Retrieve a discarded water bottle. Tear off the label and fill with any water that’s not too murky from a creek, standpipe, or puddle. Place the bottle on a piece of metal in full sun. In six hours the UVA radiation will kill viruses, bacteria, and parasites in the water, making it safe to drink.
Clever.
(via NGM Blog Central - High Marks for Clean Water - National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com)
The brilliant Paul Irish built a CSS3 rule generating web app that he calls, “CSS3, Please!” Using automated vendor specific code, you can make
box-shadow,gradient,rgba, evenrotate, work in IE, Mozilla and WebKit.The great news is that this is merely version 1.0. Read his write-up on PaulIrish.com.
So good.
Land of the Long White Cloud - Movie Trailer
The Maori name for ‘New Zealand’ is 'Aotearoa’, which means 'Land of the long white cloud’.
This trailer of a lovely documentary is about a fishing competition and its participators on the 90 Mile Beach at the top of New Zealand’s North Island.
You learn - amongst other things - that fishermen also follow the KISS principle. ;-)
“If you’re not sure of what you love, that means you can be talked out of it, and that’s a slippery slope.”– one forty plus.: Depends on Who You Ask.
“– Dan Mall in A List Apart: Articles: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the WebBut we take pride in our technologies. If I’m not striving for my guru ranking in a particular programming language or design style, then what really matters? I’ve hinted at it throughout the whole article, but let me make it painfully obvious.
People.
People matter. Not users, but people. A user is a faceless entity, robotically performing tasks that we test and optimize. A person lives, laughs, cries, loves, hates—and uses the sites and applications we make. My mom. Your five-year-old. His grandfather. Her best friend. Their science class. They don’t tell us how much they appreciate our progressive enhancement or how we use the drawing API or our impeccable use of attribute selectors. They only say that a website was confusing or hard to read or fun to play with. That’s the real motivation for excellence: bringing ease, joy, and fun to the people around us.
”
The Future of Publishing - created by DK (UK) (via PenguinGroupUSA)
(via jkleske)
“The phrase ‘I don’t have time for’ should never be said. We all get the same amount of time every day. If you can’t do something it’s not about the quantity of time. It’s really about how important the task is to you. I’m sure if you were having a heart attack, you’d magically find time to go to the hospital. That time would come from something else you’d planned to do, but now seems less important. This is how time works all the time. What people really mean when they say ‘I don’t have time’ is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.”–
Scott Berkun: The cult of busy (via marco)
There is a lot more good stuff in this article. Go, and read the whole thing!
In computing, memoization is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by having function calls avoid repeating the calculation of results for previously-processed inputs.
In Ruby f.e., this can be achieved with the good old ||= operator.
Alex Stenweiss invented the album cover as we know it to create a new art form:
“I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.”So:
In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months record sales increased by over 800 per cent. His covers for Columbia — combining bold typography with modern, elegant illustrations — took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold. …. He launched the golden age of album cover design and influenced generations of designers to follow.His new book, Alex Steinweiss: Inventor of the Modern Album Cover, was recently honored.
[Image: Alex Steinweiss Bartok, Concerto 3]
CUPERTINO, CA — Experts expressed grave concern for the health of technology journalism this morning, one week after hundreds of tech blogs suffered extreme, adverse reactions to a routine Apple product launch. One witness commented, “they just couldn’t handle it. I don’t think some of these guys will ever recover.” A spokesperson for Engadget said that coverage of the iPad was “critical, but stable,” following emergency procedures. Steve Jobs was not available for comment.
“Computer nerds got a sneak peek at a largely still world that has never made contact with the “higher web,” the silent majority. The ones that don’t know a browser from the internet or what the address bar does, the ones whose web experience is pre-determined by what their homepage is set to. The ones that disregard most information in a desperate attempt to just find something that seems halfway familiar. The users who figure out one way to do something and get overwhelmed if there is more than one way to accomplish a task.”– Frank Chimero has a blog.: The Attack of Momputing
Yeah! What the hell?
Regarding this morning’s amazing occurrence where people who had googled for “facebook login” and got taken to a news story about Facebook then assumed that the news website was Facebook itself…
Flickr user jimwhimpey posted screenshot of login pages for Facebook and MySpace; this resulted in comments from users trying to log in to those websites using small screenshots of them; or even assuming that they’re already on Facebook, talking to their high school friends and hot ladies. There are also spam/scam posts, of course.
And here’s another post about Facebook login with loads of similar comments.
There’s also a small, black market of websites offering to “help you log in to Facebook.” I won’t link to any for obvious reasons; I’ll bet good money they won’t actually help you log in to Facebook.
Is this just an outcome of Facebook’s monstrous popularity? Is it because Facebook redesigns all the time? Is their login form confusing? Note that when you start searching for “trouble log…” on Google, it autocompletes with “…logging into Facebook.” Facebook is also the top suggestion for “can’t log in…”
Man, Facebook - what the hell.
Please read marco’s post on a mindblowing web artifact:
(via Zoya)
Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.
It took me a minute to grok this, since I typically walk around with the conviction that people aren’t THAT naive, but…
What’s apparently happening here is, Facebook users are googling for “facebook login” (because how else are you going to log into Facebook?), clicking the first result (which is sometimes a story about Facebook, on an unrelated site), assuming that the site itself is Facebook, scrolling to the bottom to get to the comment form - still thinking they’re on Facebook - and using the comment form to complain about how this, a wholly different website, is a terrible redesign of Facebook.
I just don’t even know how to start feeling about any of this. It’s like the Twilight Zone episode where you wake up and everyone in the world has started talking a different language.
It’s like… Like if you asked a friend if there was a Starbucks in his neighborhood and he said, yeah I think there’s one half a mile down, maybe. And you drive half a mile and see a big carwash place, and you park and walk in and ask to speak to the manager. And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are with this terrible new Starbucks redesign.
This is shocking. Follow the (title) link to see the comments yourself.
“Clearly, the way Apple approached the iPad was that of course the iPad was going to introduce a new UI. They’re really rather fearless about it, because, I think, they’re so confident in its obviousness. Unfamiliar and new isn’t a problem if the whole thing is obvious and easy to figure out.”– Daring Fireball Linked List: Paul Thurrott, Warming to iPad
