Chrome’s Blog

Oh well … it’s been a year of google bombing now but as this obviously continues to bring joy and happiness to the civilized world I thought I might as well have the links here, too.

The only remaining issue is: google results on failure (or miserable failure for what it’s worth) will still point to the president’s webpage even after George Double-Oh is gone … then again, the next president will inherit quite some problems worse than this, no?

A site listing “free wallpaper collections” recently made it into the top digg-stats (actually into the ‘design category’ which is on the sidebar here as well) — so I thought I’d post a follow-up here as well. While I personally still favour InterfaceLIFT (very high resolution AND widescreen images) here’s two other sites worth browsing:

• Backgroundsarchive
  Loads and loads of categorized wallpapers, quite a good collection of seamless tiles as well, no widescreen formats, though

• Caedes
  Another huge collection, seems to have a focus on computer generated images, hires but no widescreen formats as well

• mandolux
  Real high-res — wallpapers spanning up to three desktops!

Enjoy!

Sorry folks, this is a german clip — not much more to say except that you need sound output (again). So these rainbow press guys HAVE humour …

Bah. Tagged by Nike. I’ll answer this right away (you could have caught me in moments WAY worse than this) .. only I’ll backdate the answer for exactly one year as I’m blogging in German now, simple as that. As far as I remember there’s no rule on how to date blog posts, right?

So, I’m in the office. I could wear suits but that’d be somewhat overdone here as nobody else does. The joys of medium-sized IT companies. NOT!

Anyway - here we go:

• Black Calida boxer briefs (the tight ones) — yes, Swiss bodywear. Just great. Oh, and in case you were wondering: I’d rather go naked than wear Calvin Klein crap. Just so everyone is clear and ON NOTICE!
• Dark blue Mexx jeans, five pockets, pretty straight forward, nothing special at all.
• Some red-greenish striped Hilfiger button-down shirt. Yes, the colours are kind of weird, but I’m not alive until roughly two hours after I got up, so colour blindness is the least of my problems in the mornings. And while I don’t wear a suit I couldn’t care less for the shirt. Also see: next item.
• A thin black fleece. Thin. Black. Nothing special.
• Black socks. As in: open drawer. Take out sock. Take out another sock. Repeat until any two socks look more or less the same. Return other socks into drawer. They are all black, so what’s the point in keeping them in pairs?
• Black Vuarnet sneakers. Yep yep. French shoes. Great as well.

So — looking over this list makes me look like a brand dork. Well, I’m not, but how would you know?

Yet another Microsoft tool which doesn’t look all that bad at first sight! Windows Live Writer is a somewhat like a blog-enabled wordprocessing software. The interface is intuitive and I have yet to see an easier setup: Enter your blog’s URL, username and password (you may want to create a dedicated ‘author’ user just in case….) and off you go: Live writer will detect you’re using wordpress and find all necessary settings automagically.

Working with Live Writer reveals some major drawbacks right at the first post: while picture handling basically works OK’ish (e.g. pictures are resampled if you scale them — no feeble-minded scaling with height/width tags), the tool cannot left/right align pictures nor can you add hyperlinks to pictures (WTF?) and the picture upload doesn’t follow the (configurable) wordpress scheme (the pictures end up in strange ‘livewriter’ sub-sub-sub-folders.
You can however open and edit older posts from the blog and categories seem to be fully supported — but that’s about it.

So, if you don’t fancy the wordpress built-in ‘visual rich text editor’ you might want to give this tool a try, although I’d strongly advise against opening existing posts which are too complex or trying to blog with hyperlinked and/or aligned pictures in a post.

And as you probably need to do some final ‘finetuning’ online anyway I personally don’t really see the point in using this tool. Sorry, Redmond.

… there’s a man staring at her ass?

Well … most of you will have seen the ‘Birth of Sean Preston’ sculpture showing Britney Spears on a bearskin. While I exceptionally despise her music I found that I somewhat like this sculpture or rather the fact that she had Daniel Edwards make it. He called it “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston“.

This statue is (or has been) shown at the Capla Kesting Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York — now as the average american is shocked by a baby magazine showing a breastfeeding mother I can vividly imagine their reaction to this sculpture.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know, there are gazillion webpages offering ‘free wallpapers‘. Well, most of the times you end up running a tool like Spybot to remove the crap from your hard disk after a short visit. After you killed roughly half a gazillion gambling, life insurance, porn or pharmacy popups, that is.

Anyway, there is a sweet collection of high-resolution wallpapers over at InterfaceLIFT. Most of them come in widescreen versions as well, no pop-ups, no registration, no hassles. Enjoy!

I’m not deeply involved in the SEO business but it’s generally a good idea to get those META tags straight. If you are only remotely as lazy as I am you will probably welcome Richard ‘Rich’ Boakes wordpress plugin ‘autometa‘:

This plugin will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

It’s as easy as it sounds. One hint: If you add this plugin to your wordpress site, it seems you need to edit the already existing posts (Edit –> Save) before you get tags for them.

Weird. I’ve been googling for a site exactly like this: A free source for symbols (or pictograms to be more precise) and could not come up with one. So here it is:

Map Symbols & Patterns for National Park Service Maps. As this is an US government site, I assume these symbols are free to use. I couldn’t find anything regarding copyright on their site, so drop me a line if you have details on the usage terms.

The site features different sets in .pdf and .ai (Adobe Illustrator) vector format. Enjoy!

That’s one cool web-service– say you need a set of ‘matching colours’ (for whatever fancy reason): Pick a base colour and let colorblender do the rest. (Doesn’t seem to work for me, though: Everytime I start with a colourful theme — say, for a website like this — I end up with a friendly set of grayscales. Uhm…)
Anyway, this site must have been one of the early birds when it comes to building something actually useful right within the web 2.0 hype.

Apropos web 2.0: Tim O’Reilly himself wrote a nice article on web 2.0 — have a look a the web 1.0 –> web 2.0 comparison list …

Update: Here’s another one — Colorjack! A tad more complicated and loaded with features. Enjoy!