious 1600×1200
Oddly-shaped 1280×1024
Wonderful 1280×960
Middling 1024×768
I would also like to point out that I seem to have some bizarre stuffed animal fetish for wallpaper. Also, this one has Optimus Prime in it.
What should you do when you're counterfeiting currency and your printer jams? Buy a new one with all your cash? No, you send the printer off to be repaired. ¶
Here's the seventh interview for Seal Club, featuring Khaled Abou Alfa of Broken Kode. It's the first of my "blue and orange" interviews; 10 bonus points for guessing who the next one is with. ¶
MIT has unveiled the production version of Negroponte’s $100 laptop. It’s hard to express how happy I am. It has the potential to make a huge difference in terms of African connectivity. Not just for education but in terms of an expanded business base and a route for freedom of speech.
My interest lies mostly in some research I did for my alternative practicum at teacher’s college. I was looking into the possibilities for internet aided learning in remoter regions of Sierra Leone. Cell coverage is spotty, but it’s improving by the day with new telecomm service. So, getting a data connection is possible, the harder part is maintaining an adequate power supply for your computing equipment. That makes that hand-crank on the laptop one of the most important features.
I investigated a number of solutions, eventually settling on handheld pdas and portable solar arrays. The power consumption is fairly minimal, the batteries are rechargable and you have the possibility of using a laptop as a central base-station. The laptops and/or pdas could come from anyone really. There are relatively inexpensive portable solar arrays available now that are capable of powering most of those devices. My ideas were partially inspired by Ben Saunders’ trek to the arctic and his blogging via pda (he used this rollable solar array).
The Junction Box is also an amazing piece of hardware. Combining a few of Negroponte’s laptops and portable Wifi router with direct cell-network capabilities creates some pretty cool options — like a mobile classroom. You could slap one of those in a jeep, but a pile of laptops in the trunk and drive around from school to school.
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The science behind four interesting physics demos, including: walking on broken glass, dipping your hand in molten lead, having a concrete block smashed on your chest while sandwiched between a bed of nails and picking up a white-hot space-shuttle tile. ¶
These Scarface posters are amazing (make sure you look in close), reproducing all 300 pages of script. Alanah did a series of Alice in Wonderland drawings in a similar style, we'll see about getting them online. ¶
Just wanted to post a few photos from the roll of film I got back recently. They’re not news to those valiant flickr stream observers, but my posts over there aren’t as freqent with the semi-broken digital camera.
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E. W. Dijkstra Archive features a compilation of his various manuscripts. The founding father of computer science believed it was a scientist's duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. And he followed through. ¶
Notice the ads on this site? Probably not. Advertising has been one of those things that has been hard to nail down properly on the web. What works for some won’t work for others. Not to mention the devious nature that 90% of the ads seem to have; punch the monkey, useless smilies, Windows errors. Most of it is crap.
Google style text-ads are everywhere. You see them arrayed haphazardly across many a templated weblog without too much thought and proceed to read about the webmasters that are disappointed by poor results. I’ve generally avoided slapping a bunch of ads all over this site because people aren’t going to click on them. At least not the regular readers — you’re just punishing them by displaying useless ads on your site. The people coming in via search engine are a different matter though. They’re transient, have little attachment to the site and are looking for something specific anyway. I don’t really mind showing them pseudo-random search-engine generated ads. And that’s what I’m doing.
Search Engines and WordPress
How do you go about doing something like this? For WordPress, I hacked together a plugin using Ryan Boren’s Search Hilite as a base. It’s kind of ugly, could be done better and I’m not going to support it. But I’ll make it available if you want a basic building block for your site — download.
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Shoot the Monkey is a popular physics demo (watch the video), that demonstrates projectile motion. Here's a java simulation of the experiment. ¶
The Paratrooper mountain bike from Montague is lightweight and foldable; designed with jumping out of a plane in mind. It would also be pretty handy size for an apartment or throwing in a car. ¶
Monkeyfilter's wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of mp3 weblogs, enough to keep you nice and busy for awhile. ¶
The Mascots for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing have been announced. They're adorable little cartoon characters. That said, the only thing that scares me more than the one holding a pistol (or the one holding a sword) is the one holding a pistol and sword, riding a horse. ¶
I haven’t posted much material related to Intelligent Design, mostly because the argument seems so stupid. It shouldn’t even be called an argument. This Esquire article (full text) was too good to pass up though. It focuses on Intelligent Design, but also touches on the broader dumbing down of America.
The Creation Museum ranks up there as one of my favourites from this whole debacle. This is a photo of one of their displays, featuring a giraffe and Adam naming a Sabertooth tiger. Nice kitty.
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The NGDC has some interesting global relief and mapping materials available including an origami earth (and dodecahedron). ¶
An article describing a recent push of wines from the Rhone Valley. I spent a couple weeks there in high-school, that's when I started to enjoy wine. Picked up a bottle of the Perrin Reserve last night, it's damn good. ¶
Empire's list of the 50 greatest independent films. I've seen 17 out of 50. ¶
The I/O Brush out of MIT is a amazing to watch. It uses a ccd embedded in the brush to record video images that are used as the palette for subsequent strokes. Just watch the video is mind-blowing; it would be awesome to see a room full of kids using it. ¶
Piero has posted a new 5Q interview with Paul B. Drohan of D5ive for Seal Club. ¶
The Atlas of North American English is a new book by Dr. William Labov, that constitutes the first coast-to-coast mapping of the major dialects spoken in the US and Canada. There is a draft chapter and a number of maps available at the UPenn site. ¶
It's worth reading girls don't exist on the intarweb, a take on online gaming from a woman's perspective. I'm not surprised by the negative reception she gets, it's kind of sad though. The rest of the issue also deals with women in gaming. Alanah schools me in most of the games that we play; I have no doubts about female gaming ability. Guys would probably notice their asses getting kicked more often if they produced games that women actually wanted to play. ¶
Some famous people who are known for other things. Bruce Dickinson is the frontman for Iron Maiden. He also flies commercial jets, is a novelist and a fencing expert. ¶
Eisenhower was elected president 53 years ago. Worthy of note, mostly because he agreed to appear in my header graphic. ¶
Particletree offers a typography crash course roundup of the better type-related tools and information available. ¶
Unofficially, November is National Beard month. If you're considering face-fuzz, The Morning News offers a run down of the basic beard styles (or Wikipedia). If the benefits of beard growth alone aren't worth it and you need some sort of reward, I suggest working towards an entry for the 2007 World Beard and Moustache Championship. Lastly, if you need inspirational support for your archipelago nightmares, you could try visiting the beard group or the Team USA weblog. ¶
Here's a brief tutorial for creating that worn, weathered, stamped look. ¶
This may be faulty logic, but follow me through. The Globe and Mail is supposed to be Canada’s high-brow, more intelligent newspaper, the New York Times of Canuckland if you will. As such, you will find me doing the challenge crossword on any given day of the week (like any good igloo-dwelling citizen). Now, we all know the Times invented the crossword, but they stay away from cryptics — it promotes a weird level of pomposity. For good cryptics, you want to turn to the New Yorker and Fraser Simpson (he authors the Saturday cryptic in the Globe).
So, what does all this newspaper name-dropping have to do with comics? Well, the Globe publishes a view comics next to their challenge cryptics. We can only assume that’s it’s some vain attempt at reproducing the cerebral air of the New Yorker’s strip. Long story short, the Backbench comic next to the cryptic wasn’t particularly funny until I made a few changes. See if you can spot them!
This image is something I threw together tonight. There wasn't really any purpose, that's why it's in junk over at Seal Club. Just one of those photoshop experiments that ended up looking kind of cool. ¶
The women of curling are gaining greater exposure via their nude calendar (insert obligatory playing with rocks joke here). You can purchase the calendar via The Curling News. They also have a weblog about the sport; it offers some details about the calendar and today's media response. ¶
