Categories
Delicious

links for 2010-12-30

  • Firefox isn't the only browser for power users anymore, but that didn't stop it from having a great year of updates, extensions, and tweaks in 2010. Here's a look back at the most popular Firefox extensions and posts.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    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 Note: This is our third and most recent Hackintosh build (here are the now-outdated first and second).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).
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-09-29

  • Technology is opening up new opportunities for people who want to work at home. Finding and landing profitable work isn't easy, but we've listed some options. These jobs will give you the flexibility you want and the income you need to keep paying your bills and maintaining a health credit score.
  • The film adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings' prequel has suffered multiple setbacks — the latest a worldwide union boycott. Is it time to throw in the towel?
  • Other than the frenzied anticipation for the coming breed of tablet PCs, the one topic that dominates the mindspace of the technorati these days is the world of e-readers. More specifically, a great debate is brewing; each of the e-readers and their associated online book stores favor differing standards and file formats, and we may have another good ole fashioned format war on our hands. (Nothing gets a techie's blood pressure going more than watching as competing technologies duke it out.) Format wars are to the tech world what elections are to politics, or what playoffs are to sports: a chance for competing candidates to go big or go home — based on the preferences of the masses. The most cited example is the great Betamax vs. VHS war of the early '80s (in which the objectively better standard got trounced), but, in truth, battles over standards have been with us since the first wheel was chipped from stone.
  • Last week I talked about 960 Grid System is Getting Old. Surprisingly a lot of comments have been made. It seems like people are using 960gs because of the "golden ratio" — all numbers are even. I’m a designer, not a grid scientist. Why restrict your layout so that it can fit into this 960gs? A grid is supposed to help you in design, not to limit your creativity. The 978 grid, that I mentioned before, is not just about increasing the page width, but to loosen the gutter space so users can read it more comfortably. Today, I would like to write a follow up post to further ellaborate on some of the points I brought up initially.
  • Designing and critiquing logos for web-based companies and startups is a pursuit of endless fascination for many of us. Over the years, we’ve seen enough startups come and go (and rebrand and merge) to fill a volume with how and how not to develop and execute a logo for a web company. We’ve also picked up some knowledge about trends in this field. Some of the trends are good; others, regrettable. Others still are simply overused, which is the saddest scenario of them all. We hate to see a good design trick or typeface grow hackneyed over the course of a few months, but it happens all the time, unfortunately.
  • While we all know the importance of the content of any webpage, what we often ignore is the first impression that the visitor forms when visiting any webpage. It is of paramount importance to know that the first thing that any visitor looks at is the look of the page. If the look is appealing enough only then does the reader move on to read the content. Graphic designers today are laying a huge importance on typography to make a webpage look attractive. When creating items like E-Books, brochures and pamphlets, it is important that the design and layout of the font is managed well so as to make any webpage look attractive. At earlier times, typesetters used manual modes to perform this action but with the advancement in technology, it is now possible to design fonts on the computer. There are some fantastic typography tools that are available for use now that enable the webpage creator to create some fantastic font styles to attract the readers.
  • Monet’s paintings evoke a sense of energy and life, they leap off the canvas with color and contrast, but Monet somehow managed to avoid using the color black for nearly his entire painting career. By avoiding black in your own designs, you can replicate some of this dynamism.
  • Amazon’s Kindle can do a lot more than just buy and read Amazon-sold e-books. This is often a surprise. I usually wind up in conversations where someone says “I’d like to try a Kindle, but it can’t _______.” Usually, it can. I was actually surprised when I bought my Kindle not just by how much it could do, but by how well it did it. The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle. Here I want to gather up knowledge generated from and circulated by many of my favorite e-reader blogs, just to try to give you an inkling of all the things that a new Kindle can do.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-09-02

  • These icons were created by me, and are free to use under a Creative Commons License. I've got icons for Digg, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube.
  • Imag ine a user who is really excited about your prod uct or ser vice. They’re ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill ing out their infor ma tion. The way you align your labels with your form fields can affect how easy it is for users to fill out the form. Do you want to give users a quick, easy and pain less expe ri­ence or do you want to give them a has sle? If you want to make their expe ri ence quick, easy and pain less, con sider using top aligned labels for your form fields.
  • Here is a list of courses and innovative resources to help CS students, faculty, and instructors. These are examples of the training Google engineers use to learn new skills.
  • Cached Commons is a collection of user-contributed javascript libraries that have been cached, optimized, and hosted on Github’s fast CDN. If a library is missing from this collection, post a request on Github and we’ll add it immediately. The readme has all the details.
  • I’ve mentioned on and off that I don’t watch TV, and several readers have curiously asked me why I do that and how I manage life without TV. So I thought it’s about time I write an article on it. I haven’t been watching TV for a long time, since about 2006. By TV, I mean watching shows direct from TV networks or channel surfing. I still catch my favorite shows off DVD or online, though the frequency is decreasing. The last new shows I caught were Prison Break and Dollhouse (as I’m a fan of Joss Whedon’s work), both of which have ended their runs.
  • <!–44d0aafe02544ac598a432ba204bb5dc–> Verifying your feed establishes that you are the owner of this content and allows Digg to auto-submit your stories as they are published. To verify your feed: Paste the RSS (not HTML!) feed URL into the Auto-Submit box and click "Add Feed" Take the verification key shown and add it to a new post in the RSS feed, (you can delete it later) then click "Verify Now" Note that RSS auto-submit does not submit content already residing in your feed, so once it is verified please add a new entry to test things out. Please allow some time for the new entry to get pulled in. If you care about the thumbnails that are used for your submitted stories, please see the FAQ.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-08-30

  • When digital cameras first hit the market, they were kind of a novelty.  My mother bought one, but she didn’t love it because it was just an expensive, complicated way for her to get a physical photograph. And that’s all that mattered to her – the physical photograph.  The digital version was an annoying step in the process.  My wife was the same way for a long time. Related to this, two years ago, I posted a short item about how global paper use is declining.  In it, I quoted this: “Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. This has also become true with pictures.  We had family portraits taken a couple weeks ago.  They turned out great, and my wife made an appointment with the photographer to pick the ones she wanted.  She asked me which ones I wanted, and I was a little taken aback by the question.
  • The conversation began here, when THQ's Cory Ledesma stated that buying used games "cheated" developers. Then it picked up steam when Penny Arcade made a comic about it, as they do. Then it turned into a discussion between PA artist Mike Krahulik and a number of other people. The thrust of the thing is that when a gamer buys a used game they might save themselves a few bucks, but all of that money will go to GameStop and none of it goes to the developer. You save five, but the developer loses forty-five. (Or however much of the purchase price they normally get from a new copy.) The conversation has taken the shape of a battle between Developers and Gamers. This is a shame, since there are three actors in this equation. I don't like the idea of painting a Snidely Whiplash mustache on GameStop and declaring them to be our villain, but we should at least list them in our cast of characters.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-08-13

  • 1. Pick your favorite software below. 2. Click "Get Installer" and run it. 3. You're done! No Toolbars Ninite says "No" to toolbars and other junk. No Clicking Ninite automates installers offscreen. 32 and 64-bit Ninite installs the best version of an app for your PC. International Ninite installs apps in your PC's language. Fast No manual labor means installs finish quickly. And More Ninite Pro has even more features. Learn more
  • CONTROLS Click and hold the left mouse button to paint snow. The skier will do tricks if you let go of the button while airborne. OBJECTIVE Draw snow under Solipskier to gain speed, do tricks and hit bonus gates. Avoid the jump chasms and red gates and tryto get the highest score you can! Share scores with your friends to see who's the best. HELP Try drawing long downslopes with short inclines on the end to gain speed and neccessary altitude (for higher gates). If you pass through a green gate while airborne you'll get a multiplier and speed boost. The faster you go the more points you will rack up.
  • Just 65 years ago, David Livermore's paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn't go well, but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future. The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight. Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. "Is this the end of antibiotics?" it asked.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-07-10

  • Yesterday Nathan Fillion tweeted this very interesting picture of Joss Whedon, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk and himself. But what were they meeting for — to talk about reuniting for a new project? Or is Fillion just being a big tease? What are they all doing together? What are they looking at? What is happening? The only clue Fillion gave was his Twitter message: "Together again." So who knows? Still, it's great seeing the gang back together again.
  • This tutorial will help you to install and set up a few email accounts, by using the built-in POP3 Service in Windows Server 2003. I will assume you have basic knowledge about the Windows Server family and Mail Servers, but I have tried to make this tutorial as easily comprehensible as possible. The tutorial has been tested on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition but should also work on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. I will not cover MX records and other similar things in this release. To follow this tutorial you need a stand alone server. You can of course use a Domain Controller, but that assumes you understand when to not follow the tutorial and use other settings (i.e. authentication method).
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-07-09

  • This tutorial will help you to install and set up a few email accounts, by using the built-in POP3 Service in Windows Server 2003. I will assume you have basic knowledge about the Windows Server family and Mail Servers, but I have tried to make this tutorial as easily comprehensible as possible. The tutorial has been tested on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition but should also work on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. I will not cover MX records and other similar things in this release. To follow this tutorial you need a stand alone server. You can of course use a Domain Controller, but that assumes you understand when to not follow the tutorial and use other settings (i.e. authentication method).
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-06-25

  • Brussels, 2 April 2008 — ISO members failed to disapprove the Open XML format. Microsoft has compromised the International Standards Organisation (ISO) during the rush to get a stamp for their Office OpenXML (OOXML), using unfair practices such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process. OOXML received 75 percent approval votes of p-members of JTC1, among them many nations of questionable expertise in standardization. In September a first attempt to approve the 6000 page standard Open XML failed with more than 3500 submitted comments. As in September many of the new approval votes were won by political high level intervention and the vendors dominance in national technical committees.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-05-26

  • This is LEGO Digital Designer. The program that lets you build with LEGO bricks on your computer. Learn more about LDD and how you get started by using our new tutorial movies.
  • WORDPRESS THEMES – Free Premium WordPress Themes with High-Quality Screenshots are available for DOWNLOAD.
  • To determine how much to charge for your services is often one of the biggest challenges for a new freelancer. If you charge too much you'll have trouble landing a job, but if you charge too little you'll starve. If you're a new freelancer, you've probably scoured the Internet in search of the average rates of professionals in your field. Don't even bother. I'll let you in on a secret… now that the Internet is here, there aren't any "average" rates, because the demographics are too widespread. Furthermore, in the United States, it's now illegal for competitors to discuss rates amongst each other in light of antitrust laws, which explains the absence of rate survey information online. Instead I'll show you how to figure out what rates you should charge by using a formula.
  • Tech companies are in a race to redefine the TV experience by combining web video content with traditional programming. The goal: to control your living-room screen by creating an experience where using the remote to view BoingBoing’s latest video on your 52-inch plasma is as easy as playing the last episode of Lost from your Tivo, or clicking over to a live broadcast from Yankee Stadium. Google announced a new set-top-box platform called Google TV last week. It will be based on Google’s Android operating system and will have access to Flickr, gaming sites such as Club Penguin, and music sites such as Pandora and Rhapsody. With Google TV, the search company enters a crowded space where big companies such as Apple and Microsoft and scrappy startups such as Boxee and Roku have been trying to make headway for years. Where Google TV hopes to score is in its ability to integrate cable programming with web video. Most other alternatives only offer access to free TV channels or select cabl
  • The internet is undoubtedly a wonderful place, but let's face it: some web sites are only too happy to serve up annoying ads, unnecessarily heavy Flash elements, and all-around user-unfriendly experiences. Here's how to make your browsing experience as annoyance-free as possible. Google's Chrome browser already takes care of some of the web's biggest annoyances—like browser slowness (Chrome is impressively snappy) and entire-browser-crashing plug-ins (if Flash crashes in one tab, for example, it won't take down your entire browser session). Throw in some great extensions, and you can block annoying ads, browser-jacking scripts, and other bad behavior. We have to put it out there, right up front: Chrome is not quite as extensible as Firefox at this point. So while the How-To Geek could show us how to fix nearly all of the web's biggest annoyances with Firefox, Chrome lacks for the same in-depth tweaking abilities (most notably Firefox's powerful about:config tool). Its Chrome Extensio
  • The story follows the adventures of Aang, a young successor to a long line of Avatars, who must put his childhood ways aside and stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the Water, Earth and Air nations. |
  • ]]>