May 2011
4 posts
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Instagram--Week 17, '11.
I wish Instagram would give us an option of not having that black border around images while keeping the filter effect. The one borderless photograph looks so much nicer.
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10 Myths About Introverts →
It’s a list. It’s about me. It’s about telling the world how to deal with me. How could I not link to this?
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April 2011
44 posts
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On Footnotes, Side-notes and Molding Content to...
My knowledge of traditional print techniques to make reading easy and smooth is fairly limited; I am a fairly modern-age book reader. So when I come across typographical elements such as footnotes and side-notes, I think about how it might enhance the presentation of writing on the web—particularly for Shorts.
I had experimented with both side-notes and footnotes on my old (now defunct)...
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“If only you’d remember before you ever sit down to write that you’ve been a...”
– Seymour: An Introduction, J.D. Salinger.
~ Via Austin Kleon.
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Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the... →
I’ve already opted-in to the transfer. Delicious for me is basically a collection of everything I’m linked to on Twitter. I don’t put any important bookmark on there—they get linked to from here, go to Instapaper if they’re articles, or get saved to Pinboard.
But the offending paragraph seems to be § 11, ¶ 1:
You agree not to do any of the following: post,...
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Personal Style Rules →
Christian Ross:
Sticking with dress shirts, when wearing a jacket (suit or blazer) I want to see about 1/2-inch of shirt sleeve past the end of your jacket sleeve. I try to keep mine in that 1/2-inch range but I do know it often sits slight shorter/longer. I have a couple of shirts where I’ve even gone as far as safety pinning up under the sleeve to keep them from being so long. Too much shirt...
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Response to "Needs a Little More Elaboration"
I think there was a disconnect in the aspects of Book Country that caught Tim’s attention and ones that caught mine. Tim saw it as a medium allowing writers to self-publish; I saw it as an an easy peer-review system. It is both those things, but I think it’ll be used more as one than the other.
Looking at the Book Country’s format, it looks tailor made to make discovery of smaller and less...
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“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– On Good Taste, Ira Glass.
~ Via Austin Kleon & Kottke.
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The Perdice Bradford (An Ode) →
… will that cheap pen ever become imbibed with your character? Will you form a bond with it that is unique to you? Will you know it’s quirks as well as it knows yours? Will it, because of these things, remain with you for a length of time and to the extent that if ever parted from your grasp it will feel as if losing a limb? Will the nib shape to your style? Will your grasp shape to the...
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Intimacy Publishing →
It’s natural to construct shiny, polished windows into our lives, to cover the cracks and caulk up the faults. And we’ve truly entertained and impressed one another, I’m sure. But at some point, the appeal of that smiling veneer starts to cheapen. The quippy sunshine, the meticulous personal branding, the glowing breakfast reviews—they have to be balanced with something real and...
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The Longest Joke in the World →
Running in at 22 A4 size sheets (as calculated by someone), this really is a very long joke. But it’s a very well imagined joke, like a story you can’t put down because you must know what happens next.
And it all starts with a man crawling through the desert.
~ Via Neven Mrgan
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Where From?
If you’re like me, you probably have tabs that stay open for days (even weeks) on end, waiting to be read and closed. Unfortunately, in case you liked what was on that page, two weeks later you don’t remember how you actually got there.
So I decided to write a bookmarklet that shows you that. Kind of. It’s a rather non-fancy script that tries to determine the context based on...
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Stammering
I’ve had a stammering problem for as long as I can remember. It’s a very selective stammer—surfacing only when I try to say certain words, and that too only in certain circumstances—but it’s enough to play on my mind whenever I talk to groups of people1.
Usually one wouldn’t be comfortable writing about such a thing unless it was glaringly obvious, at which...
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The Ph.D. Problem: Are We Giving Out Too Many... →
A year ago, I thought I was sure about my career path of becoming an academic. But the closer I get to it, the more I realise that stepping into a Ph.D. program right after graduation isn’t the right way to go because my goal is to learn and understand. The degree is just a certification that I’ve understood what I set out to explore.
Learning about something specific without having...
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The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To... →
Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
...
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Instagram--Week 16, '11.
I’m hoping to make a permanent feature out of putting up on weekeneds all the pictures I take from the previous week. It’s my way of motivating myself to take more pictures, which in turn motivates me to do other things—like get out of my room.
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Cranking →
Weeks and months from now when I’m scrolling through my posts like I habitually do, and I see this, I will stop to read it after reading this little introduction. And after reading it, if I have forgotten or have been slacking, I will be reminded of the things that are truly important. Otherwise I will be reassured that my priorities are in place.
If there is one thing you read today, it...
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Inspiration comes from experiences. Anybody who tries to say otherwise is pretentious or giving himself more credit than he is worth. “Experiences” is a big word though, so it shouldn’t be taken lightly. It encompasses everything that you observe using the five sense organs everyday, plus how your mind puts them together to remind you of something from the past, or envision...
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House-keeping
Just a little log of web-related stuff I’ve done in the past fortnight. I don’t do much of it these days, so anything small is worth a self pat-on-the-back.
I
I finally got around to adding paragraph level linking to Shorts. That means you (or I) can now link to individual paragraphs when quoting, instead of linking to the post and hoping readers can find the source. They show up as...
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“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing...”
– Letter Cult’s 2009 Person of the Year, Jessica Hische.
~ Via thebrooksreview
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Minimal Movie Posters →
Tasty.
~ Via xabhishek
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Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming... →
In other words, instead of trying in vain to persuade Apple to build Flash into iOS, or losing potential Flash Media Server customers to some other iOS-compatible solution, Adobe seems to be implicitly acknowledging that content publishers need Flash-free video streaming.
Why am I not surprised?
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Adapt.js →
Adapt.js is a lightweight (947 bytes minified) JavaScript file that determines which CSS file to load before the browser renders a page. It is worth noting this is a proposed, not prescribed, approach to a problem with multiple solutions.
Included is a way to make the whole thing dynamic, which loads up new CSS files when the window is resized. Very nice, especially the way you define the...
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“I was lucky enough to have a hard time with it at an age early enough so that...”
– Interview with Charlie Rose, David Foster Wallace.
He had a beautiful way to look at life. I said pretty much the same thing in my piece a week back, but David was just orders of magnitude more eloquent.
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“You get better at what you do”
– Cutting That Cord, John Gruber.
Rather obvious, but something we tend to forget when the going gets tough.
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Portal 2: Lab Rat →
A two part comic series set in the Portal universe, explaining what happened between games one and two.
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HackemUp—Diff for Hacker News →
Fooling around with Hacker News seems to be a lot of people’s favourite way to kill time. If you spend a reasonable amount of time on HN in a day, you need this. It shows you how the front page has changed since the last time you were on it (needs you to leave the page open, of course).
I hope this turns into a userscript, since clicking a bookmarklet everytime is so ‘05Not any...
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The Mantia Effect
I got linked to this great repository of wallpapers, but what caught my attention was the “Mantia” logo at the top. Click around on a few swatches and see how it changes. Or if you’re lazy, here’s a more obvious version.
Here’s the image he uses for the navigation bar:
There’s some creative transparency at play here. And then using absolute positioning,...
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How To Get A Real Education →
By experience, and going out and doing things. This follows hot on the heels of Wozniak saying the same thing a few days ago, about grading students based on projects rather than standardised tests.
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Let The Fear Out →
I am sure there are people who don’t care for everything I post on this site, but I am not writing for them. I write for myself. […]
Not everyone who reads this site will enjoy this specific post, but if I had let fear stop me from even writing it, both me and the people who do enjoy it would be losing out.
Justin Williams gets it.
~ Via Ian Hines
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“When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the...”
– How To Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon.
~ via marco
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The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. →
Always important to keep in mind, and not just for Ph.D. students.
~ via rashmiswamy
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Shorts v.3: Light & Dark
At least, I think this is the third iteration of the design. I thought I would be able to settle with Gotham and Helvetica. I mean, seriously, it’s Helvetica! But the previous look was too cluttered. Changing and tweaking things around I got caught up in adding useless little things that were neither functional nor pleasing.
So I started from scratch, and tried my best not to change the...
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The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design →
The context, meaning and tone of web copy should always determine typographic style. Reading the text in full—or at least understanding what the text might be before styling it—is a pre-requisite. A common mistake is to allow the design to dominate the text: Design for design’s sake, or even worse, fashion’s sake. The text is made subservient to the canvas that the designer wished...
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Bad Voice Triennium
In the 11th grade, I sang a duet as part of Red House’s entry for the school’s annual Western Music Competition. We sang a cover of Almost Here, and it didn’t go so well. Particularly the pre-chorus bits. If you hear the song, you’ll understand why.
I think 17-19 are the worst years voice-wise. But it’s especially worse for singers. I’ve been singing since I...
Instagoodies →
Stickers of your Instagram photos. Just $14 for 90 stickers.
~ Via cameronmoll
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How Tron: Legacy Effects Were Done →
Most of it was done using Adobe software and Cinema 4D, and the rest in C++ using OpenFrameworks and wxWidgets. Very image heavy, but also informative. I just wish he had a used a more readable font.
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Lesson From My Life
I haven’t read a book in a while. I used to be someone who used to read at least 5-6 books a year (each book about the size of the Lord Of The Rings), but now I don’t. A book a year for me is a good year for literature. In this age of blogs and Twitter, I somehow don’t seem to have the patience to sit and read 400+ pages worth of words that say the same thing in a thousand...
March 2011
5 posts
2 tags
“I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the...”
– Time Management, Randall Munroe.
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Things Have Changed (Bob Dylan)
My second favourite rainy day song.