Category: Interesting

Reading and Watching Material

Have some links and some videos (videos after the jump):

Top free Mac apps for Graphic Designers (though there are a load of apps there that would be useful for non-designers as well).
That fancy new iPhone4 has a glaring flaw with its antenna. It works great, as long as you don’t hold it wrong. More on Gizmodo.
A lorem ipsum tool that generates readable text.
Entertaining Facebook thread for text-adventure geeks.
Remember that whole fiasco with Conan getting kicked off and Leno getting his time slow back? Hasn’t worked out so well, as his ratings are lower than Conan’s.
If you’re prepping to launch a web site, you’d best go over these two checklists to make sure you’ve got everything covered.
No idea how well it works, but here’s a quick tool to convert spreadsheets into HTML tables.
Google Voice is now open for all (it will be tremendously useful to me when they get number portability).
Five awesome tools for Freelancers for Time Management.
The hilarious story of one woman’s attempt at running in the NCAA West Regional 5,000m race. As somebody’s who’s tried to run a race before when I was horribly sick, I feel her pain.
That Steve Martin guy is high maintenance when he’s on tour.
I just need a poster for my lost kitty. Why is that so hard?
How to setup OpenID on your own domain (here’s how to do it with a fallback provider).
YouTube gets a Vuvuzela button.

Videos after the jump …

June 24, 2010

What Has Netflix Found For You?

One of the great things about Netflix (we’re subscribers, love it) is its ability to have it recommend shows and movies based on what you rated. We primarily watch a ton of TV shows from Netflix as we just find them more entertaining many times (and it’s easier to watch in shorter chunks of time). I was talking to Owen at Mug Revolution the other day about Netflix stuff, and made me wonder what Netflix is introducing to everybody else. So here are a few that Netflix said we’d like and we certainly have.

Spooks: Holy crap this is a brilliantly written show that needs to hurry up and get its tenth season up and going. If you want great spy action, suspense, etc.., this is a great show for you. Just don’t get too attached to any character in the show, as nobody’s safe from getting killed/removed is some awful way. Netflix doesn’t have all the seasons — you’ll have to find other ways to get those.
Hustle: We just started watching this one and have enjoyed it so far.
Foyle’s War is one of the greatest detective dramas I’ve ever seen. Great show, and glad they put out a seventh series (just finished watching it last night).
Chuck: Never watched this show on TV as it came on during a time where we were watching something else (usually House), but I’m really enjoying this show.
Hamish Macbeth was an entertaining show, though the last season got a bit weird.
Pushing Daises: That was obviously suggested to us because we five-starred Wonderfalls and we pretty much like most of what Bryan Fuller has done.
The Lost Room could have easily been a much longer mini-series, but it was still quite interesting.

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. So what gems did you not know about had it not been for Netflix?

June 16, 2010

Reading Material

While I’m still probably going to get an Android phone when my contract is up, Windows Mobile still can be hacked to bits quite easily thanks to XDA_UC, which you can dump your settings and custom files and such that will install automagically after the ROM flash. the ROM I enjoy supports it quite easily and in a user-friendly way. Now that Task29 is supported on my phone, I’m less likely to have flashing trouble (though I rarely did — as I always just did the Flash Dance, just in case).
Five Ridiculous Gun Myths Everybody Believes, Thanks To Hollywood.
How can I get into this line of work? Chinese companies are looking to rent white guys as fake businessmen.
Speaking of white things, one designer’s problem with white space.
Here’s an interesting commentary about the outsourcing low-cost lie.
How much surface area would it take to power the world with solar power? Not much, though it doesn’t obviously take into account the transport of said electricity, which doesn’t work well over the stupidly long distances they’re talking about.
Want to permanently delete your account on popular websites? Some make it easier than others (and it’s just impossible on a few).
Want to write a citizen’s traffic ticket? It’s legal in many states. Here’s a step-by-step (with pretty pictures) on how to do it in Oregon.
Great little basic programming lessons that cam from a great SubReddit.
A 14-year-old tries to help a three-year-old find her mom, and now faces felony abduction charges.
You know your hex color codes? Do you?
Need to bulk download Flickr photos? Here ya go: Use Bulkr.
Hassle-free guide to ripping your Blu-Ray collection.
Oldie, and I may have linked to it before, but here are some great free typographic XHMTL/CSS layouts.
Huge list of jQuery calandar plugins (mostly booking marking that for my reference).
Comic Sans, the font that everybody loves to hates, is the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes f—–g Gutenberg.

June 15, 2010

Sometimes It’s Cheaper to Sneaker-net It

Is it cheaper to upload all your data to Amazon’s cloud storage service over the Internet or FedEx them the hard drives and let them do it? Amazon will figure out the cheapest way to do it.

June 14, 2010

Reading Material

Apparently Hollywood has only one prop newspaper and it’s used in a ton of shows and movies. It’s like the Wilhelm scream of the prop world.
One of these days I’m going to get an Android phone. Some Android reading: 10 Things Android does better than iPhone (though some of these are moot after yesterday), the new HTC Evo (I want, I want) was rooted before it was officially released, and why Android fragmentation might be its downfall.
CSS3 and HTML5 will take over the world. Or something: 48 Potential Flash-Killing Demos, Easy Link Prefetching, a bunch of good CSS3 techniques you can use right now, Apple’s HTML5 showcase (Safari only, which is silly), and 10+ Free HTML5/CSS3 templates to start with. If you’re wondering why you should care about HTML5, see this pretty graphic (and see how MSIE isn’t even remotely ready).
With the iPad getting as popular as it is, :hover might become worthless. Speaking of designing for the iPad, you’re going to have to take into consideration what happens to your design when the screen is rotated — here’s some CSS to help you out.
How the U.S. Government Killed the Safest Car Ever Built.
What’s the worst-case scenario for the gulf oil spill? Let’s ask Michael Bay.
Wired News (and Adrian Lamo) report alleged Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” video leaker.
What happens when you add Alka-Seltzer to a drop of water in microgravity?
More videos: Steve Jobs introduces the Death Star, Super Mario 64 Avoid the 1-Up and collect the red coins challenge .
Mapping the damn tourists.
Open source tools for working with dual monitors.
Notepad++ is moving off SourceForge because of an idiotic decision by SourceForge.
LifeHacker Pack 2010: Essential Windows Downloads (I really need to update my list).
32 Incredible Bookmarklets for your browser.

June 8, 2010

Reading Material

How much oil has leaked into the Gulf? Depending who you ask, between 504,000 and 4,200,000 gallons per day.
Complete guide to cross-browser compatibility check tools.
HD 101: Overscan and why all TVs do it.
Typografix: HTML re-processing script for typographic beautification.
Some controversial billboards.
Why Gmail is awesome — it’s the little things.
Remember when Google celebrated the Pac Man birthday? One analysis says it took 4,819,352 hours of productivity away from the world.
Flash player built entirely in JavaScript, and they’ve got it running StrongBad.
Our Solar System in CSS3 animation (look at it in Chrome or Safari).
everystockphoto for searching for free stock photos.
15 must-read articles for CSS beginners.
Google to Employees: Mac or Linux, but no more Windows.
NSFW ASCII Art (it looks like nothing — but select/highlight/ctrl-a all of it).
What your email address says about your computer skills.

May 31, 2010

Sewell Minideck USB External Video Card Is A Handy Little Device — And You Can Win One

When Sewell contacted me, asking if I’d review their Sewell Minideck USB to DVI adapter, I honestly had no idea such a product existed. Basically, it’s an external video card that plugs into your USB port and gives you an additional monitor interface. Most laptops can support two monitors out of the box (via an external monitor port) and many desktops can easily do so with a cheap add-in card. But if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to add a secondary screen to a computer without monkeying with the innards of a computer, this thing works pretty dang well. Read on for the full review and a chance to win one for yourself…

(more…)

May 30, 2010

Boy That’s Big

Seagate is planning by year’s end to be selling 3TB (that’s 3000 gigabyte) hard drives. The problem? They won’t work properly with many operating systems.

May 20, 2010

Facebook Privacy Made Easy

To manage your privacy on Facebook, you’ll need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. It’s a mess of options. There’s a bookmarklet you can run on your profile that will lock down a bunch of this for you.

After you adjust your Facebook settings, just make sure you don’t Facebook and drive.

May 18, 2010

KTVZ Has A New Web Site

Personally, I think their new design is a helluva lot better than their old one. I’m glad they replaced the front page story rotation Flash and replaced it with DHTML, and it appears their RSS feed actually includes all the stories now. However, all the KTVZ.com stories I’ve linked to are now dead. Unfortunately it appears that all links to their old site went dead because of the new CMS. I personally think this is more of a big deal than most people believe, and did express that to Barney when he was talking to me about the new site last week. The 404 error page is mostly worthless, too, as it doesn’t include anything remotely useful to help folks get back to the front page now that every link to a non-front page from prior to today is now dead. When a CMS is changed on a major content site, I know not all URLs can be saved, but the 404 page should at least be useful to find the new site or old content. That’s probably my biggest gripe, as I typically use Google to find past news content usually linked to from blogs and such, and now I won’t be able to find anything on KTVZ.com without using their search engine. And since their search engine doesn’t include past stories (at least right now), then what happens? A good 404 with built-in search could help alleviate this problem.

Otherwise, the site is much faster loading and a much cleaner design. It doesn’t have a favicon in place like the last one did, and it could use some code tweaks here and there, but otherwise much better than before.

Their mobile URL doesn’t appear to work anymore (again, lack of useful 404), and mobile.ktvz.com is…well … weird. It looks like a default subdomain setup for the company’s clients, not something personalized for KTVZ. I did like their simple mobile news site for news updates on the go, so hopefully something useful will be implemented in the future.

What do you think? Likes, dislikes, gripes, etc…?

May 12, 2010

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