Renaming “Chrome” to “That browser with Flash”
Renaming “Chrome” to “That browser with Flash”
The medium with which you choose to express a message shapes that message — be careful it doesn’t contradict it.
Case in point: A Rational Web Platform (via @brucel)
article
markup — even js-generated markup is predictably disgusting Everything about this is anti-web, practically screaming “ignore me”.
Improvements:
Signed up for brid.gy. If your site accepts webmentions it is a no-brainer; if not then you’re missing out! Implement today: indiewebcamp.com/webmention
An excellent implementation of a indiewebcamp.com/backfeed service, ≈2 years after I drafted that wiki page. fantastic work by snarfed.org!
Mac OS 10.6 spaces vs 10.9 full-screen apps/desktops — switching gestures a welcome addition, but muscle memory persistent “physical” location lost, replaced by ambiguous time-based UI which does exactly what you mean half of the time, and causes flow-breaking confusion+excise the rest of the time
@benwerd @chrismessina @walkah @ADJOTERUS @emilychang go team YYYY-01-07! #oneoldernessday
Celebrating oneoldernessday at the office by finding my Icelandic name – it’s either Bjarndal (bear dale) or Bjarnhéðinn (bear skin, pronounced byarn-hey-thinn).
The ever-awesome @briansuda and Ninja got me a copy of berglondon.com/products/svk — loving the affordances of having ink you can choose not to see, also pondering the possibilities of additive fanfiction where you add your own internal monologue/headcanon/background details in-place over the canonical storyline.
Compilation of some sub-optimal gauge design I’ve come across recently. First up is BBC iPlayer’s speed tester+comparison tool:
Ignoring the questionable pyramid chartjunk, there are a bunch of issues here — the use of arc length and exceedingly inconsistent scale on the skeuomorphic gauge, the strange choice of colouring on the comparison bars (is green good and red bad? or better/worse than my connection?) and the totally useless “status” column add up to a confusing graphic.
The next is this set of dials from pool.dogechain.info — again the use of arc length is unnecessary, and very few comparisons are possible. At first, the scales look fairly sensible — perhaps the maximums are pool maximums, or averages or something?
Uh, apparently not.
These dials are always half full. They use up hundreds of pixels of colour and drop shadow, taunting you into thinking you’re getting some sort of useful comparison, when actually they’re informing you that two times twenty three is forty six. Astonishing.
Simply erasing the colour creates a much cleaner graphic
which can be further improved by clearing some of the resultant whitespace
The addition of time-series data might make a genuinely useful contribution, as could some comparisons or proportions allowing your rate to be compared to the pool average or total.
Another welcome, and obvious addition would be “how much do I make per second/minute”, “how much have I made so far”, “how does that compare to other miners” and “how much is that in real money” — these are the questions that I as a miner actually want answered when looking at a dashboard, but the few relevant statistics which are shown are relegated to a small corner.
Apparently, making sure a directory exists is an exceedingly complicated task: stackoverflow.com/questions/273192/create-directory-if-it-doesnt-exist-for-file-write
Idea for focus-maintaining anti-rabbit-warren UI: “current task” bar, simple user-editable text field present on all screens, subdued but not inconspicuous, persistent reminder of current short-term goal.
Should be somewhere out of the way but accessible at a glance, i.e. only eye movement required to see what it is. Key combo to instantly clear and focus for editing.
@w03_ practising for our pizza night, obviously ;) It was unplanned spontaneous pizza otherwise I would have alerted you
@brennannovak wow; such wealth; very processor-intensive; much fan noise
Moderately productive Sunday — set up bitcoin, dogecoin (mined 9 DOGE!), tor and GPG, made best pizza so far and repaired headphones.
Cryptocurrency prediction: the easiest one to use will succeed. Currently it seems to be dogecoin.
It’s not often I come across a cringeworthy wikipedia article, but Educational Technology is particularly bad
@w03_ thanks, and YES PIZZA
Achievement Unlocked: sleep cycle disrupted without crossing any timezones. Back in Iceland again.
Reflecting on 2013 with my #family. Biggest things personally have been making my second #gurdy, moving to Iceland and meeting+working with all the great people over here. Lots of #indieweb and #taproot progress, including a great indiewebcamp in September.
Looking forward to 2014: more cooking, more indieweb progress, seeing more of Iceland, going to some gurdy festivals, improving hardware hacking abilities, connecting my gurdy and other devices to the web and each other.
I gave my brother my old MacBook this Christmas, first thing he did was get Final Cut Pro and start making things:
OH “rocket is the tastiest green thing ever invented. It really shouldn’t be that tasty” — @jwentomologist
@_aitor thanks, they did indeed! Gave my brother and some friends the recipe, emphasis on thickness and gloopiness.