Archive for the 'Just geek' Category

I am going dark on Janu­ary 18 Amer­ican time, or between noon Janu­ary 18 WST my time until noon Janu­ary 19 WST, If you want to know why, even if I and you are am not an Amer­ic­ans, read Corey Doctorow’s Boing Boing will go dark on Jan 18 to fight SOPA & PIPA because he puts it so much bet­ter than me.

Not happy with the changes to Deli­cious, unsure about what book­mark ser­vice to switch to, well how about host­ing your own, with Semantic Scuttle? That was what happened with the State Library’s Fam­ily His­tory Book­marks, within 24 hours of the changes to Deli­cious and without prior pre­par­a­tion, I had a cus­tom­ised ver­sion of Semantic Scuttle […]

Krantz and Shel­don archi­tec­tural images meets Google StreetView

With Lib­rar­y­Hack and the State Lib­rary of WA day of hack approach­ing, I needed a demo, a quick look at the data­sets that the State Lib­rary of WA made avail­able. I settled on the Krantz and Shel­don archi­tec­tural pho­to­graphs. As this was a small set of pho­tos, I did not have to search through a whole col­lec­tion of 50,000 images look­ing for a suit­able theme, as this data­set already had a theme, the work of Krantz and Shel­don in Perth in the 1960s and 1970s. For­tu­nately most had some basic geo­loca­tion data, such as addresses.

The ori­ginal concept was to pro­duce an anim­a­tion, using CSS3, HTML5 and javas­cript, show­ing the Krantz and Shel­don pho­to­graphs along­side the cur­rent Google Streetview. I have not had the chance to anim­ate the sequence yet …

I have used a num­ber of dif­fer­ent URL short­en­ing ser­vices in my time, some have closed, some change there terms of ser­vices and some include advert­ising. So when I found out I could roll my own, I thought I bet­ter investigate.

Cre­at­ing one is fairly easy …

It has been very quiet around here, for a num­ber of reas­ons. I did expect my three week enforced rest to be spent learn­ing and exper­i­ment­ing with the likes of CSS3 and HTML5 and then blog­ging about it. Instead I spent most of the time in the shed play­ing bicycle mechanic.

Once back at work, my usual blog­ging time on the train trip to and from work dis­ap­peared, as my Mac­Book Pro died and I star­ted rid­ing to work more often.

I need to start blog­ging on a more reg­u­lar basis …

For those who have not seen my Edge of the Web CSS3 demon­stra­tion I used the CSS Zen Garden HTML. Why, because I wanted to use some­body else’s HTML, mainly because I wanted to show it works with any HTML and that most people would be famil­iar with the site.

I will not sub­mit it, because Dave has not accep­ted any new sub­mis­sions almost two year, my demo is far from the visual stand­ard of most other design and I broke one major rule the CSS does not validate.

Well I am speak­ing at the Edge of the Web Con­fer­ence in Perth in Novem­ber. The title Pro­gress­ive Enhance­ment with CSS: Or how I stopped wor­ry­ing about IE6 and start­ing lov­ing CSS3.

The aim is to show how you can use CSS2 and CSS3 to improve the exper­i­ence of vis­it­ors using mod­ern browsers, while not block­ing access to those people still using older browsers like IE6 …

Twit­ter has changed the way I watch pro­cyc­ling races, it has provided me far more inform­a­tion, than I was get­ting before and it is all Lance Armstrong’s fault …

Then purely by acci­dent I saw the Crumpler Yee Ross on the Crumpler web site, a Crumpler back­pack that can be used as a hydra­tion pack. So I went to my local Crumpler store, check it out and walked away after pur­chas­ing last year’s model (more on that later) …

This is my infam­ous bag that has been repor­ted to the local Crumpler store on more than one occa­sion, because I had the auda­city to sten­cil my blog URL on it, to clearly identify as mine.

Three years ago, I bought a Crumpler bag on …