Been a while since I did one of these. But Deliciousing and/or Magnoliating simply are not sufficient from time to time. Among other things, such links are much too obscure. They are leaves in a forest of trees.
- The most genteel porn on the planet
- They’re building a new Bay Bridge in San Francisco and seemingly every single workman, -woman, and -er gets a well-executed face shot. Good heavens the girls look ugly, not that I give a shit, while so very many of the guys don’t. I find it interesting that appearance and grooming seem to escalate up the socioeconomic ladder, with the engineers looking like they could eat out at a real restaurant after a shift while a lot of the other guys sit at diners wiping their mouths on their sleeves.
- John Gruber fucks it up
- Excuse the intemperate headline, but really, he does. “Format=flowed can bite me. Sorry, but I want control over my line lengths, and don’t want them wrapping at the window width.” Then narrow your godforsaken window. What the fuck do you do in a word processor or your precious BBEdit – press Return at the end of every line? I am pretty sick of old guys who’ve been using computers forever who simply cannot understand flowed text.
- Same-language subtitling that is not total crapola
- I have elsewhere derided same-language subtitling as useless and a waste of everyone’s time. The intended audience seems to be an upper-middle-class Thai who has a half-arsed knowledge of English and takes it as an insult that a character might be captioned saying “yes,” “thank you,” or some other term he already understands. (He’s in denial that he is merely a Thai with bad command of English.) We don’t work for people like this, OK? They can just frigging read along like everybody else. However, the Google Foundation–supported program of same-language subtitling in India appears to be producing results and actually makes sense. I have read one of the research papers on the topic – “Reading out of the ‘idiot box’: Same-language subtitling on television in India,” a well-written, information-dense report (PDF) – and I am now a believer in their project.
- No captions on iTunes video
- Well, why are you surprised? Outside of major television networks and home-video releases in four countries, there isn’t any captioning anywhere. Apple’s response that “we face a large challenge incorporating legible text onto the iPod screens in a manner that does not consume the display in a disruptive fashion” is simply incorrect based on my own actual experience of setting up online-captioning projects. I don’t even know where to begin to inform Apple of basic facts like that. They do not seem to be looking for prior art, and another arm of the company seems to think WGBH can do everything for them if and when a solar system of planets fall into line.
- Most captioning viewers in Britain are hearing
- And many of them explain why they watch.
- Toronto subway station tiles
- Lovely and calming rendition of a colour palette that looks better on screen than in real life.
- Symbols.com
- Vast list of symbols and pictograms (e.g., salt).
- Spike TV butches up its logo
- The new one looks like some twat with Microsoft Paint created it, but the claim is it’s “a new, more aggressive logo that it says will stand ‘in stark contrast with the cursive lettering … of the past.’ ” This constitutes an open-palmed swat across the face of House Industries, whose book (q.v.) shows over 20 candidates for the Spike TV logo and warns “When a commercial job comes in, our general policy is to deliver one sketch. And nothing on spec, either.” Their shit is better than this shit.
- html2ps and html2pdf
- Shouldn’t these be more-convenient desktop applications, and shouldn’t the HTML–PDF converter produce tagged PDF, as it easily could even from documents with lousy semantics?
- Why I love Joe Clark
- French interviews on Web standards