Barbara’s W.I.P.

             

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DigitalDetrius.zip (3054 KB)

To keep clutter off the desktop, think about filing by date. For those who don't have the gift of hyper-organization, sorting things by date can be faster and doesn't require creating -- and remembering -- that perfect file name for less-than-important stuff.

The Secret: it's amazing how infrequently you need to find the files stored this way. But when you do, all you need to remember is "when" you made the snapshot of that amazing logo/page layout/type treatment/color pallet/or that interesting PDF or white paper -- not "what" its name is.

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Not the first time I've raved about something on MyFonts.com (and no, am not an affiliate) but their latest newsletter included a link to this lovely typeface, DIN.

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"There is a town in North Carolina that attempted to get Embarq (a DSL provider) and Time Warner Cable to increase the speed of their broadband offerings. When they refused, the town became an Internet Service provider and let the data floodgates open wide. They called the service Greenlight. Now Time Warner is lobbying the state of North Carolina to shut it down due to the competition with their Roadrunner cable modem service. You got to suspiciously watch Time Warner. They will stab you in the back every chance they get."

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Not terribly coherent about this yet BUT am posting anyway -- mostly in the form of a bunch of links (for non-geek designers: sorry, there may be nothing for you here -- if you love grids and want to know more, please read on).

Have been using CSS since the late 90's, but for whatever reason only just discovered the existence of CSS Frameworks -- by following links on the Posterous site Mockups To Go (thank you!) about the grids used by the Blueprint CSS framework.

Sites built with the Blueprint CSS framework include Quantcast and BlueFlavor. A related nugget is the 960 grid system.

Another CSS framework is the Yahoo developer YUI (vaguely remember being told to check this out a few years ago, but just wasn't ready). There's a Yahoo webcast with an introductory explanation of the framework along with a pretty good introduction to CSS.

Some drawbacks to Blueprint (like pixel vs. percent for font sizing) are discussed in the post Blueprint CSS Framework vs YUI Grids.

CSS frameworks for designers gives a very general explanation of frameworks. Another -- and more specific overview on frameworks includes some additonal pros and cons.

OK, will really let go and ramble: a CSS reset is used to set the baseline for a framework -- recommend the Eric Meyer reset and this post: Yahoo and Blueprint resets compared and the fabulous post CSS Frameworks + CSS Reset: Design From Scratch. Actually, you can probably skip all the above and just go to this post.

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Most of the netbooks sold today run on an Intel chip called Atom, which is a lower-cost, lower-power version of the company’s standard laptop chips. And about 80 percent of netbooks run Windows XP, the older version of Microsoft’s flagship software.

The new breed of netbooks, built on cellphone innards, threatens to disrupt that oligopoly.

Based on an architecture called ARM, from ARM Holdings in Britain, cellphone chips consume far less power than Atom chips, and they combine many functions onto a single piece of silicon. At around $20, they cost computer makers less than an Atom chip with its associated components.

But the ARM chips come with a severe trade-off — they cannot run the major versions of Windows or its popular complementary software.

Netbook makers have turned to Linux, an open-source operating system that costs $3 instead of the $25 that Microsoft typically charges for Windows XP. They are also exploring the possibility of using the Android operating system from Google, originally designed for cellphones. (Companies like Acer, Dell and Hewlett-Packard already sell some Atom-based netbooks with Linux.)

The cellphone-chip makers argue that the ARM-Linux combination is just fine for a computer meant to handle e-mail, Facebook, streaming video from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and Web-based documents.

Read the whole thing at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/technology/02netbooks.html

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...(leads to) too little time.

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Having watched the "downgrading" of digital camera image quality over past few years, took note of the article below.

The backstory: A few years ago you could do some research and find a basic digital camera with little "noise" in the image (like those irritating groups of pixels -- called artifacts -- that disrupt a smooth blue sky). The Fuji Finepix was a good example, there was simply NO image noise. Now even a top of the line point and shoot doesn't perform like an entry level SLR costing lots more.

I know there are reasons for this, just wish it wasn't so.

Read the last paragraphs of this article on MorningStar.com to see an outline of industry plans to reduce features and functionality on netbooks -- so they won't have the "dispuptive effect" of replacing higher-end laptops altogether.

Netbooks: A Race to the Bottom?
We examine the disruptive effects of low-cost netbooks.

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13 Odd Ways to Use Twitter

5 Terrific (and Unusual) Twitter Uses

...How to stay in contact when you're everywhere - Creating your digital personal-assistant:  ("This is a long and heavily detailed step-by-step guide to creating your own digital personal-assistant that will let you keep tabs on your distributed presence across the internet without having to log in to each site on a daily basis" [in a nutshell: how to redirect automated email updates from web apps to a separate twitter feed using Mailbucket])

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media.zip (258 KB)

Needed: one tool to keep track of media consumption -- past, present and future. Highlighted by the pile of pages torn from print publications (all those great "10 Best in 2008" lists) that are gathering dust. There's no ONE place to record titles I want to remember.

Currently I have

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