Shopper’s Drug Mart will be selling sex toys in the near future. See that Mr. Intellectual Rag? That’s what you get for moving Omar to national news. I used to run Canada’s other national newspaper and know about the filth he spews forth.
Styling thumbnail photos
A few people have been asking about how I style the images in the sidebar and I’ve been lazy in replying. Basically, we just need a list of images and then apply a few css style to it.
For the flickrRSS crowd, go into the options panel and set before image to <li> and after image to </li>. In your sidebar code/template/whatever wrap your flickrRSS function in a list. We also want to add a <div> so we can style the list. It will end up looking something like this:
<div id="flickr">
<ul><?php get_flickrrss(); ?></ul>
</div>
That’s it on the html front. It’s the styling that’s left. There are two essential things that we want to do, remove the bullets and remove the breaks. These two bits of css should take care of that:
#flickr ul { list-style: none; }
#flickr ul li { display: inline; }
Everything beyond that is gravy. Personally, I take all the margins and padding off the list and then style the images with a thing border and a bit of padding. My code looks something along the lines of:
#flickr ul, #flickr ul li { padding: 0; margin: 0; border: 0; }
#flickr a img { border: 1px #ccc solid; padding: 3px; margin: 5px 3px 0px; }
#flickr a:hover img { border: 1px #999 solid; }
That’s pretty much it. You could start doing fancy things like backgrounds, fading the picture on hover, etc. But we’ll leave that as an exercise in Google research. There may be better ways to do it, you’re welcome to comment.
Koala’s are Evil
Caught the Kid Koala show at the Elixir last night. He’s pretty sick. You watch him standing up there mixing, he’ll put something on, smile to himself and turn around to grab something else. Thirty seconds later you know why he’s smiling. It’s the bits of Radiohead or Monty Python’s Holy Grail or whatever.
My camera was being a bit flakey, but I grabbed a few decent photos. I also caught a bit of video footage of him doing his trumpet thing, it’s about 24 seconds long. Here it is for download:
Google circa 1998
Google circa 1998. Kickin it old-school, Stanford style.
Wild new Nintendo controller
Nintendo has revealed the design of the controller for the new Revolution console. It’s designed to be one handed — essentially a remote with tilt-sensors that allows for a wide variety of interaction. All I can say is wow.
Kurt Vonnegut’s list
Kurt Vonnegut’s list of “Liberal Crap I Never Want to Hear Again” from his appearance on the Daily Show. The episode is one of the funniest I’ve seen; Helms’ helper monkey is great.
Dead Man’s Float
Why do bodies float facedown in the water? Looks like the end is near for Katrina coverage. We will soon return to your regularly scheduled political squabbles and faceless foreign wars.
Microsoft Gadgets
Microsoft has introduced Gadgets, their forray into the world of desktop widgets. I’m not claiming that Apple has the most original thing in the world going with the Dashboard (see Konfabulator) but at least they both call them widgets. For some reason, Microsoft has chosen a name that is 70% similar but not quite the same.
I’ll give them the sidebar, I saw it demoed for my HCI class years ago and thought it was pretty cool. But they ditched it part way through Longhorn. This is called putting widgets into the OS and dressing them up with research that they’ve already done.
Also, start.com is kind of weird. Microsoft has added this statement at the bottom for clarity:
This site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.
An incubation experiment! Pod people! Yea. There’s also an Office 12 demo video, it’s over 400mb for the cautious.
Pick a colour, any color
Marc offers a quick rundown of websites to help with your colour picking needs. Especially useful if you’re given a base-colour to start with and need to work around it.
FontExplorerX
Linotype has released a new free font management tool called FontExplorerX. I never committed to a tool on mac and have maintained a pretty pathetic list of fonts over the last year. More speculation about the nature of the beast.
TV IV Wiki
If you were a fan of the old tvtome before it was absorbed into tv.com, you should check out the TV IV wiki
Minty Fresh
I decided to buy Mint for eightface in the wee hours of the morning last night. It’s been out for awhile now, so I’m sure the post title is clever and original. For those living under rocks or those who don’t care about websites, it’s essentially a statistics package that allows you to see who is visiting your site.
Dreamhost includes Analog on all hosted domains, so it’s easy enough to get a rough daily statistics breakdown. It might not be enough, depends what your needs are though — the scope of analog is fairly broad and it’s a little on the cryptic side but it suits most people fine. If you’re one of the new-age blog freaks that lives on the 0-day edge and lusts after technorati and the like, Mint is right up your alley.
Like most web-apps these days, Mint is extensible with a plugin and api structure. If you offer up any files on your site, it’s probably worth getting the Pepper plugin download counter, which does pretty much what it says. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, check out the Pepper forum for more.