Robotperson

Are you ready for this? I’ve developed a new watercooler technique that saves time and delivers water at the perfect temperature. Sounds impossible, I know, but there is a way. Here’s how it’s done: First, you need a cooler with both ‘normal’ and ‘chilled’ buttons. A mechanical cooler works best: no fancy-pants electronic UV units […]

Bruce Schnier at Wired on CYA security (cover your ass) Once you think about this in terms of CYA, it starts to make sense. The Transportation Security Administration wants to be sure that if there’s another airplane terrorist attack, it’s not held responsible for letting it slip through. One year ago, no one could blame […]

Beijing 2008 Olympics pictograms. Ugh. They remind me of some sort of Boy Scout knot diagram. Do they really need to inflect every tiniest aspect of the games with some sort of twee national character? Stick with the Munich ’72 set and be done with it. For fans of Squares, try Dodge, or the arm […]

HTML literati, have you ever viewed-source on Google? Take a peek now – I’ll listen out for the rustle of thousands of geek-brows furrowing. Yes, that’s right: table layout; font tags; <b> used instead of <strong>; &nbsp;’s used for spacing, missing quotes on attributes… it’s a litany of non-standards, 1996 era web design. For a […]

I noticed after making my last post that the site was no longer valid XHTML. It turns out that the Youtube standard embedding code, which they provide next to every video (to encourage distribution, presumably) is not valid. This would have been obvious to me if I’d thought about it, because it’s the same as […]

The machine is us/ing us Brilliant and exciting.

Here’s a list of all my Firefox extensions, beautifully formatted by the extension list dumper extension that I’ve just installed. Adblock – filters ads from web-pages All-in-One Gestures – execute common commands using mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation and page scrolling. Web Developer – adds a menu and a toolbar with various web […]

I’d written this draft post before Stef sent in the same link. Robotperson: Oh dear Stef, your YT-1300 is looking like a piece of junk next to this, the Ultimate Collectors Edition Millennium Falcon… “Every detail of the modified Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 freighter is here, all constructed to scale with LEGO minifigures”. It’s attention […]

I’ve finally got around to making my own custom error messages for the site. It’s nice for visitors to see a friendly message instead of a blank white screen, when I’ve messed-up and deleted a page. Error 500 – server error is my favourite.

Paper Optimus Prime. Cut-out, fold, glue, save Earth. I can’t resist it. Charlie Booker, with a wink, flames the latest Apple commercials and Macs in general. Brilliant. The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign – the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense […]