Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today
Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).
Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).
A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.
First you cope and then you adapt. The kicker: once you adapt, you may not want to go back.
Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.
I think these are great habit-forming ideas for any web designer or developer: a day without using your mouse; a day with your display set to grayscale; a day spent using a different web browser; a day with your internet connection throttled. I’m going to try these!
Twenty hard-won lessons from Dan from ten years of Dribbble.
We sent 50 shirts along with a card to friends and colleagues announcing Dribbble’s beta back in 2008. This first batch of members played a pivotal role in the foundation of the community and how it would develop. The shirt helped guilt them into actually checking out the site.
I think I still have my T-shirt somewhere!
This orrery is really quite wonderful! Not only is it a great demonstration of what CSS can do, it’s a really accurate visualisation of the solar system.
This is the best explanation of quantum computing I’ve read. I mean, it’s not like I can judge its veracity, but I could actually understand it.
Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.
Hypnotic.
The lovely (and responsive) Great Discontent site has a lovely interview with Dan, who is lovely.
This is such a brilliant and empowering idea: an open-source object-oriented to electronics, like LEGO bricks for circuit-building.
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Dan Cederholm is in the house at An Event Apart San Francisco. He’s all about the bulletproofing.
Simplebits describe what they do as hand crafted pixels and text
. This idea of craft, building something with your hands, is what Dan wants to concentrate on. It isn’t always obvious in web design how well-crafted a web site is. Dan will run through a case study that focus on three aspects of web design: being bulletproof, being adaptable and focusing on the details. Like progressive enhancement for JavaScript, Dan will be using Progressive Enrichment for CSS which really means using cool stuff that doesn’t work in IE.
The case study will be a site all about coffee called Iced or Hot (it doesn’t actually work).
border-radius
. This is progressive enrichment. Rounded corners are usually a pain in the ass. But you can do them today with namespaced webkit-
and moz-
border-radius declarations. Dan puts these vendor-specific properties into a separate stylesheet called enriched.css
to keep them quarantined like hacks. What about other browsers? Well, they don’t get rounded corners but so what? Rounded corners just degrade gracefully to rectangles.opacity
but that sets the transparency for an element and all its children. Giving colour values with RGBa (background-color: rgba(0,0,0.7);
) you only set the opacity of the background. A PNG would reach more users but like border-radius
, RGBa is great for prototyping.clearfix
solution but man, that’s a crappy class name to put in your markup. The alternative of creating a list of wrappers that you want to clear is as bad. Dan uses a class name of group
.max-width
on elastic layouts (of 100%) you can make sure that the layout won’t go outside the viewport. On Iced or Hot, has four columns of 16em with a 2em gutter between them. The XScope tool is handy for checking your grid lines..last
. Dan is constantly having to put a class of .last
on the last item in a list (for style reasons). You can use jQuery to add the class programatically. jQuery('ul.lst li:last'),addClass('last');
reset.css
. When can we…?Drop support for X. Start using Y. Answer: when your site shows the stats to support that decision.
The alphabet ends with U.
Here's Dan's latest project (and of course it looks gorgeous). I've been testing it for a while before the official launch and it's really sweet. Best of all, there is no sign up. All the interaction happens through Twitter. Clever.
The slides from Gareth Rushgrove's presentation at BarCamp Brighton. It's all about Restful Rabbits.
Khoi writes about Twitter and its younger sibling, Twitterific. He makes some great points about the differences that the two interfaces confer on the experience of Twittering.
He’s not the only one with something to say about Twitter. At Web Directions North, the subject came up at least once every evening and usually resulted in an hour-long conversation/discussion/argument about its merits and failings. I can’t remember the last time that a service prompted such strong feelings.
Personally, I found my emotional connection to Twitter deepening while I was in Vancouver. I didn’t have much opportunity to Twitter myself because my phone didn’t want to play nice with Canadian networks but Jessica was twittering. Being able to catch up with the minutiae of her activity during the day was just wonderful. Of course there’s always emails, chats, phone calls, blog posts and Flickr pics but they all require a certain level of effort.
I must admit, not having a working phone did feel a little bit like going cold turkey. I’m sure that, like Dan, I would have been Twittering from on top of Whistler.
If you want to see some real Twitter addiction, Patrick Haney has it bad, man. He paid the price for his addiction when a Twitter drinking game was decreed at the Media Temple closing party. The rules are simple:
I hadn’t seen Tantek in an inebriated state until that night.
Dan has redesigned his site and it looks gorgeous.
Dan documents the process of adding microformats to Cork'd.
From Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin: a lovely looking piece of social software all about wine. I've been trying it in pre-release and it's really, really nice. This is my kind of website.
Dan has redesigned. Or maybe that should be realigned. Either way, it feels just perfect. Talented bastard.