Simian Design

These are my delicious links for September 11th:

• macosxhints.com – 10.6: Pop-up and hide word definitions – After pressing Control-Command-D, you can release the D key. As long as you hold down Command and Control, the definition stays popped up, but goes away when you release those keys. This is consistent with the dashboard and other click-and-hold-to-display-temporarily features.

These are my delicious links for April 28th through April 30th:

• Ferris Bueller is the "Fight Club" theory – This just blew my mind. I never thought of the movie in this way, but it makes it SO much more depressing.
• Traffic – Rush hour in Los Angeles is synonymous with gridlock, but the sheer enormity of the situation can be tough to grasp. Fortunately, there is the architecture photographer Benny Chan, whose Traffic! series depicts the scale of overcrowded lanes of rush hour traffic from high overhead.
• How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – #12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

  #56: My Legion of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

  #85: I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 stones of power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be more alone the lines of "Push the button."

• This girl REALLY wants to be a horse. Or a pony. Or something weird. But the legs are kinda cool. – Kim Graham has made these Digigrade leg extensions. They are made of steel and add 14 inches of height to the wearer. But these are not ordinary stilts; they give a person the uncanny and graceful appearance of an animal. It is really cool! The movement of the legs is genuinely graceful and naturalistic. It is a great deal of fun being so much taller.
• FullCalendar – Full-sized Calendar jQuery Plugin – FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar like the one below. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format (an extension is provided for Google Calendar). It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event).

These are my delicious links for April 20th:

• Webphemera: Franklin: The Lost State of America – What led to the creation of the State of Franklin and why isn’t around today? Even more to the point, why hasn’t anyone ever made a movie out of this strange but remarkable story? My parents would live right near the State of Franklin if it were around today.
• Amateur Snapper | 10 Top Photography Composition Rules – The only rule in photography is that there are no rules. However, there are many composition guidelines which can be applied in almost any situation, to enhance the impact of a scene. Below are ten of the most popular and most widely respected composition 'rules'.

These are my delicious links for April 9th:

• Don't use @import. – Wow. I had no idea. Steve (who knows what he is talking about) talks about how using @import is actually slower and worse for the browsers than link elements.
• Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting – There is a channel dedicated to Bob Ross. I LOVE me some Bob Ross. I wish they showed more of him on TV.
• Tampa Bay Mug Shots: Index – This is a great site. It's well designed, clear with a complex reporting system that works for you. Sort by gender, height, age, weight. It's endless fun. Well-done.

These are my delicious links for March 24th through March 26th:

• Alpine Hut – Gorgeous 6×11 Alpine hut by OFIS Architects. The hut is situated in a small Alpine village, part of Triglav national park in Slovenia, with very strict rules of construction and architectural design. The client bought the site together with existing construction permit for the generic project. Demand was not to change construction permit but change the elements of the house to suit his family, sustainable factor and open the windows toward the views.
• Rebuilding Spotlight's Index on OS X (Manually) | Walt-O-Matic – My spotlight recently got hosed, this is a good reference on how to fix that.
• Letter from an AIG Official; The Other Side of the Story. – The resignation letter of an AIG executive explaining his point of view on the bonus furor. The proverbial other side of the story.
• Fuck That. – Russian teens have now new fun. They dare trains.
  This is needed to be done fast, because if one is appearing before the train too long before and machinist could see him and start breaking, so they run on the rails just before the train so he couldn’t start breaking and fell down on the rails, then the train moves above the person at his maximum speed, just a few inches from his head and back.
• Top 10 Time-Lapse Videos Show Nature at Work | Wired Science from Wired.com – When a phenomenon happens very slowly, viewing accelerated footage helps scientists take a step back and see the big picture: At higher speeds, things that we regard as fixed take motion — even the dullest scenes spring to life.
  Here are Wired Science's picks of the best time-lapse videos of nature at work.
• Travel photography: The Wave – Los Angeles Times – The Wave is a red-rock stunner on the border of Arizona and Utah, made of 190-million-year-old sand dunes that have turned to rock. L.A. Times photographer Spencer Weiner captured the swirling drama of this little-known formation that's accessible only on foot via a three-mile hike and highly regulated. (To apply for a permit, go to the Bureau of Land Management's Arizona Web page.)

These are my delicious links for January 29th:

• What Makes Good Copy Good. | Blue Flavor – Tiffani Jones comes up with some very good guidelines on what makes copy good. (Making if 'funner' is item one). A good list, well thought out.
• Amazon.com: Free – Songs: MP3 Downloads – Lots of lots of free music from Amazon. Some real gems in here.
• The Big Picture: More of London from above, at night – In August of last year, theBig Picture was happy to be able to share some amazing photos of London, as seen from above at night by photographer Jason Hawkes. That entry continues to be one of the most consistently popular ones ever put together at The Big Picture, so its good news to hear that Jason has another 24 photos from 2008 to share.

These are my delicious links for January 19th through January 20th:

• How to Design the Perfect List – Lists are a beautiful way to display content and information in a very easy to scan, easy to read method. Lists are found on most blogs to list posts, comments, tags, or links. In this post we will be exploring the modern practices of lists as an element of web design and they will be showing you how to design better lists to add to the overall design of your site.
• Slave reunion photo from 1916 – Wow. This is a photo from 1916 of 4 former slaves. They're all over 100 years old. James Madison was president when they were born, and America was 36 years old. And here they are in a relatively "modern" photo. I'm blown away.
• Harry Eng – Master Bottle Filler – One evening Harry was in a London hotel and decided to visit the Puzzle Museum the next morning. When he and his friends had finished their bottle of wine, he took the bottle up to his room. He then filled it with a book of matches, menu, and the pack of cards as a gift for us. This is a particular favorite as he assured us that the only tools he had were a pencil and rubber bands.
• The Sexy Curls jQuery Plugin by Elliott Kember – You know that page-curl effect you get sometimes on sites? This is how to do it with jQuery. Not bad.
• Coaches view of Madison Square Garden – Rangers Coach Tom Renney describes the view form behind the bench at Madison Square Garden.
• Stainless steel teeth – John Gilpin makes himself some stainless steel teeth. Quite amazing.

These are my delicious links for December 29th through December 30th:

• Bubba eats a bean burrito. In one second. – Wow. That's just impressive.
• Strangest Worm Ever. – This worm has the oddest form of movement I've seen. It's like a sea cucumber, yet not. Oddly disgusting, and intriguing at the same time.
• The Golden Ratio in Web Design – NETTUTS – While it might be obvious to some to use the Golden Ratio (or Divine Porportion to some) (1.62) in web design, it might not to others. This is a good, basic tutorial covering just how to use that ratio, and make your site better.

Jon Hobbs-Smith has written an excellent article on 25 ways to improve your jQuery.  It’s a quite well-written list of tips and tricks.  

It’s not written for super-advanced users, nor beginners, rather intermediate users. So you won’t find entry-level tips here, nor will you find advanced explanations on why you should enclose items, or the fastest way to render something to the DOM.  It’s a series of real-life, useful, in-the-trenches-kind of tips.

My favorite tip so far is tip #23: Add a JS class to your HTML attribute.  By adding a class to your HTML attribute on the javascript load, you get a CSS declarator that is valid only if JS is turned on, which allows you a very easy way to hide things if JS is turned off.

Very slick.

The entire article is worth reading, and worth bookmarking.  Nicely done.

These are my delicious links for November 24th:

• Most Wanted WordPress Hacks: 11 New Requests (2) | Noupe – A nice collection of ways to fix and hack your installation of WordPress.