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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 Note: This is our third and most recent Hackintosh build (here are the now-outdated first and second).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.
  • Welcome to Damp Gnat's MICROPUTT FREE to play and FREE to host on your own website. Engage visitors with your brand in a fun and tactile way! Customise and add your own LINKS and TEXT to the game. Visitors drive TRAFFIC to your game page with Facebook Share. Or SPONSOR a hole and drive TRAFFIC to your site from Adverputt. Read our FAQ for instructions on hosting the game
  • 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.
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    links for 2010-10-18

  • Nowadays almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable. Here you can find instructions on how to enable (activate) JavaScript in five most commonly used browsers.
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    links for 2010-10-17

  • Nowadays almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable. Here you can find instructions on how to enable (activate) JavaScript in five most commonly used browsers.
  • Typography is so overwhelmingly ever-present we hardly notice it there anymore. As elemental as it is to our culture, it’s actually bizarre to think it has a history at all. This article will serve as a condensed education on the basics of typography, including typographic terms, proper usage of fonts, unusual characters, and history. We’ve become so accustomed to communicating with type that most of us do not notice what it is doing, let alone any of the agonizing design decisions that were a part of their creation. Practically any major typeface has a long history and richness important to how the font communicates about the content it bears. At least, any font that wasn’t created by somebody named “Pizzadude.”
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    links for 2010-10-14

  • Here’s a slightly different version of the battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It’s just one of many revelations in a new making-of book. More rare concept art below. The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by J.W. Rinzler comes out today, and it’s not just essential for fans of the classic film. It’s also a must-read for anybody who’s interested in the creative process, because it goes into excruciating detail, on a day-to-day basis, on the troubled genesis of an amazing film. You get inside the heads of everybody involved with it, and you see how much pain went into every frame of this movie. In particular, there’s a 17-page section in which you get a transcript of director Irvin Kershner and the actors — especially Harrison Ford — agonize over every second of the crucial carbonite freezing chamber scene, trying to get as much emotional truth and reality out of it as possible. This was on set, after the screenplay
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    links for 2010-10-13

  • These are great times for front-end developers. After months of exaggerated excitement about HTML5 and CSS3, the web design community now starts coming up with CSS techniques that actually put newly available technologies to practical use instead of abusing them for pure aesthetic purposes. We see fewer “pure CSS images” and more advanced, clever CSS techniques that can actually improve the Web browsing experience of users. And that’s a good thing! In this post we present recently released CSS techniques, tutorials and tools for you to use and enhance your workflow, thus improving your skills. Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well.
  • This family is a bunch of Star Wars fans.
  • Out this month, the slick coffee-table tome The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back chronicles the complete tale—from pre-release to blockbuster success—of what’s become the fan favorite of the Star Wars series. Released in 1980, George Lucas’s Episode V pushed the boundaries of special effects and left audiences with one of cinema’s most epic cliffhangers. To mark the film’s 30th anniversary, VF.com presents an excerpt from the book: rarely seen photographs from the Empire Strikes Back set, annotated with behind-the-scenes details. Plus: Read Mike Ryan’s interviews with the book’s author, J. W. Rinzler, and the man behind Boba Fett’s mask, actor Jeremy Bulloch.
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    links for 2010-10-12

  • This month marks the 25th anniversary of  Robert Zemeckis’ classic film, Back to the Future.
  • This amazing infographic was shared by School Grants Blog and specially made for ThisBlogRules as we are big fans of Star Wars.
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    links for 2010-10-09

  • MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.
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