Typography is important in all types of media, and it’s increasingly becoming more important on the web too. Here’s a good guide to web typography…
The Elements of Typography Style Applied to the Web
Gizmodo found a pretty funny vid of a lady preaching in front of a store about technology…
Email is quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives. The reason I say it hasn’t already is because there are still plenty of people I know who check their email once a month, or even worse, never at all!
But for most of us that are on the net, it’s something we do all the time. It’s part of us. It also takes up a lot of our time. While surfing the net earlier this week, I came across sentenc.es.
sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be a pre-determined number sentences or less. It’s that simple.
Seems like a pretty cool policy, I’ll try going with the five.sentenc.es policy one with my friends for now. Hopefully it’ll make my life easier 
I was tagged by Aki on Wednesday.
- Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
- Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
- Players should tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.
So, here are my 8 random facts:
I tag these people:
One thing I’ve always wanted with Google’s services (like reader, email, calendar), is the ability to use it offline… don’t we all want that?
Google’s actually already made the Reader app available offline. What you need is Google Gears. I’m pretty sure it stores scripts and data from the service on your local computer, and when you are in offline mode, it uses the stored data instead of the live data (web) to present information to you. Since Gears has the ability to support multiple services, I think Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar are next.
Here’s a list of my top 10 values. What are yours?
Those 10 were voted on the most out of 374 different values that Steve Pavlina wrote about. You can take a value test here to see your top values.
If it wasn’t for Apple, I probably would be ripping friend’s CD’s to play music… wait, I probably wouldn’t even be listening to as much music as I listen to now. I think it was either MacRumors or AppleInsider where I read this, but on average, every iTunes user only has approximately 8 purchased songs… Compared to that, I have over 400, and that grows every month… but I think it’d grow faster if there weren’t DRM.
Why?
Because right now most of my music is registered to a .Mac account, and if I cancel that account then I can’t authorize or reauthorize my computers. It is my music, and I’d be more at ease if something like that didn’t control my music library. So, without the DRM to bother me, I’d definitely be buying a lot more (even if it was +$.29 to get DRM free).
How does this all tie in with DRM for HD DVD’s and BlueRay? I love watching movies, but I like to watch them on my computer. I like to have them easily accessible any time I want to watch them. What’s the best way to do that? It’s to keep a copy (for personal use) on one of your own hard drives. My HDTV is connected to a seperate computer that I run as a media server, then I have my laptop, and another laptop, and another server, and well, you get my point. Lots of computers. The 5 computer limit (if they adopt Apple’s same DRM restrictions that is), wouldn’t be enough, and the DRM would make it impossible in the first place to make a personal use copy on my hard drive.
I’ve seen the quality of the new HD discs (both BlueRay and HD DVD), and they look amazing. Even though the DVD’s are double the price of normal DVD’s. I’ve also seen the quality of the movie downloads on iTunes, and truthfully, I don’t think it’s worth the $9.99 they charge. I think Apple should offer movies in at least 720p, and for an extra cost, provide it without DRM restrictions (just like music). So, $15~$17 for 720p video without DRM? Hell yes I’ll buy it. Have it released 1 week before DVD’s, I’d buy it before I rent it!
With storage so cheap today, why do we need new DVD’s? Why not just purchase and download, it’s much more convenient right? There’s one issue that comes up for me. When you go over to a friends house, and want to watch a movie you own, you bring your DVD and watch in on their player. That’s not illegal, but, in another example; you go over to a friends house, purchased the movie on iTunes, how would you play it at your friends house without copying it? There’s definitely some gray area here.
Got a little side tracked, but my point is, if the MPAA/RIAA wants us to stay legal, then provide good legal alternatives. Don’t fill things up with DRM just because you don’t want it to get copied. On the contrary, if you put DRM on the content, people will find a way to circumvent it and distribute it another way, without paying for it. Also, when things get out of hand, don’t try and cover it up. With last week’s Digg example, the information would spread faster (this is where my child analogy comes in 
).
A List Apart’s web design survey was surprisingly fun to take. I usually hate taking surveys, but A List Apart’s website has helped me a lot in the past, so I figured what the heck.
It’ll be interesting to see what the statistics are once it’s finished…
On a side note, the software running the survey seems pretty interesting too
Google’s added a feature that’s been in Google Earth to their Google Maps! You can add your own points just like in Google Earth, and they one-upped it too, you can share it with friends!.
This will be a great way to share those places where you hang out with friends, went on trips, or maybe even where you plan to go… Can’t wait to use this to show friends and family the places I’ve traveled to before.
For all the hype around Joost, I think it is not even close to a 1.0 release.
The interface is nice, it has a dashboard type capability to chat with other users while watching the same show, which is kinda like having someone sit next to you while you watch it. But, the video playback sucks.
I’m *really* disappointed. It pauses/skipps every 5 seconds, even though data is coming in at around 150kilobytes/sec! And even if I just pause it, and wait 5 minutes for it to stream ahead a little, the moment I start playing it starts skipping/pausing on its own!
I’ve been to the forums with the error, which is error #121, and they said its because of bandwidth issues on my end. (as you can see from the speetest results).
I can’t wait until they solve the issue… until then, well, I’m just going to be waiting for the next version.
Google has recently released their Desktop search application for the Mac platform. I’ve of course, downloaded it, and it’s indexing my computer as I write this.
The installation and setup of it was very simple, it uses the same Privacy list as the Spotlight search function in Tiger, so you don’t have to add the list to both of their settings. I think it does a good job of searching for word docs, emails, history, but for documents that require images, video, it’s not something I want to use. It does after all, show the results in the Google Search layout (which is strong in text-based results).
I like the features that comes with Google Desktop, maybe Apple and Google can work together to make some parts of it built in functions of Spotlight… (ie. being able to search through emails, chat logs, etc.)
Google Apps for Your Domain Name has been talked about a lot this past year, I’ve been using it for 11 months now, and the features just keep piling up (prior to today’s announcment, they added the ability to purchase domains). Today they formally released it as Google Apps. There are two versions, the free one, and the Premier one. The premier one has these features
The free version doesn’t include the API’s, 24/7 support, and only has 2GB of storage. All beta users now have the free versions of Google Apps. (I wish they would have just let us have the Premier version for the accounts that are already set up )
There’s always the issue of privacy when you used a hosted solution for your email. Since most of us already have a Gmail account, (or some form of other free hosted email), using it for private uses probably wont be a problem, it’s the corporate customers that will need to decide whether or not to trust Google with their data.
Google is targeting the Premier version to Small Businesses and the Enterprise, and the free version to Educational institutions, families, and organizations.
DNS servers are what make domain names possible. Every internet-connected computer has an IP address, but remembering those are difficult, which is one of the reasons why domain names are much more useful. But in order for the domains to work, there needs to be a way to tell the client computer that the domain www.apple.com points to the IP address 17.254.3.183.
This is where DNS servers come in. These servers have huge databases that store the information that the client needs to connect to the web server. Probably all ISP’s use their own DNS servers to help speed up the queries, but when those DNS servers don’t know what IP address the domain points to, it asks one of the 13 root servers.
Depending on where you are, and where the DNS servers are, the time taken to find the IP address of a domain can vary. To speed up the process, there’s a service called OpenDNS.
Two things make OpenDNS faster than similar services. First, OpenDNS runs a really big, smart cache, so every OpenDNS user benefits from the activities of the broader OpenDNS user base. Second, OpenDNS runs a high-performance network which is geographically distributed and serviced by several redundant connections. OpenDNS responds to your query from the nearest location. That means we’re very fast (and extremely reliable, to boot).
Not only does OpenDNS speed up your internet performance, it also helps prevent phishing and fixes typos when you type in a domain (eg. apple.cm gets redirected to apple.com). Their service is easy to setup (all you need to do is set your router/computers DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220).
A lot of us use Google Analytics, it’s easy to use, and easy to add accounts that can view the data also. I personally like it because the servers are nearly always up and running, and thus doesn’t slow down your page loads. (I’ve used other statistic sites but whenever the site goes down, the page load becomes rediculously long).
I’m open to new things, and when I got a random invite (that I never signed up for) to a private beta for ReInvigorate, I thought I’d give it a try.
The layout is though out nicely, you can put sites into groups of your choosing, helping you keep track of personal, business, or client stats. It gives basically all the same info as Analytics does, but with a bit more customizibility. For the graphs, you can set the trending order, cubic spline interpolation (all of which I have no idea what they mean, but they make the graph look cool )
So far, I think it beats all the other free statistics websites out there, and it comes close to Google’s Analytics.
