Author: splicer

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Sorry, iPhone and Pad users

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As of today, I’ve removed svg ver­sions of the type­faces my site uses (See Colophon). The ren­der­ing of svg faces in Webkit browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari has been less than sat­is­fac­to­ry, and in Chrome’s case svg fonts were used even when True­Type fonts (which Chrome ren­ders very well) were avail­able. This change means that this site will look bet­ter in new­er ver­sions of Chrome.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this removes the appear­ance of dynam­ic fonts from Chrome browsers … Read the rest

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Retailers, you’re losing me

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I’ve rant­ed about this before (see Brick and Mor­tars, Don’t Blame Us) and the sit­u­a­tion is wors­en­ing. It is get­ting to the point where if one wants to buy some­thing oth­er than an auto­mo­bile or gro­ceries, leav­ing the house is a fool’s errand.

A lit­tle over a year ago, I pur­chased a wrist­watch. My last watch mys­te­ri­ous­ly stopped and so I decid­ed to move up the price lad­der from my pre­vi­ous watch. Watch­es, like pens, are items that can … Read the rest

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No Bay to Breakers for me this year

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I’m a lit­tle sad to say it, but with only twelve hours left until the reg­is­tra­tion dead­line for Bay to Break­ers it looks like I won’t be run­ning it this year. Look­ing at my mea­ger bank bal­ance I have three option: gro­ceries, cat food, or Bay to Break­ers reg­is­tra­tion. Of those I can pick any two.

It’s also a lit­tle longer than I should be run­ning, but after all, that is what race day is for. As slow as I’ve been … Read the rest

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Adverts and how to get rid of them

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I don’t make much mon­ey from putting ads on my site. At the rate I’m going, the site gen­er­ates enough rev­enue in two years to pay for my host­ing for a month. Of course, Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look isn’t here to make mon­ey, but two things come in to the ques­tion: first, I’m sort of fas­ci­nat­ed to see what adver­tise­ments show up on dif­fer­ent pages. I get excit­ed when I see Wacom ads (I use and cov­et Wacom prod­ucts) and expe­ri­ence dis­ap­point­ment … Read the rest

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Hallelujah, Microsoft!

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Microsoft has joined Mozil­la (and Opera, if it mat­ters) in spon­sor­ing the Web Open Font For­mat (WOFF) as a stan­dard with the World Wide Web Consortium.

This comes at the end of more than ten years of fight­ing between Web brows­er mak­ers over dynam­ic font for­mats, none of which worked on a plu­ral­i­ty of browsers. 

A legacy of conflict

The clos­est we came was back in 1997 to 1998 with Netscape 4’s sup­port for Bit­stream’s True­Doc web font for­mat. … Read the rest

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A drawing is not a photograph!

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I dis­like say­ing hate­ful things about oth­er artists or their art­work. I real­ly do. I believe that any­one who puts their time and ener­gy into cre­at­ing some­thing rather than into idle con­sump­tion deserves respect. Even when I am unmoved by the art­work, it is to be laud­ed for the skill and effort expend­ed even in cre­at­ing dis­plays of tech­nique with lit­tle else to rec­om­mend them.

On the oth­er hand, I have some of the skills in ques­tion and a per­spec­tive that many do … Read the rest

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Wave

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Mak­ing my way through the neigh­bor­hood streets between home and my stu­dio today I passed a woman start­ing her motor­cy­cle. She lives in the neigh­bor­hood and I’ve seen her and her bike a few times. She’s a heavy­set woman and she rides what might best be described as a Euro­pean café rac­er. Her shape and the shape of her bike are com­i­cal­ly incon­gru­ent, some­thing I’ve noticed the oth­er times I’ve encoun­tered her. This morn­ing was no excep­tion. I saw her … Read the rest

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I can dance, but I can’t juggle.

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It’s some­thing I’m almost afraid to admit in this fast-paced mod­ern world, but one of the things I sim­ply can­not do is mul­ti­task. The abil­i­ty to work on mul­ti­ple things at the same time seems to be a very valu­able skill in today’s job mar­ket, and many résumés for tech­nol­o­gy and infor­ma­tion work­ers boast the abil­i­ty to jug­gle tasks.

In 1993 I bought my first com­put­er with a mul­ti­task­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem. In the nine years from ages four­teen to twen­ty-three I … Read the rest

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Two approaches to design: iPhone versus Nokia

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Well, this one’s gonna be a grudge­match, isn’t it? Apple and Nokia both make smart­phones, and there the sim­i­lar­i­ties end. Nokia and Apple fans flood the Inter­net with debate, each think­ing the oth­er has missed some­thing crit­i­cal. The con­flict goes deep, root­ed in the philoso­phies of the respec­tive com­pa­nies and how they try to meet demand for products.

Apple has been crit­i­cized by its detrac­tors for mak­ing sub­stan­dard but pret­ty prod­ucts. They cite a lack of fea­tures or a lack … Read the rest

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Yet Another Biased Drupal versus Joomla Shootout

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This is exact­ly the sort of thing the Inter­net needs few­er of, but I’m going to go ahead and pol­lute the Web with my com­par­i­tive expe­ri­ence with the two lead­ing open-source CMSs available.

(I’m not count­ing Word­Press as a «lead­ing» CMS even though it is more pop­u­lar than either Dru­pal or Joom­la and clear­ly falls under the def­i­n­i­tion of «con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem». In my opin­ion, Word­Press is too lim­it­ed to be con­sid­ered in the same class as Dru­pal or Joom­la. … Read the rest

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