A while ago I came across Phojoe, a site offering age progression photos. Some of them are pretty darn spectacular. They admit on the site that the process is really more of an art form, rather than a strict science in the forensic sense. With this in mind, one of the testimonials caught my eye.
My son wanted to be a Professional Baseball Player…Phojoe, I am so pleased with the photo, please go ahead and send them. I can’t express to you what an amazing gift your service is, especially to a grieving parent. You’ve helped to answer one of the many “what if’s” I’ve had since I lost my son. Thank You again, so very much. Gratefully,
Allison P - Jamestown, SC
This quote almost got me a bit choked up. Try reading it when it’s sitting right under the photo of her son, who looks about 5 years old. Now I’ll try and say this next bit without sounding too heartless…
The age progression is basically a fantasy; an artist’s impression of what could have been. While it looks convincing at first glance, if you look closer, the eyes have changed from brown to blue and the nose looks quite different. It’s not a stretch to imagine this as a stock photo, or a composite of stock features. So it puzzles me how such a fabrication has the power to bring relief to a grieving mother. Maybe I don’t get it because I don’t have kids of my own.
I upgraded to Firefox 3 on my Mac the other day. I was spewin at the default Mac theme still not displaying favicons in the bookmarks toolbar *scoff*. I wasn’t at all surprised; I had this problem with Firefox 2 but a workaround was to install the “Mac Favicon” theme. But then I googled for it and was doubly spewin at its discontinuation! “Why do you need favicons?”, I hear you ask. Well my Firefox toolbar normally looks like this (on Windows):
I use favicon-only links for my VERY frequently used sites. I can tell them all apart using only the favicon, so they are all called “” - our good old friend the empty string (one of the many advantages of storing bookmarks in a single HTML file and not as .url files on the hard drive as IE does, is that you can name them “”).
Quite rudely, the default Mac theme still gives toolbar favicons the cold shoulder. With no modification my toolbar looks like this (that embossed circle is a link on hover). As you can see, this is quite useful.
Then salvation came in the form of the Stylish addon, which is normally used for applying custom CSS styles to web pages. An article on userstyles.org shed some light on how to use Stylish to tweak Firefox’s userChrome.css file “on the fly” without having to dig around in the Firefox profile, an activity which is both time consuming and just plain dangerous.
With the style installed, my toolbar was useful again. I still have a problem with the “hover” decorations. They’re too thin and look kinda stupid. But this is just a nitpick, really and I’m already used to it. I also added some other tweaks which fixed the spacing and increased font size and toolbar height.
Before I go, I really should slot in a plug for the Foxmarks addon, which in my experience provides flawless and transparent bookmark sync across multiple installations of Firefox (regardless of platform). It’s that one must-have addon I install before all others. You also get a spiffy web interface for your bookmarks.
UPDATE (7/7/08): Added line in CSS block to change toolbar shadow font.
Josh posted about Deepak Chopra the other day. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, here is an interview with Richard Dawkins. And a warning to our Quantum Physicist viewers, you will probably find this video highly annoying or even offensive.
Four years ago, I signed up for Gmail. Back then it was still invite only and I managed to get an invite from a “Gmail Swap” site by offering the password to “The Blue Room” flash puzzle game that one of my friends had found out. I was quite proud of this because the password was basically common knowledge if you googled “blue room password” yet it still seemed attractive enough to be worth a Gmail invite.
I’m sure you already know how much of a Gmail fanboy I am, and that’s basically 90% spam filter, 5% lots-o-storage and 5% “conversations”. So rather than write a post blabbing on about how great Gmail is, I thought I’d try out some of the new Gmail Labs thingies. And in the process, I started to realise that Gmail still has a long way to go.
Custom date formats: Very welcome feature. Finally, I can have the date in dd/mm/yyyy while still using US English as my language. But it only affects dates on “really old” emails, the ones Gmail deems to be old enough to display the year as well. Newer dates are still in the “Jun 16″ format.
Random signature: I’m not a big user of random quote signatures, but I know certain people who will be very excited about this feature. Unfortunately, it only pulls quotes from an RSS feed, so that’s an extra step for users who haven’t already set that up.
View messages in fixed width font: Good idea in theory but to activate you select from a dropdown on each email, and that’s one extra unnecessary click. Would be good if you could blanket enable for all plain text messages, perhaps. The option affects HTML messages, overriding style fonts. I’m not sure if I like this behaviour. It seems non-compliant to me in some way. I also find the font too small and quite thin but that’s Courier New for you. Would like to be able to select a custom font.
Quick links: Interesting. You can bookmark certain views of Gmail, like searches etc. This could be useful, like Search Folders in Outlook which I find useful. But it could also quite easily backfire by illustrating just how clunky the interface can be sometimes.
Superstars: More stars. It’s great how you just click to cycle through the different stars. Yes this is extra clicks, but they aren’t moving clicks which require targeting time, and that changes everything.
Pictures in chat: I disable these in Gtalk anyway, so this gets a big fat “meh” from me.
So what do I really want to see in Gmail?
A link next to the To, Cc, and Bcc boxes that lets you select from your contacts. At the moment, when I want to browse my contacts for people to send to, I use the autocomplete feature, typing “a”, “b”, “c”, etc. right up until “z” until I’ve gone through my whole address book. Efficient, this is not.
Improved filter GUI. It’s OK, but currently we have mystery text boxes that do… what exactly? Does the search include the exact text I type, separate it into keywords, or what? Also needs the ability to have “does not include” through the GUI. You can’t expect users to dig up the list of operators in help.
Stop saving blank drafts. This has been happening lately. I will go to compose an email, write nothing and it saves a blank email in my Drafts.
Optional attachment reminder. If you write the word “attachment” or variants of this, then hit send but haven’t attached any files, the GUI prompts you with something like “It looks like you may have forgotten to attach a file, would you like to do it now?” Not an essential feature but one I’ve thought would be useful for a while now.
Easier editing of Contacts. I’m getting used to the “click on field to edit” behaviour of MS Windows and now used in Flickr, so being able to do this in a giant grid of my Contacts would be nice.
GUI overhaul. Call me picky but Gmail’s user interface is starting to feel like it’s just a collection of hacks, with this new feature tacked on here, and this new feature shoved in some free space there. One day I might do a proper analysis of the GUI but for now I’ll just say it needs some work.
Wow, this post has turned out to be way more cynical than I was anticipating but I think I’ve realised something. I still love Gmail, but for different reasons than when I first got it. Back in 2004, one whole gigabyte of email storage was ground breaking and “search your email like the web” seemed like it would be powerful. The conversation feature rocked out and still does. But now, I feel like the main reason I prefer Gmail over other providers is that I’m trapped by the awesome spam filter. Not so much trapped as too scared to use anything else for the fear of going back to the days of spam.
I’m really interested in trying Apple’s new mobileme service when it opens. Mainly for the user interface which is being plugged as being a desktop app on the web.
I can now play Tyrian on my Wii. My life is complete. It doesn’t get any better than this, folks… Well, it could be better if I could actually save my game >_< Oh yeah, and getting out of OpenTyrian requires a Wii hard-reset 9 times out of 10 but come on, it's Tyrian people, TYRIAN! Arcade mode is actually quite fun. And hard. I forgot how hard this game is.
I used the Twilight Hack to install the Wii Homebrew Channel (HBC), and it worked first go, like an absolute charm. I remembered to back up my Zelda savegame first, and will restore that soon. Once HBC is loaded you really have no need for the Twilight Hack again.
There are some pretty neato apps for the Wii so far, but most only use the “fake Gamecube” inside the Wii, which means this really isn’t worth doing unless you have a GameCube controller. ScummVM uses the Wiimote which is impressive. There are also emulators for just about every Nintendo console before the Gamecube, so I ask: Why aren’t Nintendo jumping up and down? It’s obviously a huge threat to the Virtual Console. Maybe VC sales are just a tiny fraction of their income though so they don’t care?
But there’s still one thing missing and that’s DVD playback. My good ol’ Panasonic DVD player has recently carked it. I loved it to bits because it was region-free out of the box, and I have a lot of non-R4 DVDs. There is still no .elf DVD app that can be loaded with HBC, but Wii Miidia looks quite promising. I’ll be waiting for an official release, though; I’m happy to give everyone else the chance to brick their Wiis using the betas.
If anyone wants to borrow my copy of Zelda to get this going, let me know.
If you consider yourself a scientist, or have even a vague interest in things scientific, then you should watch Steamboy. It’s not one of the best animes I’ve seen; actually, I’m just not sure I like the English dub - a bit too literal. But its overt theme of “Is Science Evil?” had me glued to the couch with joyful anticipation. Some may cringe at the comparison, but I couldn’t help but draw numerous parallels with the recent Iron Man movie. Both deal with the arms industries and both question the morals of profiting from what is essentially, the business of killing.
In addition to the traditional website, many news and blog publishers offer their articles in content-only formats called “feeds”, and more people are using feed readers to view this content. This means users are visiting the actual websites less and less. Has the rise of feeds had the effect of devaluing web design? Have we become so obsessed with instant access, no-nonsense content that we’d prefer to read our news in the blandest of surroundings, caring little for the actual presentation? Or have we just shifted our focus towards the content, rather than away from design? Would that be so tragic? Is web design really that important?
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