Five minutes of rocking [a day] would be enough, because it would be five minutes more than just about anyone else.
— Seth Godin. This is one of the things I try to remind myself when I’m sweating programming or writing or something else — the fact that you actually think and care about getting good at this stuff means you’re already ahead of 90% of the pack. Not that I’m congratulating myself. But still.
Idea
Idea: a t-shirt, on the front of which is an Alien (you know, the one in-between the facehugger and the holy-shit-that-thing-is-fucking-huge stages) bursting out from what is seemingly the wearer’s chest.
No jokes, no witty one-liner on the back, no snarky cross-reference to a video game — just a simple homage to a classic film.
(I did 0.0 research before I posted this — if this already exists, link me up — I’d probably buy one in a flash.)
Reverse Garage Sale
MM: I also like the idea of what I would call the Reverse Garage Sale, which is: I place an ad, and then maybe I just bring a whole lot of stuff to your house and we hang out for a while. You get a few rolls of nickels, you brew some coffee, and we argue about the value of what I have for a few minutes. There’s nothing that says that it has to be my garage we have the sale in.
SS: That’s good. I like a reverse.
MM: Maybe, maybe I go to your work or job site. Maybe repeatedly. “Hey, you seem pretty interested in that CB — you off work soon?”
From Mr. Owl
An Excerpt From Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland, performed by Matthew Perry
Matthew Perry recorded the audio version of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. I love the book (so does Joel Spolsky), and I like Matthew Perry (I really wish Studio 60 got a second season), so it’s a pretty good fit.
The only copy of this audiobook that Amazon has is on cassettes. It’s also $124USD. If you don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for an out-of-print cassette tape, I happen to know that you can get an MP3 version of the audiobook to fall off the back of a cyber-truck. You know where to look for it.
Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t already seen it (and even if you have), you need to go and watch this horrendous Windows 95 instructional video starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. It’s 30 minutes long, and it is hilariously bad.
It’s a start.
Got the must-make-something bug again. Maybe I’ll have something new in a day or two.
Previous & Next
We read letters, words, lines and pages in a book from left to right. However, with a blog, someone is writing a “book” and the homepage is where the author is up to in writing the book, so the reader starts at the “back” of the book.
To progress forward and read more, the reader has to go backwards through the book. That’s why navigating pages is a problem on a blog.
In the screenshot above, tell me where clicking on either of those buttons will take me. If I click “Previous,” will I see newer posts or older posts? “Previous” could refer to the time of publication (“posts published previously,” indicating older posts) or to a direction (left, back towards where you started, meaning back towards the homepage, towards newer posts). It could refer to your history (things you were looking at previously) or the blog’s (things published previously). It’s ambiguous.
The solution: don’t be ambiguous. Somewhere, indicate that “hey, this link goes to older stuff, and this link goes to newer stuff.” Some people make the word “older” the actual link, some have arrows be the link and have “older” be the title-text. Whatever you do, don’t just write the words “previous” and “next.” (Alternatively, you could do away with pages altogether and navigate in a Tumblr-esque endless scrolling manner.)
My name’s Scott, and I took 1 (one) whole usability course at university.
http://www.martinjetpack.com/ →
And people say we’re not in The Future yet.
http://github.com/philc/vimium →
Chrome + Vim = Vimium.
Vimium is a Chrome extension that provides keyboard based navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.
Tried it this morning and it works great. If Chrome was my main browser, I’d probably be all over this.
4%
Wikipedia on converting 24p to PAL:
The most popular method [of converting] is to speed up the material by 25/24 (4%). […] As for audio, the ~4% increase in speed raises the pitch by 0.7 of a semitone.
That speed increase doesn’t happen with Blu-ray or DVD, but I get it on television where I live (Australia is a PAL region). I’ve noticed that pitch variance very occasionally.
I can’t help but think that online video distribution will fix these kinds of technical issues. There’s no need to convert to PAL or NTSC or whatever when it’s just 1s and 0s going across a network, right?
I scratched my own itch again. Throttle is a little Mac OS X app I wrote that (surprise!) throttles your Mac’s bandwidth.
It’s a little spartan (not Spartan) at the moment, but it works.
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator →
Converts font files (.ttf, .otf) into EOT and SVG fonts.
Context: the only monospaced programmer-y font on the iPhone is Courier New. How could I let a site involving Mac and iPhone software development be rendered in Courier New?
Point is, SVG font + @font-face = Monaco on the iPhone. Boom.
[[NSPodcast alloc] init];
If I was going to host a podcast about Mac OS X and iPhone software development, y’know what I’d call it?
I explain a little bit more on the site, but I’m considering making a show for and about Mac/iPhone software development. Not a big thing — just some interviews with developers that I think make neat software. I think that’s a reasonable goal to shoot for.
More news on NSPodcast as it happens.
http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/ →
Hex Color Picker from waffle software (the same group that did Google+Growl, a nifty little program I use every day) adds another tab to the Mac OS X Color Picker for dealing with colors in terms of hex values, a system more familiar to programmers and web designers than a box of crayons.
It works really well and it’s free. Try it.
Computer: internet.
From Men in Black II (2002).
Mac OS X v10.1, I think. That QuickTime icon looks about right.
