scrap pad

chickens

tesseract-ocr

bright fake wood

eh

word

1969, in font

kb, I saved this font for you. it's from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969 western with Paul Newman and Robert Redford).

kb asks:

where are CA mobile home parks?

respelling

from now on

read aloud

when putting text on a photo

for a quick and dirty improvement in readability/prettiness, you should put a small shadow around it to make the text edges look crisper. How I do this in Photoshop:

1. duplicate the text layer
2. make the text in the new layer black (for black text, I make the shadow one of the colors from the background)
3. rasterize the new text layer and move it behind the original text layer
4. do filter > blur > guassian blur. a 1-3 pixel blur should be plenty to make the letter edges sharper.
5. sometimes I reduce the opacity of the shadow layer.

example:

the second image has a black shadow on the white text and a pinkish shadow on the black text.

tetris

EL wire

This winter I got some electroluminescent wire for kb's and my bikes. I bought the following stuff (1 setup) from CoolightWest (not the cheapest but had a good tutorial):

• 3.2 mm general purpose EL wire, 7 feet
• battery powered inverter, you could probably also use this one.
• heatshrink tubing, 1 foot of 1/4" black. you really only need an inch or less for each end of the EL wire.
• solder like this - you only need a tiny bit.

Then I put it together with a lighter, like in this tutorial on connecting EL wire.

for the fall

more hosting

web hosting

names

hilarious album covers

weird positioning

Moxie weekend

pie

Blackbirds. nursery rhyme:

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,
Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?
The king was in his counting house counting out his money,
The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!

thing I wish google maps would do

things that annoy me

• when people say, "[good, worthy person] got [some mistreatment], but then [bad, unworthy] person got [better treatment]" and they're not actually asking for these people to get equal treatment, but rather have the "worthy" person receive good treatment and the "unworthy" person receive bad treatment
• when newspaper people complain that their business is hurting because of the internet. people: grow! evolve!

anyways.

oh.

blimp story

bank REST API

yosemite

fancy point and shoot

PostgreSQL for Mac

looking for a 2.5" ATA drive enclosure

2.5" ATA drive enclosure, USB 2.0, at OWC (needs this power adapter). $29.95 and $9.95 respectively. Anyone have any better suggestions?

also found: ADAPTEC 2188700 2.5 inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Kit and DataPortable 250 External Hard Drive Enclosure for 2.5" IDE and ATA-6 Drives.

ouch

camera details

things from Berkeley

• my uncle and I biked out to Albany Bulb, where there is a park with driftwood and scrap art. lots of people used to live there, or go there to get stoned and make art. some people still do live there.
• Sheri S. Tepper - a scifi author who apparently writes lesbian utopian scifi. I am skeptical (based on a retelling of one of her books), but if I read Heinlein there is not much justification for avoiding other scifi authors. books: The Fresco, Six Moon Dance, The Family Tree, Singer from the Sea.
• Yosemite: apparently it's doable without a car. you can take the train, then the "yart" (Yosemite Area Rapitd Transit). There is a youth hostel called The Bug in Mid Pines, and it has good food.
• On the BART into SF I saw some writing on a wall: "gothic dolphins! not bombs!"

arctic photos

today's funny things

• kb could not read A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette at work
• I had the same problem with Wikipedia's Lamest edit wars (via dy links)

dessert chart

hah!

more IH db

HTML elements in HTML versions

entity lookup

comic

email list tools

Idealware on email tools; Campaign Monitor looks pretty decent.

also, I think Idealware is my new favorite tech nonprofit.

haha

re: "lesbian gangs"

Black lesbian in NYC get 11 years for self-defense. also, nice copyright notice:

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

talked about

• danah boyd's Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. generated lots of buzz (good.)
• Is the web killing our culture? the idea that person to person culture is bad: "In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors." Why is the "value" of culture determined by its elitist appeal? Why is creating and consuming culture for small, personal groups of people a bad thing? In my opinion, re-valuing our personal cultural expression is good, and having more people are creating and sharing means that there is plenty of room for all of the "superficial observations of the world around us," "deep analysis," "shrill opinion," and "considered judgment."

slug

seamless gsm+wifi cell networking

T-Mobile is offering phones & service that switch between using GSM and wifi for phone service (via). cool but expensive. only works with two specific (new?) phones.

UMA service treats trusted Wi-Fi networks as just more GSM cell transceivers. This requires new handsets that have both Wi-Fi and GSM radios, and which can operate both radios simultaneously to allow a seamless handoff between GSM and Wi-Fi (in either direction), just as cell networks hand off between two transceivers. “This is GSM over Wi-Fi,” said T-Mobile spokesperson Tom Harlin.

(from Wi-Fi Networking News: T-Mobile Takes Cell/Wi-Fi Calling National)

word

catenary. describing the shape of a hanging line, or powering electric buses or trains. via the silver line in Boston.

"wait wait" on the iPhone