I’ve been waiting for someone build a site where the user can switch between completely different CSS designs rather than just switching between colours or font sizes, and adactio.com does just that. In terms of graphic design, I think we’re really starting to see something happen with CSS driven web design and I sense that Chris Casciano’s article Your CSS Bores Me has riled designers into pushing the limits of what is possible. Now that more people seem to be adding bitmap graphics to their CSS layouts, it’s important to remember the whole point of using Style Sheets in the first place: to separate style from content. So, if a graphical element of your site is part of the styling of the site, then define it in the stylesheet, for example:

#head {
background: url(../images/graphic.gif) 0 0 no-repeat;
}

Alternatively, if a graphic is part of the content of your site, such as a photograph in a weblog, then put it in the HTML with the rest of the written content. The aim is to keep your information uncluttered and logically structured, without unneccessary graphics that should belong in the page’s styling. A good way to monitor this is to add Tantek Celik’s ‘Toggle CSS Style Sheets’ favelet to your bookmarks. This is a piece of javascript which strips the style sheet from your HTML document, allowing you to see what your page looks like without any styling information. If your page still looks good, is clear to read and easy to navigate around when the style sheet is disabled, you have designed your site well. Visit waferbaby.com or glish.com and toggle the style sheets off to see examples of good mark-up design.

Hot-rod your PowerMac at appleskinz.com.

I really am sick of renting houses. I was up ‘til Stupid O’clock last night trying to get my house straight for todays inspection by the landlord. What’s worse is that a flatmate recently moved out so I’m having to pay extra rent which I can’t really afford. Fortunately, house prices are pretty low in the Northeast of England, at least in comparison with the ridiculous amount you have to pay in the Southeast. Perhaps the fact that I’m paying too much rent is a good thing, because it will motivate me to finally start looking at houses to buy. Hey, another weblogger based in Newcastle. That brings the total up to an incredible 5 [that I know of].

Minotaur Shock’s album ‘Chiff-Chaffs & Willow Warblers’ not only has a good name, it is also great to listen to.

I can’t remember the last time I posted anything on a Monday. I tend to drift through Mondays as I’m waiting for Tuesday to happen.I upgraded to Blogger Pro the other day after much debating on whether I need to or not. Then I decided to go ahead as more of a gesture of gratitude than anything else. Anyway, it seems as though I’ve handed over my $35 only to find that I can’t access it. If anyone else has had this problem and has managed to solve it, let me know.

Google does a really bad job of translating this page into English. Old scythe ? [via plasticbag.org]Update: Thank Mo Morgan.

Could this be the greatest word game since Countdown?What you need:

• A pen and a piece of paper
• A calculator [unless you’re very good at multiplication]
• Access to the Google search engine

How to play:

1. You must enter a search query using just 2 words. When you submit the query, you must only get one result back.
2. When you have found that elusive one result, enter the words individually into Google and see how many results they each return.
3. Now multiply the 2 numbers together to get your Googlewhack score.

Here’s an example of Googlewhack:”viridian nunberg” = 1 Result


“viridian” = 53,000


“nunberg” = 5,450


53,000×5,450 = 293,755,000Of course, this Googlewhack won’t last for long because I’ve just blogged it and so have other people. But this means the game will get more difficult as time goes on. More info here.

Hurling yourself head-first down an icey track at 85mph on nothing but a small piece of metal is my idea of an Olympic event. Skeleton sounds like one of those games you might have played as a kid in which you challenged one another to risk death in order to pull of an incredible feat of athleticism, like jumping the gap between 2 high buildings or cycling down a near vertical slope. That millions are spent on carbon fibre sleds and aerodynamic clothing does nothing to hide the fact that Skeleton is essentially sledding head-first on a souped-up baking tray. Brilliant.

Mschmidt explains the loss of the k10k.com domain. Sounds like a legal battle is going to take place. [via Craig Stainton]

Next month, OS X users will be able to download the complete version of Maya for free. That’s right,

Some good news if you’re into cutting edge digital video work and you live in the Northeast of England; onedotzero is coming to the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle on the 9th of February. More info here.

I knew K10k was a portal [of sorts], but really. Ok, so it looks as though the K10k team haven’t renewed their .com domain name and for good reason; .com is synonymous with the new media economy’s fall from grace in 1999/2000, a time during which K10k bore the brunt as much as anyone else. So, here’s to K10k.net and its eagerly awaited return.

A few nights ago, I went to see a punk / ska band called King Prawn. They have a massive following on the live circuit, but have never quite made it into the mainstream, which is probably a good thing. Anyway, their music had everyone jumping up and down like mad people, and I was certainly one of them. Furthermore, I believe Babar is the only person in the world who can make a Hohner headless bass guitar look extremely cool.

Craig Linton has written an excellent piece on OS X and suggests many improvements which could be made – especially to the Dock – to further improve the useability of the Aqua GUI. I agree with many of his criticisms and I think the Dock is perhaps the most flawed feature of OS X; no matter how you have it configured, it always seems awkward.Of related interest, Death of an Icon. I linked to this almost a year ago and I thought I’d link it again now that OS X is becoming more widely used.

Some mad scientists have put together a cluster of 152 G4 chips to create a computer capable of 1.5 Teraflops [that’s 1.5 trillion floating-point calculations per second]. It can only be called one thing, the Big Mac.

Thanks to Matt Bloch at Soup Kitchen for buying me my Secret Santa gift, Edward Gorey’s Doubtful Guest and a present I didn’t even ask for: More Red Meat, cartoons from the excellent Max Cannon.

glish.com was offline for quite a long time last year, but now it is back. If you’re a web designer interested in the use of Cascading Style Sheets, this is the place to be.David Byrne: Accidental Photography. [via Evhead]Design your own O’Reilly Cover. [via xlab]

From Apple, a special message to Windows users.

Before the arrival of Google, using a search engine to find information on the web was almost a last resort. Entering a few keywords and hitting search was like using a one-arm-bandit-machine, the results seemed to come in at random and you were lucky if one result in a thousand was relevent to your search query. If you didn’t know the URL of what you were looking for, the next best thing to try was searching for information using the Yahoo Directory; navigating through the levels of sub-directories until eventually you found the information you were looking for. So, domain names became hot property as they were the only means by which your site could be found. But now, it seems that Google is changing that; so effective is its unique search algorithm, that it reduces the need for an easy-to-remember domain name to attract people to your site. If your site contains relevent information and presents it well, then Google will lead people there, even if it has a URL longer than the human genome sequence. Of course, for companies who control domain names and make money out of the them, this is a bad thing. Read more about what is being called the ‘Google Effect’.

I never found Stanley Unwin’s linguistic tomfoolery particularly funny, but there is no doubt that the world has lost a talented and enigmatic individual. BBC News | TV AND RADIO | Comedian Stanley Unwin dies

A collection of images taken using the excellent Digital Dream L’espion camera. These pictures demonstrate how well a camera the size of a box of matches can make exposures.

Here’s a draft version [4.4M PDF] of the servicing instructions for the new iMac. A warning to Mac lovers though: this document shows graphic images of a servicing operation which some of you may find disturbing.

Unwords.com | Home of the Sniglet

For so long, I’ve been testing this site in IE5.1 for OS X not thinking that I should check it in IE5.0 / Classic. I assumed there would be no difference in the way the two browsers rendered the page. I assumed wrongly; why did nobody tell me this site ballsed up in IE5, a MAC browser! I think I’ve fixed the problem; it seems that IE5 is more sensitive about how are ordered in the HTML. Anyway, I’m off to bury my head in the sand.

Ogg Vorbis is a patent and royalty-free audio compression format similar to mp3. You may think that mp3 is an open format, but it isn’t; strictly speaking, you must pay royalties to the MPEG consortium if you want encode music using mp3. Worse, the RIAA are determined to take control of the distribution of mp3, which is bad news for everyone. So, it is welcome news to hear that the BBC are currently testing the Ogg Vorbis codec for their live streaming services. Support from big organisations such as the BBC will help to put the .ogg format into public conciousness, which can only be a good thing.

SnoopDockieDock is either the worst name for a piece of software I have ever heard, or the best… I can’t decide.

Ever willing to explore what is happening in the alternative music scene in Newcastle, my friend Alex and I decided to go to the city’s ‘premier rock venue’ for, dare I admit it, an evening of metal and extreme ear-drum battering. I definitely felt like an outsider in that place, everyone either had very long hair or a close-shaved head. I was in the middle ground somewhere and I don’t have a beard, so I must have been considered as some kind of freak. Intervening on such a gathering of gothic metal heads is an astonishing experience; it’s like the 1990s never happened. Sufficient to say that the music was loud, and my worries about damaging my ears were compounded when I noticed that the person standing infront of me was wearing ear plugs.’Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagralacka mind zones are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind of all.’ – From The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.Even though everyone else seemed to take the headline band seriously, including the band themselves, they came across as being more of a self parody, like the Spinal Tap of the death metal circuit. This band have really boiled down this genre of music to leave the core of what it’s about: loud, dropped tuned guitars played through tortured amplifiers, frantic drumming, one string bass-lines and sub-sonic wordless vocals. It was minimalist in a weird kind of way, although I would have preferred it if the bass player stopped pretending and simply discarded the 3 strings he didn’t use. So, was it worth damaging my ears for? No.

The new iMac is growing on me; it’s a radical design solution as well as being an obvious one, which is kind of weird. However, Steve Jobs’ keynote fell short on delivering the ground-breaking products the mac community were expecting. Apple were hyping it up like crazy and it seems that everyone – including me – fell for it. iPhoto seems very useful though; an app designed to take away the ‘chain of pain’ of capturing and organising digital images.

It seems as though the cover of next weeks issue of Time Magazine, containing a picture of the new iMac, has been leaked. Of course, this could be a cunning plan on behalf of Apple to throw people off the scent of what is going to be unveiled later on today. After all the hype last week by Apple themselves, I wouldn’t put it past them.

Well, I’ve been wondering [see last post] and here’s what I think the iMac 2 will be… this will be the end of the speculation, I promise:Apple need a breakthrough Macintosh, and I think the iMac 2 will go some way to reaching the level impact the original iMac had when it was released. One thing that is definite about the keynote speech next week is that Steve Jobs will say that the iMac 2 will truly be the ‘centre of your digital lifestyle’. However, there has been a problem with this campaign over the past few months: lifestyle doesn’t just mean sitting infront of a desktop machine, or hunched over an iBook on the train to work. We all aspire to a lifestyle of activity and health and Apple want to bring their digital products into this. The iPod was one step towards this; a small, pocket-sized mp3 player that you can take with you and use anywhere. This is why I think the iMac 2 will be a computer based on a series of portable modules:

• There will be a compact desktop machine, one which will run the latest applications at lightning speed and this will form the hub of the modularised iMac.
• Connected to this machine will be a flat screen LCD display which could double as a portable tablet to be used with a pen, although I think this is unlikely.
• More likely is the introduction of another module which interfaces with the main desktop machine. This will be the PDA bit, a smaller tablet and pen device that you can take away on your travels. This could be a wireless networked device with a unique protocol for connecting with the main module of the machine at home.
• Home movie making has always been a selling point of the Macintosh range ever since the original iMac was introduced. But there was always a problem: lack of screen space. Those 15 inch monitors don’t have enough screen resolution to fit a video viewer, browser, timeline and capture bin on screen all at once. This is why I think the PDA will double as an extra monitor to provide more space for windows etc.
• The iPod will take its place as another module of the iMac 2.
• This new machine will share the same colours, materials and overall aesthetic of the iPod.
• Apple will start to produce more digital devices to interface with the main module.

So… there are my predictions. Even if I’m a mile out, I’ve had fun thinking about it.

I read a rumour a while ago that the new iMac will have a detachable flat screen which doubles as a kind of hand-held tablet, just like the ones they used in the original Star Trek series. The latest Apple tagline reads ‘To go where no PC has gone before’. I wonder…

I’m pretty sure that the iWalk is a fake, albeit a very elaborate one. A couple of days before the iPod was announced, Spymac released this picture sent to them by one of their ‘informers’. Clearly, it looks nothing like the iPod or the ‘iWalk’ as seen in the latest videos [which, unsurprisingly, you have to register for]. They were faking it in October, so why should we believe them now?Spymac are probably just a bunch of Microsoft nuts whose aim is to discredit Apple in some way [peoples’ expectations will now be higher than they were before, so there will be disappointment when the announcement of an Apple PDA doesn’t come], and they are undoubtedly making lots of money by selling advertising space and email addresses harvested from those eager Apple fans wanting a sneak preview of the latest products. It’s also strange that they don’t seem to have an archive before the 23rd of October, and they never speculate about any other Apple technology other than these so-called breakthrough devices. Call me cynical, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing the iWalk at the Mac Expo event.

Tonight, 19:30 on Channel 4: ‘Jon Snow presents a profile of photographer Joel Meyerowitz as he records the aftermath and the reflections of the New York’s citizens after the September 11 attacks’When Stu and I studied photography at Foundation level, Meyerowitz’s work really inspired us. The level of detail and the quality of the light in his photographs is incredible [he uses a gorgeous 10, 8 Deardorff view camera]. If you ever see copies of Cape Light, St Louis & The Arch or Nature of Cities, check them out.Update: There’s an article about the programme here [via t-melt].

So why are we so afraid of the Euro? ‘I want the Queen’s head printed on my currency thank you very much!’ says the vox populi, worrying that we’ll somehow lose our sense of national identity if we enter the European Monetary Union. I’m sure the French will still be proud to be French, the Irish will still be proud to be Irish and so on; the fact that they share the same currency does nothing destroy their national heritage. I think the introduction of the Euro is very much a humanitarian event; bringing people together and looking to the future. Frankly, I’m embarrassed that my country hasn’t taken part in it. It’s inevitable that we will have to join the E.M.U. at some point in future, so it might as well be now.

‘6 days to Macworld San Francisco. Count the days. Count the minutes. Count on being blown away.’ So what do Apple have in store for us? Could it be a new flat screen iMac? There’s some speculation here. Update 3.1.02 : It seems as though Apple are really hyping this up, there’s a different tagline for each of the 7 days leading up to the event. Yesterdays was ‘Beyond the rumour sites. Way beyond’ and todays is ‘It’s like a backstage pass to the future’. As you can imagine, this is sending the rumour sites into a frenzy of wild speculation.The iWalk: An elaborate fake?

Let’s hope it’s a peaceful one.