December 2007 Archives

“But Dave,” you might say, “those fonts you listed all cost money and I don’t want to pay for any content.” OK, well there is a way to get some high-quality fonts without paying and without breaking any copyright laws. I pointed you to some of the free font resources a few days back. But here are my top picks from those lists.

Old-style Serif Day Roman Modern Serif Gentium Sans Delicious Humanist Cosmetica

Something very, very strange has apparently caused nearly everyone in the State of Washington to go completely bonkers. Either that or editors are working hard to get their "Best Headlines of 2007" entries in before midnight tonight:

• "Nude Couple Grapple Over Dog Near Shower"
• "Man blames car wreck on prehistoric winged reptile"

The default web fonts are boring. They have been overused, and while they are reasonably well-designed fonts, they just aren't inspiring because they are used everywhere.

For a lot of applications, you'll be forced to use one of these standard fonts, simply because they are universal. But if you are creating a print-out, or a PDF, or even using rich typography on the web, I highly recommend you go beyond the defaults and make your design stand out with a fresh typographic look. Some of my favorites:

Serif Hightower Jenson Mrs. Eaves Caslon Vendetta Sans Serif Agenda Meta Syntax Legacy Myriad

I booked my holiday travel with United Airlines through Hotwire.  During the checkout process there is a pop-up menu that asks what frequent flyer plan you wish to use.  Strangely, United Airlines wasn't among the choices.

One thing I've wondered about movies: why are they all priced the same? It's quite clear that there's a wide range of quality and demand, so I wonder why the studios don't recognize that and charge accordingly. I could see charging $5 for the latest version of the teen cookie cutter movie (From Justin to Kelly anyone?), whereas Star Wars or Lord of the Rings could command $12 for a ticket.

I know movie theaters aren't set up for this yet, but how hard would it be to change? Fast food restaurants have the technology. Sure, they might have to set up improved security on the theater doors to make sure those going into the expensive movies actually paid for them. Maybe some sort of turnstile scanner like they have on subways these days. Or just throw a minimum-wage kid on the door for the expensive films (which they already do on opening weekend for big movies) and don't worry about the rest.

OK, so if variable pricing is too big of a leap, how about coupons? A movie's not doing well, so put a coupon for $1 off in the paper/online. It works for other markets, why not movies (or music for that matter)? If studios want to stop the declining attendance at the movies, they'd better start thinking about making changes like this real soon.

FWIW, Joel Splosky suggests the reason for the price-fixing:

Pricing sends a signal. People have come to believe that “you get what you pay for.” If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

He could be right. But we won't really know the effects of such a change unless we test it out. There might be markets where you don't want to do this. Or times of day. Or certain movies. But ultimately if the movie studios aren't happy with the way things are going, they should start testing out these sorts of things real soon.

A mysterious 30 meter long tank / silo / spacecraft part has washed ashore in Scotland. This sort of thing never seems to happen to me. I was at Ocean Beach in San Francisco twice in the last week, and all I found was some gelatinous blobs and a lot of bubbles. 

The story on the BBC has all of the typically-British details.

Simpson’s memes aside, I love my Scooba floor-scrubbing robot. Nobody likes to scrub the floor, and paying a person to come do it is both expensive and a hassle. These things can be gotten for $275, or half that if you go for the refurbished one like I did.

It takes a long time to charge. I made the mistake of thinking that it would fully charge in a couple of hours, and ended up with half-mopped floors. But if you leave it charging overnight, it's good to go for a run the next day.

It also cleans with plain vinegar and water if you want. We've been trying to eliminate all of the chemical cleaners from our house, so this was a must-have feature.

And while you can get away without sweeping first, I find it works a lot better if you do. Especially if you have a menagerie of pets that are constantly dumping big clumps of hair all over the place. Hmm, so maybe it's time I got Scoobie a friend?

Burn your TV in your yard;
Gather 'round it with your friends.
Warm your hands upon the fire,
And start again...

I have been using Windows XP (I upgraded from Vista) as my primary OS for the past 3 years. One thing I've always missed from my Mac days are keyboard shortcuts for handling windows, like the ubiquitous Cmd+W. OK, so Windows does have Alt+F4, but this was designed by a sadist. There's no way to do this with one hand that won't result in carpal tunnel.

So I got a copy of AutoHotKey and started to fix it. Here are the three essential commands in my script:

#Esc::Send !{F4}
#!Esc::Send !{n}
!Esc::WinMinimize,A

The first rmaps Windows+Escape to Alt+F4. I use this all the time. The second maps Windows+Alt+Esc to Alt+N, which lets me dismiss those “do you want to save?” dialogs. And the final one, Alt+Windows now minimizes the front window.

And this topic reminds me of one of my little-known claims to fame. I was the guy who designed the Cmd+`shortcut for cycling among the windows within an application back when I worked on Mac Outlook Express. The shortcut was picked up by Mac IE and Entourage, and then someone from the Mac OS team saw it and liked it so much, he aded it to the OS. Yay!

My hilarious mom (Angela Haine) obliged me by writing this paean to Seventeen, the Xmas tree.

I took a quick look at the Amazon.com bestseller list for the computers category (as of today). Of the top 25, one is a warantee, so I'll ignore that for a moment. Six items are Macs -- including the top selling MacBook, two are Asus Eee PC's and two others are Nokia Internet Tablets. That's 10 of 24 (or a bit more than 40%) that do not run any flavor of Microsoft Windows. It's not quite half, but I think it's sufficient to officially declare that we are at the end of The Windows Age.

At my new job I'm the sole designer on the team. So despite the fact that I'm primarily an interaction/information designer, I’ve also had to wear the “graphic designer” hat too.

I'm mostly a cut and paste, modify & tweak designer. I take an existing piece of art and modify it for my purposes. That's why I think VectorMagic is so great.

You can upload anystandard bitmapped image and it will turn it into a vector file. The vector file is then more easily tweaked, re-colored, scaled and—most importantly—rendered with a transparent background.

In the example I posted, you can see how I took a typical logo off the web and turned it into a vector file. Try it out yourself; you'll be amazed.

1. Behind the desk, wedged between the tabletop and the wall
2. In the sleeve of the heavy jacket you haven't used for months
3. In a random purple file folder in the filing cabinet.  (The same color as the empty folder labeled "Passport".)
4. On top of the washer and dryer stack, under a thick layer of dust

Another site that has a lot of interesting searchable music is imeem. The problem is that the big labels struck a deal with them whereby they only let you play 30 seconds of songs. But I did figure out a way around it.

Copy the Embed code into your favorite text editor. Find the src value within that code and copy/paste it into the URL field. A media player will load that allows you to hear the entire song. Ignore the aus parameter and the music will start playing immediately.

For example here's a great version of my favorite Christmas song, O Holy Night, performed by Celtic Woman: http://media.imeem.com/m/VEF299EHvL

And while I haven’t tried it, I image you can save the music to your computer using a utility such as UnPlug.

At my new job I'm the sole designer, so I end up doing some basic visual design work too. For commercial fonts, the best overall site hands down is MyFonts. They've got a great search engine, show excellent previews of the fonts, and even have cool tools such as More Like This and What the Font. The latter let's you upload an image with some text in it and they will try to figure out what typeface it is. It works pretty damn well.)

But it turns out there are some pretty good free fonts out there too. The best meta-resource is Smashing Magazine's font articles, from which I found a link to the beautiful font Pigiarniq (shown above. The best repository is DaFont.

Also don't forget that the built-in fonts are often pretty good too. For example Microsoft shipped 6 new, high-quality fonts with Vista and Office 2007. And if you don't have either, you can just install the free PowerPoint Viewer 2007 to get them.

Here are a few other free font resources: Font Garden · Larabie Fonts · Urban Fonts

The Mac is so much better than Windows.  Look at this gorgeous Windows XP blue screen of death.   The deep, rich blue, the graduated drop shadow.  Truly a thing of beauty.  

Sometimes you just really need to hear a song. Something reminds you of an old song you know, a new article references a new artist… Previously I used one of the music stores like iTunes or Amazon's MP3 downloads, but that only gets you 30 second clips.

Seeqpod gives you more. The whole song in fact. It's basically an MP3 search engine that has a really nice, high-quality index of songs and let's you play the files directly in the search results window. You can even create a playlist of songs if you want to use it as a basic media player.

The down side is that there's no easy way to get to the source file. The UI is all done in Flash, so right-click doesn't have the "save to disk" option. But they do show the full URL to the file (albeit in an unreadable, uncopyable state), so all you need to do is practice your typing skills and manually copy the URL.

Other music search engines: BeeMP3, Skreemr, Songza.

The NY Times reports on a new organization (GiveWell) that does seriously in depth analysis of the effectiveness of various charities. This isn't the usual "11% of donations go to administration" kind of evaluation. GiveWell performs an exhaustive look at the effectiveness of the programs themselves, and how efficiently the donated money achieves the charity's stated goals. If their first report -- on saving lives in developing countries is any indication, we can expect great things from them. Their blog makes for interesting reading too.

Recently I've seen a few Smart FourTwo cars around Palo Alto. Coincidentally I'm starting to think about our next family car, and while we can't fit four people into a two-seat car, we certainly don't need two "big" vehicles.

The tiny / economical car market in the US seems mired in an embryonic state. Corbin tried to sell their Sparrow but that seems to have fizzled. There are some signs of life, however. Several companies are promising to have vehicles available "late next year," with two of the most interesting being the VentureOne and the Aptera.

Both are two-seated, three-wheeled high efficiency vehicles, though the VentureOne seems more focused on "fun" and the Aptera on "efficiency". I think both cars look great and either would work well as the second car. I know a tiny bit about product development, engineering, and manufacturing, and I'll be very surprised if these cars get to market on time at the stated price and meet the declared specification. That doesn't mean they might not succeed (even in a limited way), but I'll wait and see.

Well, it's already happened. I was aiming to write a post every day, and I've already missed a couple of days. According to Jerry Seinfeld, the way to do something every day is to visualize it on a large calendar. You X out each day as you accomplish it, and the fact that you get an unbroken chain that stares you in the face all day every day motivates you not to break the chain. I really should try that out. Maybe tomorrow…

Original article

Like it or not, much of my life is online. I have the usual collection of accounts and passwords with banks, credit card companies, email services, phone companies, etc. Since we tend to be a bit on the techie side here at KPAO, I also have about 100 other user name and password combinations for various other services. Sometimes these passwords are for "real" world items like bicycle locks, but usually it's just another website password.

I worked for a while on the other end of the password game -- at a company that offered a service via a website, and asked people to register and remember a password. In other words I was part of the problem. I was recently chatting with a colleague about this system, and he reminded me of this fact of life: people hate passwords, and repeatedly use the same (poor) ones. If you need to guess someone's password, "password" would be a decent first try. "none" would be a very good second guess. If you get a hold of someones password for a low security site (say a photo sharing web site), odds are good that the same password will work for their bank account.

Do you ever reuse a password? If you do, do you trust the people at sillyphotosofmydog.com to securely store your personal information to the same level as bigbankwithlotsofmoney.com? If you use the same password for both accounts (or closely related passwords), then you are implicitly trusting the customer service representative at the puppy photo web site not to steal your bank account. So what to do?

First, you really need use a good password, and you need to change them every few month. It's very, very easy to crack poorly chosen passwords (even ones like "bobby76", which probably resembles one you are using right now). A long time ago, we were taught not to write passwords down. That advice came from the days of one or two passwords, and was probably even wrong then. It's simply unfeasible to remember even a small number high quality passwords that change every few months. So don't try. Here's what I do, based on advice from very reasonable sources:

1. Get a USB thumb drive. Small capacity ones are essentially free these days, and you don't need much space for this recipe -- 512MB is plenty. Pick one based on brand, appearance, etc. Mine has a key chain loop.
   
2. Use KeePass and KeePassX -- two version of essentially the same software. This software securely stores your passwords in an encrypted file. The only password you need to remember is the one to unlock the password safe itself. Install the Mac OS X, Linux, or even Windows version of this software on the USB thumb drive. You can even install all three version, and they can share the same password file.
3. Plug the USB drive into your main computer, and start using the password safe. Be sure to save your changes. KeePass isn't the most intuitive program to use, but it's not that bad. You can figure it out. When you're done, unplug the drive, and put it on your physical key chain. Take it to work and use it there too.
   
4. Just as important as using a password store is using it to generate new passwords. Don't make up passwords -- generate them. Trust me -- your passwords suck. Store the generated ones in the password safe. You probably have a hundred online account too -- don't be overwhelmed by having to change everything at once. Just generate and save a new password the next time you log into a website. You'll hit the most important ones sooner.
5. Set a three month time limit on the passwords (it's an option in the KeePass software). When the time is up, generate a new one.
   
6. Profit!

OK so maybe the last step is not quite right, but you get the idea.

I just read about a cool shape called the Gomboc, which is a shape that has a single stable balance point. Thinking I might want to buy one, I headed over to their online store.

First, it took me 5 clicks to get here from the front page, and 4 after clicking on the top-level menu item “Get Gomboc”.

Next, it turns out they are only selling limited editions numbered 2–2007. And the UI for browsing through the items: type in the serial number, click Next, and see if that particular one is still available. If you want to find a new one, you either need to go back, or click a link to bring back the submit button. Typing in a new number a pressing Enter doesn't work.

And worst of all, the minimum price for these things is €1,000. Wow. Guess I don't want one after all.

I just had linguine with my home-made marinara sauce tonight for dinner, and it's one of my favorite dishes of all time. The recipe is actually from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, but modified to be vegan, and with a lot of detailed technique on how to put it together, learned from many iterations.

software:

• 3 28 oz. cans of whole peeled plum tomatoes, unsalted (I get mine from Trader Joe’s. If you want to save some time, get diced tomatoes instead.)
• 3 tbsp vegan margarine (I recommend Earth Balance)
• 3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 medium onion
• kosher salt
• linguine (or the pasta of your choice)
• optional: nutritional yeast and fresh herbs such as basil and oregano

hardware:

• can opener
• knife
• medium bowl
• large sauce pan
• large sauté pan
• stock pot with cover
• splatter guard for the sauté pan

Place the margarine and olive oil into the sauce pan over low heat. Cut the onion in half along the equator, remove the outer skin, and place both halves in the oil.

Open up all 3 cans of tomatoes near the sink with the bowl. Remove each tomato one by one, open it up with your fingers and scrape the seeds out into the sink. Place the tomato meats into the bowl. When you're done, pour the remaining tomato juice from the cans (and the juice from the bottom of the tomato meats bowl) into the sauté pan. Place over medium-high heat and cover with the splatter guard. Put the tomato meats in the sauce pan, stir to combine with the onions and fat, and turn it up to medium-low.

You now have two pans cooking. The meats are cooking with the fat and onions on a low simmer, and the tomato juice is reducing to a thick sauce on a low boil. Stir both occasionally.

When the juice has reduced to a thick sauce, lower the heat to medium-low and pour the contents of the sauce pan into the sauté pan. Stir to combine, then re-cover with the splatter guard.

Fill the stock pot ¾ full with water, add salt to taste (I use ~1 tsp), cover and place over high heat. When the water boils, add the pasta and cook until al dente.

Meanwhile, continue to stir the tomato sauce as it thickens. It's done when a spoon scraped across the bottom of the pan leaves an exposed  gap that does not immediately fill back in with sauce. It takes about an hour from start to finish. Salt to taste. Remove the onion pieces and throw them away; They are only there to provide flavor.

Garnish with nutritional yeast and minced fresh herbs.

I get about 90% of my news from online sources -- the rest comes from radio and friends. Two of my favorite sites for political news and analysis are the New York Times and the Washington Post. For a long time, both of these sites were free, so long as you registered. They would then slip you a cookie and presumably track what you read, how often you visited, etc. I don't mind the ads (well at least not the obnoxious Flash-based ads), but I don't like leaving a "cookie" trail unless absolutely necessary. My bank can known that I'm paying bills, but I don't want the Washington Post tracking what I read. actually I don't mind them so much as the advertising networks.

We just flipped the switch today on our new solar panel array on the roof of our house. It was installed over a month ago by Solar City, and through several paperwork and communication fiascos, it took this long for the city and PG&E inspectors to approve. But at any rate, we're live now.

It only generates about ½ peak production during the winter, so we're not going to see great results until the sun starts coming back North (only 1 more week until the solstice!). Still, it's pretty cool to see the flow of electricity run backwards for part of the day.

Unfortunately there's no benefit to being a net electricity producer. The best you can do is reach zero with PG&E; that is, the amount of excess electricity you generate from the solar panels during the day offsets the electricity you pull out of the grid when the panels aren't producing. If you push more into the grid, it's basically a gift to PG&E.

The whole process of buying, installing, and activating the system was a lot more involved and stressful than it should have been, so if you're looking to get solar installed, you should check out some of the competing companies like Akeena.

OK, I'm probably just a tool for passing this along, but it's funny and well done, in the same category as the Onion News Network or Daily Show/Colbert Report “investigative journalism”. Be sure to watch Home Sweet Server.

http://www.stayathomeserver.com/

"The total average time a household watched television during the 2005-2006 television year was 8 hours and 14 minutes per day, a 3-minute increase from the 2004-2005 season and a record high. The average amount of television watched by an individual viewer increased 3 minutes per day to 4 hours and 35 minutes..."

I attended the final presentation for the Stanford Facebook apps class last night. It was a great event. There were a ton of really practical learnings that the students found out during the 10 weeks they worked on their apps. And the great thing was that there were enough projects (about 25) that you'd see the recurring themes come up on different teams, further validating.

Here are the top learnings:

1. Simplicity rules
2. Be blunt with what you want the users to do; most will do it
3. Focus on encouraging positive, lightweight communications between users
   
4. Require users to invite their friends to force virality
5. Make default decisions for users (you can allow them to customize but most won't)
6. Keep the feedback loops short. Give the user some value, then ask for some value in return.
7. Use a level-up system with unlocked functionality to encourage engagement.
   

I know a lot of my techie friends swear by Gmail, and I admit there's a lot to like about it. Their spam filter is top notch, it's very fast and responsive, the keyboard shortcuts make it easy to get around,