How to center stuff in CSS with no hacks

By akie

Linked because I keep on forgetting how this works and it’s driving me crazy!!

Women laughing alone with salad

By akie

Link and the related “Best of sexual harassment stock photography”

Tan lines

By akie

Tan lines from typical summer activities:

A-capella “Thriller”

By admin

François Macré has recorded Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in a 64-track a-capella version. Très cool

Vintage “Internet-age” posters

By akie

Of Skype, Facebook and YouTube. Utterly brilliant

Link

Not being an employee…

By akie

Switching jobs had not solved my problems. The truth was that I hated working in a conventional structure. I hated having a boss, working on someone else’s creation and sitting in an office all day. My time was not my own, and I was miserable. I could not bear it for even one day longer. So I quit and decided to become an entrepreneur.

Exciting as it may be, however, the entrepreneurial life is far from easy. Stress is a regular part of the day. Money is tight. There are frequent emotional highs and lows, and the desire to succeed can become all-consuming. Underlying all of this is the knowledge that failure is the most likely outcome.

Yet, no matter how tough things get, I wake up every morning with renewed hope and excitement for what lies ahead. The fact that I am working on my passion gives meaning to even the most mundane tasks.

My future is perhaps more uncertain than it ever has been. I may end up wealthy, or I may earn barely enough to support myself. But the realization that I face a high likelihood of failure is not enough to send me back to the corporate cubicle.

Very true. From The New York Times.

Television is a drug

By akie

It’s true!

Link

Flexible grid & flexible images

By akie

Open this web page and resize it - from iPhone-size to XXL. Notice how the design changes based on how much space is available. Notice how the images scale based on big your screen is. Explained here and here (thanks A List Apart!).

This is why I’ll never be an adult

By akie

Read the funny comic that follows: link

Where can I fly for how much?

By akie

Link

Sculpting

By akie

Artist Philippe Faraut shows how it’s done.

Make any song swing

By akie

Take a song, time-stretch the first half of each beat and time-shrink the second half - and what you get is a remarkable swing version. Some examples:

Daft Punk’s “Around the World”

or

“Every breath you take” by the Police

More examples - including a link to the source code so you can do it yourself (to any song).

Prince of Bel-Air

By akie

The theme song for the Prince of Bel-Air, as performed by Gandalf

and Neil Young

Immer mussen die blöde Holländer uns ärgern

By akie

Business plans

By akie

I think I’ve had this conversation… let’s say… ehm… regularly? If only they would accept my equity

From “8 Websites You Need To Stop Building“

Rowan Atkinson at a Conservative Party Conference

By akie

Only 3 minutes but brilliantly funny. Another apparently classic Rowan Atkinson:

I didn’t know this guy is actually funny

“Bad Romance” a capella

By akie

Brilliant a cappella version of Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” by 20 regular guys in shorts & t-shirts (University of Oregon’s “On the Rocks”):

Cool logo

By akie

Yowzers! By Richard Fonteneau (1, 2).

Why people cheat

By akie

Great TED-talk by Daniel Ariely (link) on why people cheat. Very interesting.

“Signs”

By akie

Beautiful short film by Patrick Hughes.

What happens after you rescue the princess

By akie

Hahahaha By Studio Joho

Obama meets Miyagi

By akie

Hammerzeit

By akie

Obviously referencing MC Hammer

Pixels

By akie

Retro gaming!

Vimeo

Bonobo

By akie

The Bonobo monkey understands English, writes, makes fire, and drives golf cars. Amazing.

Future is now: Bionic arm

By akie

Not photoshopped! Check the video.

Disney meets Magritte

By akie

I really like Brian Cook’s crossover between Snow White & Magritte.

Actually, I like most of his work, like this “cavemen graffiti”:

Check out his blog.

Metallica & jazz

By akie

A (spoofed) smooth jazz version of Metallica’s classic “Enter Sandman”. Genius!

The basic laws of human stupidity

By akie

From this article comes a nice, succinct definition of “stupidity”:

The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see below).

If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom’s mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O.

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

When confronted for the first time with the Third Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour. But let us abandon the lofty plane of theory and let us look pragmatically at our daily life. We all recollect occasions in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his gain and our loss: we had to deal with a bandit. We also recollect cases in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his loss and our gain: we had to deal with a helpless person. We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent. Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful reflection you must admit that these are not the events which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.

Note that I’m in no way implying that I’m NOT stupid

Link

It’s like, argh, you know?

By akie

Stating that she wasn’t in the best place right now, and that things have been sort of you know, Belmont resident Megan Slota announced Thursday that sometimes she just feels….

Due to a general sense of…well, it’s hard to explain, the 28-year-old dental hygienist reported that she just needed to work some stuff out, and that she would probably be a little I don’t know for a couple weeks or so.

“It’s not anybody’s fault, honestly,” said Slota, standing in her kitchen and holding a mug of tea with both hands. “Sometimes I just get like this where it’s like I’m not, I guess, whatever. We don’t have to get into it right now.”

Added Slota, “I’m really, like, argh, I don’t know.”

Ah, The Onion…

Future is now: IBM building human brain

By akie

IBM has completed a test setup that models 4.5% of the neurons in the human cortex. It used 147,456 CPUs and 144 Terabytes of RAM to accomplish this, but alas. A 100% simulation coverage is expected around the year 2019. This is not a joke. Academic paper here.

Terminator, anyone?

Microsoft’s tablet: surprisingly good

By akie

This prototype of a Microsoft iPad-alternative looks surprisingly useful and well-designed. This video is dated before Apple’s announcement, so it’s not a iPad clone.

Given this video and their pretty decent IE9 preview release, can we conclude that Microsoft is not really going extinct after all?

Close to where I live

By akie

Christophe Gevrey took this picture of the Promenade, close (<200 meters) to where I live.

Still can’t believe I actually live there

“Show them to me”

By akie

As sung by Rodney Carrington

No-one thinks of fighting, when they see a topless girl
Maybe if you’d show yours too, we could…
…saaaaave the world

One man beatboxing band

By akie

Now that’s a cool iPhone app

A comedian’s take on computers

By akie

“Eddie Izzard’s encore on computers”

Hilarious!

Gangster rap/folk crossover

By akie

Flight of the Conchords - Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros

Statistically correct love song

By akie

In honour of yesterday’s Valentine day: Tim Minchin’s “If I didn’t have you”. A cynical, statistically correct love song. The engineer in me appreciates this

(YouTube)

Lyrics:
Read more »

Web typography solved

By akie

When choosing a font for use on a website, you are restricted to one of the 15 or so “web fonts“. That sucks. The only way you can use a different font is by resorting to hacks such as Cufon, sIFR or FLIR.

But if you do that, you’ve only solved half the problem. You’re still in muddy waters regarding the licensing of the fonts you’re using, possibly opening yourself to future litigation. And, whether you choose Cufon, sIFR or FLIR, the text that’s in a different font will behave differently than ‘regular’ text. You can’t select it, copy it or edit it like ‘regular’ text. That’s because it’s not regular text. It’s  a Javascript image, Flash movie, or plain image - respectively. That sucks!

Fortunately, there’s a solution for that: the CSS3 @font-face tag. It allows you to set the font of any given text on your web page. If the user does not have the font you indicated, it will be downloaded and used. It even works cross-browser.

So only the legal issue remains. Obviously, you can’t redistribute high quality commercial fonts like Minion or ITC Franklin Gothic. The companies holding the rights won’t allow it, and probably rightfully so.

So what to do? As Mark Pilgrim so eloquently stated: Fuck the foundries. If we can’t legally use their fonts on a web page, then we’ll have to look for high quality fonts that we CAN use on a web page.

And that’s when I came across Font Squirrel, and I must say: I LOVE IT! Free high quality fonts that you can use on your website. 100% free for commercial use. No licensing issues! Just what web typography needed

Link

This is not a real volcano

By akie

Matthew Albanese creates fake photorealistic pictures by building scale models and photographing them from a specific angle.

For example, this image does not show a real volcano:

Really, it doesn’t. Proof: Read more »