harassment takes a back burner

So it seems that the whole Winnie Pooh stuff has gone away. We can only hope.

The Taquito is on the way soon. We've been thinking a lot about home movies recently. While we don't have a fancy shmancy movie camera, we do have a small camera that will take clips, and we can take still pictures like a muthatrucker. So what we need is editing. We have been really interested in Jahshaka, the open source movie editing software. But then recently, we've been seeing some free online tools. Eyespot is one such online editor. Jumpcut is another. We haven't tested any of these, but we are willing to check them out.

Another big thing we have been seeing a lot of online talk about it Firefox extensions. Now, we love ourselves some Firefox extensions. And we are aghast to find that SessionSaver is a veritable memory sieve. We've been wondering where our memory has been going (and no, this has nothing to do with the parking lot at the slam). TabMixPlus is supposed to be an excellent replacement for SessionSaver, with a whole bunch of tabbing and memory saving built in. W00t! Plus, our good buddies at lifehacker have been putting together some interesting Firefox extension packages. We're excited about those, too. And lastly, this might be our favorite extension since "Open all linked pictures in new window": DownThemAll! This little bugger downloads everything off a site. It's like pictures and sitesucker all in one. Neat!

Now here are some things we might classify under web design and general design. Firstly is an AJAX-enabled color themer: Color Tool 2.0.1. We've used lots of themers before and this one is nice, too. Next is an awesome gallery of classic arcade artwork. One of our earliest calls to the world of design was the come-on in the darkness of the Bunny Hutch and Corbin Bowl arcades. Wait, rephrase. Oh, nevermind. Behold: The Arcade Art Library! Now granted, we've never Varkon in our lives, but damn, that's some great sideart. And lastly, there is EveryStockPhoto.com. This site collects Creative Commons licensed pictures and allows you to use them at your whims. Nice.

If you've been following our trevails in this blog, you'll know that we have some serious-ass networking issues. We've tried a lot, but we're always willing to try more. We're hoping Network Magic won't bite up in the ass. Yet another software package that promises to make networking easier, file and printer sharing a snap, and etc., etc., etc. And then there's Vyew, which promises easy web conferencing. Though when they require Flash updates and recommend IE and Java, we wonder at how much we would really use the damn thing to begin with.

2 more that we can't leave without telling you about. First is a nifty Ray Carver site we found, and it includes a few (3) audio snippets of Ray laughing. Joy. Pure joy. PinkDome is a local lefty news & politics site our friend Gen tipped us to. So far, we haven't been greatly offended.

how to bury your dead

This news piece was so incredibly sad, we waited 9 days to post it. From Reuters, the government is preparing for the upcoming pandemic of avian flu. Are they stockpiling anti-flu vaccines? Are they making the world country cleaner, safer? Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Presenting: How to bury your dead. In your backyard.

“We talk about how people should bury their dead in their backyards, how far from the septic systems,” said Dorothy Teeter, director of the King County public health department in Seattle. “In case you’re wondering, it’s $20 apiece for high-quality body bags.”

But while you are still alive, you might enjoy your music online. Here’s something we’ve been meaning to try out: Picard from MusicBrainz. It promises to help you organize and tag your mp3s. Okay.

Also, while you are still above ground, you might check out MIT’s free open courses. You think “burying your dead 101” is a course? Don’t bet on it.

link grab bag

Lots of links on the dashboard today. And recently we read that clutter is a sign of procastination. Which is something we really need to get rid of (actually, both procrastination and clutter on that tip).

So let’s start. Psychology Today has an article entitled 10 things to know about procrastination. The first 5 weren’t that interesting… then we got to #6:

Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Such as, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” Or “I work best under pressure.” But in fact they do not get the urge the next day or work best under pressure. In addition, they protect their sense of self by saying “this isn’t important.” Another big lie procrastinators indulge is that time pressure makes them more creative. Unfortunately they do not turn out to be more creative; they only feel that way. They squander their resources.

Sound familiar? Ouch. One link down. See? We are getting to done even faster now.

Now we have a few tools that look interesting:

• Our first tool is a visualizer for your Windows directory. If you run TaskManager a lot as you plug away, this might be a good tool for you: WinDirStat.
• If you need to edit file properties for audio files, AudioShell might be a good tool for you. We didn’t need to fix up a lot of things until we found a set of mp3s that iTunes did not like, which we whittled down to the “Original” tag. If AudioShell can help you change that flag, then there isn’t anything you can’t iPod.
• The DIY Planner is a set of downloads that help you create planners on good old fashioned paper. If you are into that sort of thing.
• The Democracy video player touts itself as a supreme badass in playing videos. That is can download in the background and then play videos seems really promissing. But we aren’t holding our breathes. We still love the VLC player. Edit: BoingBoing explains that the video player for Democracy is the VLC player. Democracy just bundles it with RSS and BitTorrent sharing.
• Here’s an extension that is vitally important to GMail. This Greasemonkey script stops all that “add contact” popup nonsense that google recently added to their email app.
• And lastly in the tool department is an uber-collection, the TTCS OSSWIN open source “CD”. You might recall a few weeks back we talked about the OpenCD, which collects many of our favorite open-source apps, but the TTCS collection also looks promising.

Now that we are seguing into lists of links, we can’t leave without mentioning Yahoo’s “UI Library”, a collection of interactive and other AJAXy UI tools that one can use/mod for website deisgn.

GCast looks like a nice tool for creating podcasts. It might just even trump our other favorite podcasting software, Odeo. What we most especailly like about GCast is that it has a stand-alone player you can embed into your website. We like that. A lot. Plus, they tie in nicely with their (GCast’s) other service, GarageBand. And their connection helps you key into podcasting music. Which we also like.

Lastly today, we have the video eater site, VideoShift, which culls online video from GoogleVideo and YouTube and presents it in a digg-like format. OUr currentl favorite line of videos is the TechTalks at Google. (Oh, and that one about zero-config with Bonjour networking? Don’t believe it for a second.)

There. All done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

font it up!

Friday afternoon, quarter to 5. Cool Staff Account swings around asking if I can make a chart for him. He’s got a mock up on a piece of paper, and he assures me that yes, there are 2 x-axes on this chart and that yes, there is a line with the same name as one of the axes. “It’s not mine, really,” he says. “It for someone else.”
So it’s a drawing of what a chart would look like if charts could look like that. Like in another reality. But ours is not to question why, right? As I drew boxes and lines in pretty colors and shapes for CSA, he said pointing a label, “Could you font that up?”

Why yes, yes I can.

We love the colors

We admit it: it’s not always the shape of coporate logos that get our attention. It’s the colors. We love the colors. Oh sure, recognize the shapes when they are plasterd across a Corprate States of America flag, but we always return to the colors.

So boy howdy were we please to find someone had gone through dozens and dozens corprate identies to pick apart the colors of their icons.

Presentation Zen (who we could’ve sworn we had linked before with their “how to find pictures and images“…) has a nice page on where to find quotes for presentations. Or websites. Becuase quotes are the colors of language. (Okay, that was a stretch.)

making it work for you

After Hamachi didn’t work for us to network a printer, we were disappointed and a bit downtrodden. Though we still have the network up at home, it doesn’t function like a regular network (least as far as we can tell). But regardless, we are still trying other things.

One thing that looks promising is Bonjour. Now, Bonjour is something that popped up under Processes in our Task Manager and ZoneAlarm a while ago, and we could never quite figure out what the heck it does or who put it there. We believe it is attached to iTunes in some way. And we did figure out that crippling it crippled our access to the Internets. Which saddened us greatly. And lifehacker says an actual download of Bonjour (different from say its embedded cousin in Itunes, perhaps?) can help us set up networked printers. Joy! Ask Metafilter also has some interesting lines on how to share information across computers in-house.

Edit: Yes, iTunes 5.0 and beyond installs Bonjour without your knowing it. Both Bonjour and iTunes talk to the Internets separately, as evidenced by their separate ZoneAlarm calls.

Also on the networking tip, lifehacker has a handy slice of info about how to set up subdomains on a server.

It would be passe to say now that GoogleMaps (Double True!) is a killer app. But we’d say it anyway. One of the things we love about it is being able to link it into our web pages. Exploration Age has a nice tutorial about how to add Google Maps to any web page.

It would also be passe to gush over Firefox. But we just came across yet another extension that makes us squeee like little girls. X-Ray for Firefox. With a simple right click you can see the markup of a page. Shazam. For little hackers like us who learn by watching, this is amazing. Kids these days have it so fucking easy. Back in my day we had to view source if we wanted to check markup!

And, if you can’t make it work, if you can’t get it done yourself, you can always ask a favor of someone. Favorville is a neat web community that allows people to ask and offer favors. Rock.

some CSS references for project X

Sadly, we don’t use PHP and CSS every day, nor do we have people to talk with about them, so we scamper around the Internets a lot looking for information, help, and code examples.

One of the things we had to do with project X is make a pleasing design for end users. We consulted out books, but were uninspired. Besides, our books were “too fancy” for the project at hand. But happily, we found some inspiration in a british site that has downloadable web templates. We actually didn’t end up using any of their templates, but they were enough of a spark to get us focused on our end design.

We misplaced our facts about using images and links in CSS this project (our minds are growing fuzzy in the winter months–if only someone turned on the heat in this place!), so HTMLSource’s tips on using images with CSS helped a bit.

Also, there is the trickiness of making things appear and disappear in CSS. display: none and display:block to the rescue.

We really hate IE. Sure, we’ve been told that we will love IE7, but once bitten, twice shy and all of that. Still, we have to code with IE’s float errors and such. We love Position is Everything, and their page on magins, floats, and IE was a lifesaver. The problem is largely with varying box models. Thankfully, tantek has some nice box model hacks at the WaSP project that are nifty and helpful.

EDIT: Hey Mac users, Microsoft no longer has your back. Seems that after years of proprietary coding standards and forcing people to code especially for IE, MS is pulling the rug out from under Mac users. As of January 2006, they will no longer offer up downloads of IE, nor will they support it. The irony is that they recommend better, more standards-based browsers such as Safari and Opera. Which is exactly what we, as web developers, have been telling people to use for years.

Getting better all the time: Illustrator

When we first began using Illustrator, we were so frustrated. All the time. We couldn’t understand how everythng worked. We came from a Photoshop world, and the fluidity of Illustrator bugged the hell out of us.

For a set of docs at Le Job, we opted to create TIFFs instead of AIs, only because the set of P’shop tools was so much handier than Illustrator’s.

But we persisted. WE struggled, we read books, we learned. And now, we are proud to say that we have remade a lot of those old images which, frankly, ended up looking blocky and choppy in print and PDF form. Now we have glorious vector graphics that are smooth smooth smooth! It makes us very happy. And we have smart looking graphics that are very controllable and adaptable.

Edit: We caught ourselves this evening, while working with P’shop, marvelling at how it doesn’t treat objects independent objects. And so we come full-circle.

Along the way, we found CreativePro and Adobe Proxy magazines, both of which offer up good tips and advice for burgeoning designers. And in our jack of all trades magic switchblade, we find we are designing more and more every day. (Now if only InDesign Mag was free….)

On another slightly different note, we think the MyFonts’s utlity What the Font is pretty darn neat. Upload a file and they will tell what the font used is.

What it looks like to be you

When designing online, one must get a sense of what things look like for other people. Gone are the days with the little button that said, “This site looks best with BrowserYou’llNeverUse.” The best one of those, btw, said, “This site looks best on my computer.” Because it always does.

CSS was supposed to take care of a lot of those issues. Of course it did not, because not everyone plays by the same rules (see browser compatibility).

But still, we try. Because we care, we love, we try. A recent project has presented issues with Safari on Mac (where it’s perfect with Firefox on Windows, so what gives?) So we have been interested in checking out a good Mac emulator. But, failing that, we will be happy to take our chances with buying time on BrowserCam. We have seen other sites that let you publically check out what a site looks like through a different browser, but for project development, that’s not really a “good option”.

We, however, remain steadfast in our love of Firefox. We hear 1.5 is set to drop today, too. W00t.

Here is an extension for viewing a site “as IE” while never leaving the comfort of your Firefox tab (from lifehacker).

And speaking of Firefox tabs, you might want to move your tab bar. We have yet to try tohis trick, but it sounds like fun.

And there is this promising article on How to Turn FF into a Web Writer. We are writers for the web, so this looks nice. And here’s a fun movie from the amazing folks at Coudal partners about a writer.

We found safaritest to be a good and cheap (free) previewing solution for the Windows-based web designer. The KHTML engine is a bit differen than Firefox’s, so one needs to actually see the screen to test the differences. Although, for its quirkiness, it’s necessary to have a Mac with IE on it to test that browser.

Adobe freebies – training and files

At our work, we have come to rely upon Adobe’s InDesign. Pagemaker, the program replaced by the new interloper, was a great program. The best thing about it was its “Make Booklet” function, and we absolutely, categorically despise that not only was that functionality removed from ID, but that it could be bought for an extra price in, confusingly, could be either a different form of the program (from Adobe) or a plug-in from a third party–but it was never made clear which it was. Plus, looking over the functions in each, one is not sure even if one gets what one wants from the extra purchase. Rubbish.

Frankly, we were up for scrapping the entire effort. But as we said, we need it for our work.

We found a nice set of free, online video tutorials for InDesign CS (and blast-all that CS 2 business). We have also uncovered another set of tutorials, but they have not been evaluated yet.

Also interesting, is Adobe’s own print and video Tips and Tutorials. We have checked out a few of these, and they are nice. The site is slow, but the tutorials are nice.
But what we are really loving–head-over-heals, to-die-for loving–is Adobe’s Studio Exchange, where lovely designers and good folk users upload things they have created so that others may use them, too. There are Photoshop and InDesign bits, as well as bits for one of the many banes of our existance, Illustrator. Huzzah.

We have also found some other templates for InDesign from WorldWide Printing and Sheriar Press.