Category: Uncategorized

Kudos to New Scientist for pointing me to Personas: Find out how the web sees you. A few of the people the engine found were me, but I can’t imagine how the John Smiths of the world feel.

You Have To Burn The Rope. Really. Then, if you haven’t already, Achievement Unlocked and This Is The Only Level will extend the smile on your face.

Hazel just sang happy birthday to her weet-bix.

The largely talented cast (of many accents) resurrect an extinct form of blockbuster, from a time when the camera tilted upwards as our hero stares off into the distance. Director Wolfgang Petersen handled the battles well, but many dramatic scenes just don’t work and the body doubles get more screen time than the leads.

The highlight comes near the end when Orlando Bloom’s Paris finds his courage, a bow and arrow, and channels his inner elf. He shoots, he scores, you stop hating him, and the movie ends.

Only for a dare.

Hazel update: when asked to identify letters from her wooden alphabet, she gets them all right, except for F, E and P. 🙂

If your site faces heavy load, custom fonts (using @font-face) could bring you down further. The page linked here is, at the time of writing, loading, but the fonts it wants to use (about 10 are linked) aren’t loading because the site is being hit hard. Whereas a normal page might be missing images, because of the custom fonts, this page is blank. A few underlines are shown, but that’s all. Safari 4 bug?

I’m not a big Gizmodo reader, but kudos for finding Pocket Universe and Seek ‘n Spell — awesome-looking new apps which interact with the real world.

It’s been too long since my last post. Let’s all celebrate together by quickly voting “5” for my latest design at Threadless:

Alternatively, if you’re reading this in mid July 2009 or later, you’ve missed the boat and can see what my final score was. I suspect it will be low; not because I think my design is bad (I really like it!) but because Threadless voting is brutal. The number of casual zeros given by madly flicking visitors is nuts. My last design got plenty of positive comments but only scored 1.89/5. Ah well. More designs, more often.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t already acted on my Facebook or Twitter pleas for help, woohoo! I’d be super-appreciative if you could vote “5$” (that’s “I’d buy this” then “5”) for my design Rain and Wind on Threadless. Why?

1. Threadless needs more design-based fart jokes.
2. I’ll win fame, glory and cash if they decide to print it.
3. Please.
4. Except for the words, it’s the same upside down!
5. Please?

An interesting phone is about to be released in the US, the Palm Pre. You might have heard of it. If not, check out this in-depth review with a good video. Many other reviews are out there, basically saying that it’s very good, it’s like an iPhone but different, and it has a few issues that will hopefully be ironed out by v2.0.

I see the lack of SDK as a huge problem. Developers screamed at Apple for the SDK, and when it arrived, it ushered in a new world of mobile applications, changing (in a real way) what I could do while away from my main Mac. The Pre doesn’t have that yet, and they won’t get professional-level games with the web-based systems in place right now.

Another huge stumbling block is that the Pre is, so far, CDMA-based. The US still uses CDMA but the rest of the world has moved on (like the metric system and A4 paper). So, no Pre for the larger world for the moment.

On the plus side, it’s great that Apple actually has some competition — albeit from a product made by many ex-Apple employees. The iPhone is still a great phone and I’d recommend one to almost everyone. I’m still kind of excited that I managed to make a talking-book version of my kids book for the iPhone — I just need to figure out what to do with it.