Archive for the 'geekery' Category

Web comics are a great way to escape the dullness of work for a moment. If you’re just starting to read a comic that has been around for some time, it is actually possible to spend an afternoon enjoying the development of characters’ personalities and the comic artists’ drawing skills while clicking through hundreds of comic strips. For the geeks, bicycling aficionados, and hip indie rockers among my dear readership, i can heartily suggest taking a look at xkcd, Yehuda Moon, and Questionable Content. Take your time.

On my old email address (word at anarchitect dot org) i get a lot of spam these days. So i thought i discontinue it, as i don’t use it that often anymore anyway. I added this auto-reply so that my contacts that don’t have my new address are directed to the right location and nasty spammers would not just parse it from the auto-reply message:

I have suspended using this Email address.
Please, go to my contact page to get in touch with me.
Thanks for your understanding!

…………………………………………………..

I habe dieses Emailadresse eingestellt. Um mit mir in
Kontakt zu tretten, benutze bitte dieses Formular.
Vielen Dank für dein Verständnis!

…………………………………………………..

Terminé usar esa e-mail. Por favor, visite esta pagina
para poner en contacto conmigo.
Gracias por tu comprensión.

Only problem is that spammers use existing sender addresses they found on the Web. Hence, my auto-responder would automatically increase spam-caused traffic and annoyances for those whose email address was hijacked. Therefor i will just discontinue the mailbox silently and hope that people that want to reach me would remember my name and search for it and would somehow come to this page.

And by the way: this is, of course, proof of my capitulation to the state of email these days. It seems as if email is broken, yet, it still works well enough considering its importance and relevance in professional and personal communication. May somebody have mercy and fix it?

Joe just mentioned the usefulness of tape reminding me of what John Miller said about duct tape to motivate us volunteers at the WWW conference taping cables on carpets:

Duct tape is like the force in Star Wars. It has a bright and a dark side and it holds the universe together.

Verrückt, was alles so im Browser geht: jetzt zum Beispiel auch ein kleines orangenfarbenes Unisexfigürchen so Straszen entlang. Es zeigt an, wo mensch sich auf Googles Straszenkarte befindet und: in welche Richtung mensch schaut. Denn statt einfach nur Straszenkarten mit Satellitenbildern zu mischen, packt Google mit Street View jetzt auch noch Panoramen in die Karten mit rein. Die kleine stilisierte Figur kann dann über die Karte gezogen werden, während es stilvoll die Beine in die entsprechende Richtung ob des Fliegens wegen anwinkelt. Aber noch cooler ist es, damit auf Straszen und Plätze entlang zu schlendern und mal nach rechts und mal nach links zu schauen… Verrückte Welt.

via Spreeblick: Google Street View

If you are involved in Web development in any way there is usually a point in the timeline of a project where you want to see what our dear Internet Explorer is doing with the pages that have worked just fine in your browser of choice and even for the W3C’s validators. Well, if you happen to be using a non-Windows platform chances are that you don’t have an IE at hand – let alone different versions.

NetRenderer to the rescue! The German company GEOTEK offers a service that renders Web pages on the fly in IE 5.5, 6 or 7 as PNGs. So there is almost no need for VirtualPC/Parallels/etc anymore. While you will only see the upper 740 pixels of the page in question and are not able to interact with it you can still check if positioning and basic styles work out fine. Very handy i must say. Something i have looked for for quite some time.

You can make it even more handy if you are using things like Sogudi for Safari or Firefox’s Quick Search. Typing “ie http://www.anarchitect.org” into the addressbar would then show the page at NetRenderer as rendered by IE.

The makers of the DRM mechanism for HD-DVDs really had a sense for how colors work in combination. The hexadecimal string of numbers that is used to decrypt a copy-protected HD-DVD can be turned into a very appealing set of colors. So if you are wondering what kind of colors you want to apply to your next website project, t-shirt design, or stencil you can turn to this code.

Note also the recent revolt at Digg.com some days ago around the issue of publishing the code or not.

via information aesthetics: HD-DVD hex color themes

Wow, that is just awesome. The makers of BibDesk, a wonderful open source bibliography manager, have just released Skim, an application that allows you to annotate, highlight, and evalue scientific papers that come as PDFs. The tagline of Skim is “stop printing and start skimming.” That is actually something i have looked for for a long time. Skim follows an interesting approach and takes reading papers to a new level. It has got some pretty neat features – read what one of the developers Michael O McCracken has to say about it in his blog. Also try it out if you have Mac OS X running. I can’t wait to include Skim into my reading/writing workflow. My internship thesis comes out in it really well ;)

via Brent Simmons: Announcing Skim

In the time of fully 3d animated movies i think stop motion videos constitute a very distinctively charming alternative. It’s mind boggling what people do with thousands of photo stills stringed together to stop motion goodness. Regardless if they do it with drawings, clay figures, or with photos from the ‘real world’. Some of these you probably already know. Here is a quick write down of those who kept me from doing more important things the last days.

Graphical and drawn

• Minilogue/hitchhikers choice
• Post-It
• NO Boundaries

‘Real world’

• Tony vs. Paul
• The Last Laugh
• My Animated World
• antihero699

Reenacting vintage computer games

• Retro Games in Stop Motion
• Using teelights
• Space Invaders crowd

Clay and other material

• Bathroom Bob
• Eyeheadman and the Self-Portrait
• Eigendynamik
• My Chair
• Retro Games in Stop Motion

Not to mention the countless Wallace & Gromit clips on YouTube…

Doing research (read: googling away) on library information science i stumbled upon radical, militant librarians defending access, privacy, and freedom. This button was recently created by the American Library Association in the light of a special section of the Patriot Act. Oklahoma based Janet has got a lot more gear on her Cafépress shop called Radical Militant Librarians Unite! - Good stuff. Now back to work.