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links for 2010-10-30
Maurice Murphy, who died yesterday, is an essential part of the soundtrack to your musical life – even if you don't realise it. Maurice was principal trumpeter of the London Symphony Orchestra for 30 years, from 1977-2007, and you have sung along to his unmistakable, brilliant sound even if you have never knowingly been to the Barbican to hear the LSO in the flesh. It's his trumpet playing you hear blazing over the soundtracks to all six Star Wars films, and it was his playing for John Williams on the first film – his first gig with the orchestra – that made Williams stick with the LSO for his future movies. But Murphy's playing was always cosmic in its splendour, as anyone will know who heard him with the brass section of the LSO in the countless concerts and recordings they made together.
Today on the Twitter blog, the company wrote a post that was all of three sentences to let people know about their new logos. Yay!
But there’s actually quite a bit more to it then it seems.
If you follow the link they provide to Guidelines page, you’ll find some interesting tidbits.
Mike Pantoliano of Distilled had a good post over at SEOmoz about how to turn Google Analytics into your own rank tracker. We have been playing with the cd= parameter at Yoast before to track SEO rankings, as Mike also notes, and his improvement on the idea is a welcome one.
In the comments, my buddy Richard Baxter immediately suggested this would be a good addition to the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. The "problem" was/is that Mike's example was in PHP, doing the rank recognition server side. This won't work, as we all use W3 Total Cache to cache our pages, right? And then, we'd be storing the same rank over and over again, or no rank at all, or, well you get it, mayhem ensues.
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links for 2010-10-27
A low pressure system slinking its way across the northern midwest of the United States has set a new record as its central pressure is now the lowest on record for a U.S. non-tropical land-based system with a barometeric reading of 956.31 mb 954.95 mb in Minnesota. To put this into some perspective, a Category 3 hurricane usually has a atmospheric pressure of 964-945 mb, but unlike a hurricane the pressure system does not have a large, warm body of water to feed itself with so it isn't quite the same.
The center of the storm is off to the northwest of me, and our local barometer is reading 979.68 mb. The wind is howling, rain is coming down in sheets, and I need to walk the dog still.
Categories
links for 2010-10-26
Adobe Fellow Mark Anders provides a sneak peek of a tool codenamed “Edge,” a prototype of a tool for creating animation and transitions using the capabilities of HTML5.
Do you think that only cool PC or Mac or Sony PlayStation or whose ever games can be addictive? Than you know nothing about short and simple Flash based games! No, no, no! We are not trying to say that something is better and something is worse… We just kindly warn you that playing Flash games is extremely risky for it can lead to your unemployment!
P.S. Consider this: It took us about 5 weeks to finish this article: 119 hours to complete all the games (we just couldn't stop playing) and an hour to post the article.
Categories
links for 2010-10-25
Building a Hackintosh from scratch—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Mac hardware—has never been easier, and the final product has never performed better. Here's how it works.
Note: This is our third and most recent Hackintosh build (here are the now-outdated first and second). This time, to make things really easy on you, we put together a video walkthrough of the entire process. You can watch the video in its entirety below, but we've also broken up the video next to the accompanying text in each step below.
The Dark Sun has risen again on the parched, magically devastated world of Athas, bringing with it the new rules and mindset of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. First introduced in the early 1990s during D&D 2nd Edition, Dark Sun was meant to be a brutal, unforgiving dark fantasy setting unlike anything the game had seen.
Noble hobbits, wise wizards, and forthright knights gave way to a world devastated by an arcane apocalypse. Where once there had been a bright, green planet, there was now just sand and death. Civilization lived on in a handful of city-states dominated by all-powerful sorcerer-kings. Players took on the role of slaves, gladiators and other peons thrown to the bottom of society’s latter; the setting wasn’t about saving the world – it was about surviving it. It was also the first setting where psionics dominated the landscape, while magic was rare (and profane, as it caused the apocalypse that turned verdant Athas into a wasteland).
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links for 2010-10-24
As most of you who visit the blog are probably aware, I record bands sometimes. I like doing that kind of thing. I record my OWN stuff all the time, but I particularly enjoy recording someone else. It forces me to think differently and to try things I never would have done with my own music—mostly just because I’m pretty much dialed in to my “sound” and I don’t need to experiment to find it. I love the recording process.
Most of the time.
Sometimes bands can make the engineering/mastering process, which I LOVE, a real pain in the ass. The enjoyment of everyone in the project hinges on some very basic issues between the band and the engineer, and as a service to musicians (and as a hopefully fun read for anyone who wonders what a recording session looks like) I thought I’d offer a few suggestions that a band can take to make their project an easier effort for all involved. I came up with 12 off the top of my head. Thought about editing it down…
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links for 2010-10-23
In honor of Banned Books Week, Geekosystem's Susana Polo looks at 10 great science fiction novels that have been banned, or at least threatened with removal from libraries and schools. Including some major classics of the genre!
These titles are among the most popular and beloved science fiction works of the last century. They've told us how bad the future might be before we get there, how free you can be if you don't follow blind belief, and that children are perfectly capable of digesting some pretty heavy concepts, actually. But they've all been banned or threatened with banning.
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Games might not yet be recognized as art but they are increasingly being used to explore the kind of deep themes that were previously the preserve of artists and philosophers.
After years of breathless anticipation, Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" is finally a go. Though which continent the assuredly massive production will take place on is still up in the air, the cast list has been announced. Click ahead to see who's going to journey to the Lonely Mountain and battle Smaug the dragon.
CSS is the fundamental way of styling our web pages. Its deceptively easy syntax allows us to do many things to affect the visual layer of our work. And especially with CSS3, the language has gotten even more powerful.
There are many useful CSS techniques and tricks out there for you to take advantage of. This is a collection of a few useful CSS snippets that you might want to keep in your toolkit.
We teamed up with some of our favorite designers to create stunning email templates anyone can use. You don't need to know a thing about design or programming to use them. Just plug in your content and you're all set. And the best part? They're completely free for all MailChimp customers with paid accounts.
When it comes to SEO, there are certain elements that need to be in place for any newly-designed or updated website. Have 301 redirects been put into place? Is the robots.txt file authored to allow adequate crawling? This infographic depicts a handy checklist that will help get you through any new site launch or transition.
YouTube has earned a reputation for featuring brain cell-slaughtering fare such as the truly abysmal Fred and playing host to the some of the most depressingly stupid comments this side of Yahoo! News. But for every participant liberally dishing out misspelled racist, sexist and homophobic talking points, there is at least one whose channel genuinely offers something provocative and educational. For teachers hoping to infuse multimedia into their classrooms, YouTube makes for an excellent starting point. Plenty of universities, nonprofits, organizations, museums and more post videos for the cause of education both in and out of schools. The following list compiles some of the ones most worthy of attention, as they feature plenty of solid content appealing to their respective audiences and actively try to make viewers smarter.
In this guide, we will cover an incredibly great feature of WordPress: Custom taxonomy. Custom WordPress taxonomies give you unprecedented power in the way you can categorize and relate your WordPress content with each other. Though WordPress taxonomies were introduced in WordPress 2.3, it has been revamped in WordPress 3.0 for WordPress developers.
Recently, we had looked at creating custom WordPress post types in the WordPress custom posts guide, and to further our command of WordPress 3.0 site and theme development, we’re going to now discuss custom taxonomies.
Today we are glad to release a Payment Icon Set, a set with 18 payment icons in PNG format, in the resolutions 32×32px — 128×128px. This set was designed by Phil Matthews and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
The icons are inteded to be used on e-commerce websites where you can show what types of payment the shop accepts. Each icon comes in curved and straight edge variations. As usual, the set is free to use in private and commercial projects — no credit is required.
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links for 2010-10-22
March 2011 will mark the YouTube Symphony Orchestra's return – and once again, we invite you to be a part of it. There are two ways you can audition: submit your video audition for the orchestra or submit a solo improvisation to a piece composed specifically for the orchestra by American composer Mason Bates.
The best and most creative performers will be selected to form the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 and invited to perform in March at the Sydney Opera House, under the direction of world-renowned conductor and YouTube Symphony Artistic Advisor, Michael Tilson Thomas.
SlideNote is a customizable, flexible jQuery plugin that makes it easy to display sliding notifications on your website or in your web application. For more information or to see a demo, scroll down.
In the past we’ve taken a look at several CSS grid systems. We’ve also gone over how LESS.js can add a lot of flexibility to the way you style web pages. Today we’re going to combine these two ideas and create a grid system that utilizes LESS.
Read on to see why on Earth we would do such a thing. If you understand the concept, you can also skip the tutorial and go straight to the download. Let’s get started.
Image Optimization is one of the most important factors for your website run without any problems. As if the images embedded within your website wouldn’t be optimized, then they will grasp a huge bandwidth and will resulting into very heavy load laid on your website. This may let too much of traffic driven away from your website. And nobody will want that, well if you want to know that how you can get yourself away from these kind of problems by optimizing your image, then there is a simple solution to it… Just use any of the below given image optimization tools as per your desire. So, let us drive through the list.
Whenever one purchases a domain, one usually believes that the process of setting up a website is simple and doesn't require much. However as this article on Network Solutions domain forwarding will explain to you, there are plenty of things that come up in the process that will cause you to do one or two things that you had really not anticipated.
Network Solutions domain forwarding refers to a process whereby you make it possible for someone to find a certain website under different domain names. This is pretty similar to what happens with telephone numbers. You can set your phone in such a way that if someone calls you on a certain number on which you are not available, they are able to find you on another number on which you are available.
There is a lot more water on the moon than previously believed, according to an analysis of NASA data being published Friday, a finding that may bolster the case for a manned base on the lunar surface.
The discovery grew out of an audacious experiment last year, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration slammed a spent-fuel rocket into a lunar crater at 5,600 miles an hour, and then used a pair of orbiting satellites to analyze the debris thrown off by the impact. They discovered that the crater contained water in the form of ice, plus a host of other resources, including hydrogen, ammonia, methane, mercury, sodium and silver.