bitful

Recycle now - RecycleNow homepage
'On average every person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every 7 weeks.' I found this handy website while browsing CSS design galleries. It was probably there because of its Web 2.0 large headings and use of whitespace and colour.
(tags: recycling uk reference nature green)

Pain in [...]

Typetester > Compare fonts for the screen
Online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. You can see them side by side with all their variations, change attributes and colours, then download the corrisponding CSS.
(tags: fonts typography screen webdesign css)

Online Etymology Dictionary
'This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not [...]

We went to Barcode Vauxhall's opening night yesterday. I loved the place, as you step in you forget you are in yet another reclaimed railway arch in Vauxhall.
The new Barcode is sleek and big; at around 5,000 sq. ft, it must be the largest gay bar in London now. Last night it was packed by [...]

Ursi's Blog: Chris meets A-ha
When cartoon styles collide: Chris from Family Guy reaches out to get some milk from the back of the supermarket counter, and is pulled into Morten Harkett's black and white world.
(tags: cartoons a-ha familyguy humour spoof)

YouTube - Big Brother 2006: Nikki hasn't got any breakfast
Poor little girl Nikki is mad at [...]

Language Log: The Dan Brown code
The Da Vinci Code writer's writing code analysed from a linguistics point of view. Insight into why all Dan Brown books read about the same.
(tags: danbrown davincicode language linguistics literature books)

Pop art portraits tutorial
Simple black outlines and solid colours, in the style of Julian Opie's Best Of Blur album cover.
(tags: [...]

Before & After magazine
Graphic design tutorials to be viewed online by clicking through as you would a presentation, or to downloade (PDF) to be printed in a variety of formats.
(tags: graphics design tutorials)

Wasteonline electrical and electronic equipment information sheet
Useful information and UK contact links to organisations to help you recycle anything from mobile phones to [...]

How to Create a Block Hover Effect for a List of Links | Smiley Cat Web Design
Quick and easy CSS solution, although not necessarily the most semantic of markups.
(tags: css links hover tutorial)

communication skills - zefrank
Punctuation Substitution as a communications solution for passive aggressive individuals.
(tags: comedy videos language punctuation humour)

Slyck News - BitTorrent 4.20 Released
'…latest release of the Mainline client. The primary focus of this Mainline release is to address the issue of ISP bandwidth throttling, and more importantly, BitTorrent traffic caching.'
(tags: bittorrent filesharing p2p torrent allegro)

Kid Caught Singing Gnarls Barkley - BREAK.com
'This kid forgets that he doesn't have a doorknob and is caught [...]

MediaCoder - The universal audio/video transcoder
MediaCoder is a free universal audio/video batch transcoder, putting together lots of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution, capable of transcoding among different audio/video formats with many e
(tags: audio cd decode dvd encode encoding media mp3 music opensource software tool video)

Snipshot: Edit [...]

There's this Excel spreadsheet I have on my computer at home. It's called log.xls and has detailed information on all the food I have eaten during the last fourteen months, my daily calorie intake, weight (recorded on a daily basis) and body fat (weekly, on Monday mornings), along with weight fluctuation charts and stats.
I also [...]

Etymologic: the toughest etymology (word origin) game on the Web
10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to solve (multiple choice). I could play for hours - and yes, it is rather tough.
(tags: dictionary english entertainment games language learning quiz words)

DEFRA Secretary of State's blog costs the taxpayer 40,000 pounds per year
It takes [...]

I have recently changed jobs and moved on to a more suitable, less designer-y role.
Today I needed to prepare some user interface mock-ups for a short presentation I must give, and of course I immediately looked to open Photoshop… which is of course not installed on my machine at work.
In a bit of a hurried [...]

Vitamin Features | What's next for web accessibility?
A young developer/designer comments on the offputting effects of WCAG's stilted recommendation language, and the emergence of alternative sets of guidelines and definitions of web accessibility, that people can actually understand and use.
(tags: accessibility wcag)

Hitler cats!
'A blog dedicated to cats that look like Hitler' (i.e. with a black [...]

Coke Zero has (softly) launched in the UK. It suddenly is in most shops I went to, although I do not recall having been exposed to any advertising for it.
It has been heralded as the greatest Coke innovation since the introduction of Diet Coke in 1984. It is targeted to young adult males who don't [...]

X-Ray Firefox Extension | Design Meme
The X-Ray Firefox Extension lets you see the tags by right-clicking on a page (or via the Tools menu) without having to go to the sourcecode. The tags wrap the actual elements and give you a visual representation of the page structure.
(tags: firefox extensions tags sourcecode)

LSD Tested on British Troops [...]

Season 2 of science-fiction series 'Sugar Rush, ' premiered last night on Channel Four. Not one alien or a laser beam in sight, but plenty of lipstick lesbians meeting in lesbian sex shops, having lipstick lesbian sex, dancing in crowded femmes-only lesbian clubs, then holding hands and sipping Coke from curvy glass bottles on Brighton [...]

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Billie Piper to leave Doctor Who
'Actress Billie Piper is to leave Doctor Who at the end of the current series, the BBC has confirmed. But the corporation refused to comment on reports that her character, Rose Tyler, would die in the final episode.'
(tags: doctorwho billiepiper rosetyler bbc sciencefiction scifi)

Star Trek: [...]

What is it with some people have to jump up from their cinema seats and leave the theatre the second the last scene fades into the closing credits?
When you have paid over a tenner to see a movie, missing the last few minutes can be very frustrating. I suppose that in the age of Google [...]

PocketMovies.net :: View topic - Simple Guide for making MPEG's optimized for Smartphone
MPEG files made using this Guide can be played by PocketTV Classic (free) or other MPEG players such as PocketDivX/PocketMVP/BetaPlayer/TCPMP
(tags: movies smartphones encoding videos)

Tips for watching AVI on a PPC/XDA - boards.ie
Discussion thread with useful tips and links to software and tutorials.
(tags: movies [...]

It's been a while since I wrote anything relevant here (have I ever?) and there's no reason at all really, apart from you know, when you are a bit out of practice and some time has passed and the whole thing starts looking a bit daunting.
So here we go. Hello. And laters. Off to produce [...]

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
Cory Doctorow's 2001 list of seven obstacles between the world and meta-utopia. Or, how to take metadata with a pinch of salt.
(tags: metadata corydoctorow tagging humour)

All About Facets and Controlled Vocabularies - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
A series of articles from 2002 [...]

Find your frequency threshold
As the range shrinks as we get older, most humans cannot hear frequencies above 15,000 Hz past the age of 25. If these mp3s are correct, my threshold is 17,000 - not bad for being 39.
(tags: reference science tests frequencies hz hearing youth age)

How to Mask Your IP and Use Country Restricted Services | 6initiative.com
A useful link to my friends in Italy who are enraged about the fact that half the World Cup matches are not going to be broadcast there. Thank goodness for the BBC.
(tags: computer howto ip television tv)

BBC SPORT | Football | World Cup 2006 [...]

BBC - Science & Nature - Human Body and Mind - Spot The Fake Smile
I took the test and it turned out I'm particularly good at spotting fake smiles, that 'are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain'.
(tags: body online quiz science [...]

The New York Diet - What Five of Us Ate in a Week
'New York asked five compatriots to arm themselves with log books and document not just everything they ate but also where and when they did it, for one week in May.' (via kottke.org)
(tags: diet food health newyork logs diaries nutrition)

My Web Blog
A new [...]

FDA / EPA What You Need to Know About Mercury in Fish and Shellfish - March 2004
Up to 12oz/week of low-mercury fish (ie canned light tuna) is safe. I'd better find an equally cheap, high-protein, easy to find and prepare, nutritious and filling alternative for my work lunches/midnight snacks - or turn into a thermometre.
(tags: [...]

Is being overweight all in the brain?
'PET study links obesity to serotonin receptor, suggesting possibility of curbing appetite with future drugs, note findings issued at SNM's 53rd Annual Meeting June 3-7 in San Diego'
(tags: brain diet health weight serotonin chemicals drugs)

Mooncup Menstrual Cup
The Mooncup is a reusable menstrual cup around two inches long and made [...]

The Motive Web Design Glossary - web communication design terminology and definitions | Motive Guides
'We've compiled the Motive Web Design Glossary to help demystify web communication. Coverage ranges from issues of philosophy through to web design concepts, standards and technology.'
(tags: design webdesign web dictionary internet reference technology websites)

From Guys To Dolls (ITV1, Monday 12 June, [...]

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?
' issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.'
(tags: folksonomy tags metadata)

WordNet - Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory
'online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human [...]

Google News Cloud
Daily news tag cloud. All tags are discovered automatically from Google News by text analysis. Passing the mouse over a tag highlights related tags. Clicking on a tag shows related news links.
(tags: tags metadata cloud googlenews folksonomy)

Derek Gatherer: Comparison of Eurovision Song Contest Simulation with Actual Results Reveals Shifting Patterns of Collusive Voting [...]