Speed Racer
March 14, 2008
Man, think this might be really good: Speed Racer
Run Firefox 2.0 and 1.5 side by side | Muffin Research Labs by Stuart Colville. For both Windows and Mac.
In Drug Test - A Cautionary Tale, Stuart Stevens works with a doctor to see what it’s like to use performance enhancing drugs.
headphono.us - A blatant ripoff of the beautiful and near-iconic design of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Says John: “The only change made to the CSS was to remove my name and copyright statement.”
Note: This site is proudly formatted in Markdown and I’m a proud supporter of Gruber’s efforts at professional blogging. Update: The owner of the site has changed the site and apologized to dawn.
The Vintage Mac Museum - Lots and lots of screenshots of 9" Mac screens. I’ve always felt that System 7 on a black and white screen was one of the best computer experiences ever.
Flickr user Lockwasher creates rayguns, rockets, and robots from scrap metal and the occasional thermos.
CAPL: Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon is an online dictionary of German (only about a thousand words) that shows images with the words. More on the about page.
Google introduces a new page creation tool, Google Page Creator (not Poogle?), in beta, natch. Free, 100MB storage, templates, super simple. Quicker to start than Blogger (for me). Which brings up a question? Where will this fit with Blogger? Just a different market? Will Blogger be the premium service and this the ultra-basic?
Chameleon: an icon set from SimpleBits that changes color. Similar to the set linked below, but with a couple of significant differences:
Clearbits is a set of 121 small icons for web sites and web applications. The background color and shape are configured through CSS. Pretty nice. I think something similar using PNG translucency would work well, too, especially if IE7 gets that stuff sorted out.
defective yeti: Shares Of ACME Corp. Plunged In After-Hours Trading. This not funny, except that it is hilarious.
Dustin Diaz’s getElementsByClass Javascript function is a swell piece of work. Not only will it find all the elements of a given class on a page, but you can tell it to look only in a certain node (it defaults to document) and only for certain tags (it defaults to *). Be sure to also take a look at Top 10 custom JavaScript functions of all time.
From Will Durst: The George W Bush 2006 State of the Union drinking game. Plus fondue! With Li’l Smokies!
Dan Sandler on the true nature of evil. He makes a good point.
Consumer Reports on which kinds of products are worth buying organic. Pretty much what we do, and it also highlights the pitfalls of the “organic” buzzword (lack of certification standards for seafood, for example).
From Creating Passionate Users, a Crash course in learning theory. This is good and timely. I’m about to start teaching web development to public school teachers.
“Hardcore was more than music — it was a social movement created by Reagan-era misfit kids. The participants constituted a tribe unto themselves — some finding a voice, others an escape in the hard-edged music; some sought a better world, others were just angry and wanted to raise hell.”
I know some of the Texas folks that are going to be featured in this film, and played shows with most of the Texas bands at one point or another. I hope the movie is good.
“ ‘ Random Screen’ is a mechanical thermo dynamic display which does not rely on any electricity.” Cubes with one transluscent side that each hold a single tea candle with a specially cut beer can that displays or hides the light according to the heat from the candle. Very pretty.
If only Katie Holmes had thought of this. David Letterman subject of restraining order — Woman says she sent ‘thoughts of love,’ talks of ‘code words’.
From the brilliant folks at Icon Buffet comes Free Delivery. Sign up and get a pack of icons from every month. For free!
From Elias Fotinis, TaskArrange: Arrange the Windows taskbar buttons. Works as advertised. I have a 21” monitor and if I close Outlook and reopen it for some reason, then it moves all the way from the left to the right and I find that I have to visually scan for it before I can select it. It would be ideal if I could tell Windows “Always put Outlook on the far left, no matter what else is open, and always put Query Analyzer next to Enterprise Manager, no matter where Enterprise Manager is”, but this program gets me halfway there, since I tend to leave programs running for days at a time.
The Society for HandHeld Hushing, presented by Coudal Partners and Aaron Draplin. My wife is going to be so happy.
Nice gallery of Buck Rogers comics covers from Australia
RemoteCalendars, an Outlook 2003 plug-in to interact with iCalendars. Holy cow. Finally. Download from sourceforge.
Recording and Releasing an Independent Record, Part Two. As hoped for.
Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours. A snazzy idea, and a nice way to use JavaScript without littering your page with <script> tags.
Dr. Doom’s Top Ten Euphemism for Sex from Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin.
Interviewing Hell from Bookslut. Wherein Richard Hell lays it out for a young writer in no uncertain terms.
From Veer comes the Kern Zip-up, possibly the best piece of design geek clothing I’ve ever seen.
Waiting Patiently. I found this photo while I was waiting patiently for something and I just love it. Such a great face, and the extra umbrella just makes the whole thing.
A completely immature and completely satisfying story of a group of people getting Scott Stapp to chase some tail across the United States. Godspeed, you dorks.
Joseph Hathaway imparts some lessons learned from recording and releasing an independent record. This is called “Part One”. I hope there will be a “Part Two”.
The truth about Google’s so-called “simplicity” from Don Norman happens to expand on this post very nicely.
John Maeda has a series of screenshots comparing the evolution of Google and Yahoo! from 1996 to now. It’s an interesting comparison, and he says up front that it’s not an exhaustive study, but one thing that isn’t mentioned is that from the beginning, Yahoo! was a categorized index first, then a search engine.
If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop? – more Google Maps madness.
The McKee Recursion: An academic curiosity, prepared by the author immediately after sending out his graduate school application. [via]
On April 24, 2005, Heavy Trash volunteers deposited bright orange viewing platforms in front of three Los Angeles gated communities; Brentwood Circle, Park La Brea and Laughlin Park. The purpose of these viewing platforms is to draw attention to the phenomenon of gated communities — the fastest growing form of housing in the United States. “There are now more than 1 million homes behind such walls in the greater Los Angeles area alone,” according to Setha Low, a professor at the City University of New York.
Hong Kong is Metropolis. Or the Matrix. Or Blade Runner’s LA. Or the Sprawl from William Gibson’s early work. These picture of Hong Kong are stunning. I would love to go there some day, but I can’t imagine living in it. I think I’m too used to the idea that I live in a state with a population density of one person per square mile.
Over at Illustration Friday a topic is posted every Monday and then participants have all week to come up with their own interpretation. Nice. [via]
Low-Literacy Users on the Web. Some interesting statistics and, of course, low-balling expectations. Possibly safe, but is it right?
Speak Truth to Power. A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence: A Study of International Conflict Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee. (There’s a much bigger story behind the guy who posted this, but I haven’t looked into it yet. You can start with the “via” link and work your way back from there. [via]
Jason Kottke goes pro. Good luck. I think he stands a decent chance.
Six Apart consolidates the web sites for all their products and redesigns. Nice work by Mule Design.