Cloudiness

RIP Harvey Pekar

Art — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:02:12 +0000

Pekar was, as the cliche goes, a complex man of contradictions. Famed for his self-portrait as a cranky, anonymous everyman. Widely-respected as a legitimizer of comics and pioneer in autobiographical comics, all of which he made in collaboration with a variety of artists. Pekar was one of the standard-bearers of the blue-collar intelligentsia, which has a long low-key tradition in America and especially in the Rust Belt where he spent his life. Fans of his comics are probably not aware of the many essays and reviews he’d written about music, politics, and literature, while his literary readers probably considered his comics a quirky attention-getting sideline, at best. He’s missed already.

Smokescreen

Art — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:44:33 +0000

Interprets Flash files entirely in Javascript. Not only a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, but also because it’s primarily one person’s work. One of a couple similar projects I’m aware of, but this one seems to have the most traction.

It’s also interesting to speculate why Adobe isn’t attempting anything like this, or why they’re so closed-lipped about it if they are.

Windows Phone 7 Series

Art — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:08:08 +0000

Very pretty and pleasing to look at, but why can’t it show me today’s date entirely? Aggressive styling becomes a low-grade irritation when routine information is obfuscated, even where the full message is easy to guess.

(Update: Luke Wroblewski considers this in more detail, via Daring Fireball)

IPhone frenzy in the mini-sausages…

Art — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:18:41 +0000

The iPhone’s touch screen works by conducting a small electronic charge through your fingertip; most gloves that are effective insulators from the cold are also pretty good at electrical isolation, so you have to take your glove off and your hand gets cold.

South Koreans have solved the cold-weather iPhone problem: Buy a particular brand of mini sausage that’s approximately the same shape and conductivity of a human finger.

Clusterflock has a concise summary of the iPhone sausage finger. The Google-translated article leaves us with this thought: “Maekseubong tagitcheung and this just fits the iPhone user base, while the poisonous celebrity, Max is on the stick.”

Google’s Nexus One muzzles the foul-mouthed

Art — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:07:49 +0000

While they’re at it, why not use “fudge”, “darn”, and “shucks” instead of replacing the offending words with hash symbols?

It’s time to stop using IE6

Art — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:50:41 +0000

I’m filing this under “ZDNet Imitates The Onion”.

I wish security vulnerabilities were the only reason why people should stop using Internet Explorer 6. Web developers have been campaigning steadily and conducting user outreach for many years to instigate upgrades. IE 6 support inflates web development budgets (because of the added work necessary to support an outlier platform), results in websites that aren’t as good and useful as they could be (because of client demands for full feature parity across all supported browsers), and a host of entrenched attitudes regarding web design that should have been shaken loose six or eight years ago. Unfortunately, as a web developer working on contracts I rarely have the option of arbitrarily cutting off IE 6 users, and currently most IE 6 users are themselves unable to upgrade.

iPhone headphone mic works with [late 2008 Mac] laptops

Art — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:43:46 +0000

This evening I wondered whether the four-conductor iPhone headsets (headphone plus microphone) could be used as conventional headphones on my computer, nevermind the mic. As it turns out, they not only work on Apple’s laptops, the mic does as well, as does the play/pause clicker. Now you can use Skype without taking off your earphones. (They’re also compatible with almost all of Apple’s iPods.)

Apple’s own documentation is sparse bordering on nonexistent. Product descriptions for their iPhone headsets only mention iPods. The most Apple has written about this is on page 25 of a PDF of the MacBook Pro user’s guide: “Audio out port: Connect external speakers, headphones (including iPhone), or digital audio equipment.“

If you haven’t got a compatible laptop, you can make an adaptor that splits into Mic In and Stereo Out plugs, or buy one.

Peggy Bacon in mid-air backflip

Art — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:02:11 +0000

The caption notes: “Peggy Bacon of Bondi, one of a troupe of girls who did pyramid stands on the beach, does a backflip for the photographer.” For whatever reason, this fails to dissipate the sense of strangeness in the picture.

What a wonderful photo.

Browser size

Art — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:25:45 +0000

An interesting graphic showing you how much viewport area (where the web content is, between the scrollbars, toolbars, and so on) web users see. Made useful because you can load your own websites in for comparison.

It’s worth remembering there is no page fold because every web browser is capable of scrolling and every web user knows how to scroll. Google has provided a guide for where to put the most important information and action elements on the page, not a guide for how short and narrow to make your web pages.

Five reasons why this is the only online SEO marketing blog entry you will ever need to read

Art — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:04:23 +0000

Today’s guest author is a prolific columnist and consultant about SEO strategies and author of the e-book Nine Thousand, Eight Hundred Seventy Six Ways To Put Your Site In Front Of People Who Have No Use Of Your Services, available soon from Churnumout Press.

It happens to the best of us: We get stuck in the marketing doldrums. To break yourself out of your marketing doldrums, you should do some kind of search engine optimization that you haven’t done before. Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your site for the benefit of being found through search engines. One of the best ways of learning about breaking out of marketing doldrums through search engine optimization (or SEO, as the experts call it – and now you can be one too!) is to read a numbered list, for which there is an example below.

Read a numbered list of SEO strategies, of which this is one.
Break yourself out of your marketing doldrums, for example by doing some kind of SEO you haven’t done before.
Try a new SEO strategy, because it may break you out of your marketing doldrums.
There may be things you haven’t tried before in the realm of SEO, so study numbered lists of them for ideas. For example, this one. Many people find this useful for breaking themselves out of their marketing doldrums.
Many SEO experts recommend experimenting with new SEO strategies. Such things are available online, helpfully itemized in numbered lists.

Do you often find, after skimming to the end of a blog about online marketing full of useless factoids gleaned through lazy research from Wikipedia, a pointless and awkwardly-phrased leading question meant to invite conversation in a hollow attempt at fostering traffic and precious advertising revenue? Tell us about it by using the commenting form to comment!