Friday, October 17th, 2008
- Glassbooth – Quiz to help you choose best 2008 presidential candidate
- Glassboth lets you see where each candidate stands in relation to the issues that matter to you through the used of a weighted quiz. Slick interface that I found very easy to use and understand. Even if you’ve alredy made up your mind I recommend you check it out.
- Byline – Google Reader on the go.
- If you use Google Reader, and you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch you should check out Phantom Fish’s Byline. Byline is essentially a Google Reader client that syncs so you don’t need a network connection at all times (and it offers features missing from Googles own iPhone interface, like an oldest post first view). It’s not perfect, but I find it a vastly preferable in most cases to the Google Reader iPhone web interface.
- Shyamalan Talks ‘Unbreakable’ Sequel
- Seems to me that M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t exactly rule it out, but there’s no “it’s happening” in here. Still “Ubreakable” is probably in my top 10 list of films, and I’d love to see where it goes next.
- My Life With Gwen Stacy,Or, How an audiobook narrator redeemed his misspent youth reading comic books by getting to the bottom of the greatest comic book mystery of all time: Who killed Spider-Man’s girlfriend?
- Scott Brick, one of my all time favorite audiobook narrators, recounts the story behind his 1998 Comic Buyer’s Guide article “Who Killed Gwen Stacy?”, which delved into the creative decisions behind killing off Spider-Man’s girlfriend in 1973. Like most of Scott’s posts it’s also available in audio.
- Web 2.Rockstar: The robotic tale of Jonathon Coulton
- Ars Technica offers a nice JoCo primer, and how he succeded where the underpants gnomes failed.
“When I first started the important thing was audience: if I can reach enough people, that’s leverage, or power, and maybe that leads to something that does make money.”
Has some interesting thoughts on labels, and what may replace them in the future.
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Sunday, September 28th, 2008
- jQuery and Microsoft
- When Microsoft started adding some of the often requested features to their ASP.NET AJAX Client API they realized that jQuery (my personal favorite javascript library) already did what they wanted. Rather than reinvent the wheel Microsoft will be shipping the standard, as-is jQuery with full intellisense support in Visual Studio.
- The Creative Process
- “For me, ideas stream through my head at a frantic pace. I feel like a bear trying to grab a salmon. If my paw misses its target, that salmon is gone for good. I don’t dwell on it. I just lunge for the next salmon.” Scott Adams (Dilbert) discusses ideas, and how he sometimes forgets he’s already used them.
- Tip: Using a background image on an image
- Using CSS to create layered images (with a fun animated example). Simple but effective.
- Fresh Out – PDF Version
- Free fun little mini-comic from Natalie Metzger. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll really want some cookies! Ready for printing.
- Sizzle: John Resig has a new selector engine
- Ajaxian brings word that John Resig is working an a new Javascript selector engine, which is expected to replace the one in jQuery. So far it’s less than 4k (but it doesn’t support IE yet). “4x faster in Firefox 3, 3x faster in Opera 9, 1.5x faster in Safari 3 than the other major JavaScript libraries.”
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
- Digital Dickens: How Scott Sigler is changing the way we read
- The Independent (UK) covers the upcoming UK release of Scott Sigler’s “Infected”.
- Leo Laporte Does 24 Hours of iPhone to Over a Quarter Million Viewers
- I always find Leo entertaining. I tuned into this a few times and was amazed at how even with numerous technical faults and no sleep he kept things interesting.
- Human Mirror
- Improve Everwhere fills a subway with identical twins creating a human mirror, and messing with peoples minds.
- Interview: Gaiman, Zelazny and More Coming To Your iPod
- An interview with Steve Feldberg, content director for Audible’s science-fiction/fantasy line Audible Frontiers who have been releasing some very exciting audiobooks (including the upcoming release of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories)
- Story of a Peanut: The TiVo Remote’s Untold Past, Present and Future
- Fascinating history of the TiVo remote.
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Thursday, May 29th, 2008
- IETester
- IETester is a tool that runs the rendering and javascript engines from IE8b1, IE7, IE6, and IE5.5 in a single process so you can see how each one mangles your site in it’s own unique way (currently in beta).
- POC : Implementing HTML 5 Video Element using JavaScript and Flash
- A proof of concept allowing use of the ‘video’ tag from the HTML5 draft spec, and having it work, even though browsers don’t yet support it.
- Audible.com and Blackstone Audio Royalties
- SFFAudio shares some information from Robert J. Sawyer on the royalties he receives from audiobooks.
- Characteristic Confusion
- While investigating line-height Eric Meyer used font-family: Webdings to display “Oy!” (Webdings doesn’t contain ‘O’, ‘y’, or ‘!’). Firefox 3 unexpectedly displayed “Oy!”, which, it seems, is technically correct, leaving him asking “which is less correc
- Growl for Windows – alpha now available
- Growl is one of the three apps that excited me enough to buy a Mac, and it’s one I really miss when I’m on my Windows box.
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Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
- Matthew Wayne Selznick Signs Book Deal
- Author and Podcaster Matthew Wayne Selznick signed a deal with Swarm Press to re-issue his novel “Brave Men Run” in paperback. Congratulations Matt!
- Take notes during phone calls with friends and family
- One of those “that should have been obvious” suggestions. I’ve conditioned my brain to filter out most things that aren’t useful to me right now. This doesn’t mean I’m not interested in people’s anecdotes, and schedules, it just means I’m unlikely to remember them without some reminder.
- Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Hacking transparent PNG support into IE6 with IE PNG Fix, CSS and jQuery
- Ah, IE6. I’m pretty good at getting it to do what I want, but it’s very existence makes most of the things I have to do harder than they should be. This tutorial deals with one of the harder issues, PNG transparency in positioned background images.
- YouTube – Sigler Book Tour (Seattle Q&A) Part2
- In the second part of the video Scott covers such diverse topics as Sci-Fi Channel’s lack of foresight and how when it appears he has made a mistake it is actually sabotage by J.C. Hutchins.
- Sigler Book Tour (Seattle Q&A) Part1
- I’m not lucky enough to live near any of the book stores Scott Sigler was signing at, but luckily Natalie Metzger captured this video of one of the Q & A sessions.
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Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
- INFECTED Trailer
- Amazing film-style trailer for Scott Sigler’s novel Infected (available now in hardcover).
- OverDrive to offer DRM-free audiobooks via Borders: Time to try unshackled e-books, too?
- This can only be good news. OverDrive has an interesting history with DRM. They have always claimed to be unable to work with iPods due to Apple’s proprietary DRM, while failing to make clear they were using Microsoft’s proprietary DRM.
- garfield minus garfield
- Take Garfield (the comic strip) and remove the title character, and you’re left with something darker and disturbingly funny.
- ‘Lego Universe,’ a brick MMO, is in development
- I haven’t been real interested in Massively Multi-Player Online games in a while, but the idea of a Lego based MMO might change that.
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Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
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Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
- jQuery Validation plugin overview
- Examples of how to use the jQuery Validation plugin 1.2 to provide unobtrusive Javascript validation to forms.
- The Dissing of SF
- Ever have someone ask you for a favor and simultaneously insult your career? Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer had this happen twice in one hour, and he posted his responses.
- JavaScript Pretty Date
- John Resig has released a prettyDate Javascript library that can take strings like “2008-01-28T20:24:17Z” and turn them into “2 hours ago”. It works standalone or as a jQuery plugin.
- JavaScript Memory Leak Detector
- Paolo Severini of Microsoft’s Global Product Development team has released a utility to help find Javascript memory leaks in IE. It can be set to detect things that would leak in IE6, things that would leak in IE7, or actual leaks.
- Getting HTML 5 styles in IE 7+
- Possibly the most interesting thing to come out of the X-UA-Compatible discussions was this method for allowing IE7+ to apply styles to elements it doesn’t support.
- Write to Done
- A friend (thanks Kate) recommended this spin off of zenhabits.net which is billed as “Unmissable articles on writing. Twice weekly.” So far it’s living up to it’s promise.
- MD044 – Stan Lee Interview
- Veronica Belmont interviews Stan Lee on Mahalo Daily. I never get tired of seeing interviews with Stan Lee. Maybe it’s his voice.
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Friday, January 25th, 2008
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
- How to rewrite
- A detailed post on rewriting, and how to do it.
- Podiobooks.com Community
- Online community based around Podiobooks.com. A place for listeners, authors, producers, etc. to communicate and help improve Podiobooks.com
- Issue #1 of Sci Phi is available
- The first issue of Sci Phi (The Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy) is now available. The download version ($7) contains all stories and articles in various ebook formats as well as MP3.
- GTD: Free Bundle of GTD Articles Written By David Allen
- Lifehacker has a link to a collection of 17 articles available for free download from the David Allen Company.
- Infamous IE hasLayout is toast
- This “feature” of the IE rendering engine has caused me more headaches than I care to remember. I’m not at all sorry to see it go.
- Kindles in libraries – the importance of ebook standards
- DRM, lack of e-book standards, and related issues are even bigger issues for libraries.
- AICN: 12th Episode will air!
- SaveJourneman.net brings word that episode 12 of Journeyman will air. Journeyman is my favorite show of the new season, and I hope it comes back, but at least it will get to finish it’s run.
- Doug Morris, Old Person
- Jonathan Coulton posted this summary of the New York Magazine blog’s summary or Wired’s profile of Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. I’m not going to further summarize, just read and be enlightened.
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I co-authored the proposal for the Z-Machine Standard 1.1 twelve years ago. To my surprise, this happened yesterday: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/