In case you were curious, here are some pictures of where I work: the b5media office.
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From the monthly archives:
March 2008
Click here to see the Flickr page for the top storefront, and click here to see the Flickr page for the bottom storefront.
First, a confession: I have not played Portal yet. Yes, I’m a negligent geek. I’ve got The Orange Box for the XBox 360 sitting in my living room, but haven’t gotten around to firing it up yet (in fact, I’m still working on Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed, and that’s on top of keeping up with my spare-time programming, plus Toronto tech community stuff, plus other non-geeky pursuits).
While I haven’t gotten around to playing Portal, I’m quite aware of its gameplay and the role that Weighted Companion Cubes play in the game. That’s why I smiled when I saw these storefronts created by Posterchild, Toronto’s answer to Bansky. If you’re in Toronto, you can check out these storefronts up close and in person — the top storefront is at 644 Bloor Street West (near Euclid) and the bottom storefront is at 725 Yonge Street (near Bloor).
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It’s mainstream now: Rickrolling has been written up in the New York Times.
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Here’s an inspirational poster for testing advocates who dig on Star Wars…
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
This photo is one of two testing advocacy posters that Sebastian Bergmann has put into a Flickr photoset.
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Here’s something for people with both nerdy and interior design tendencies: ASCII curtains!
The kids today may not remember ASCII art, but those of use who grew up in the era of dot matrix and daisywheel printers will find these curtains hauntingly familiar. From a distance, designer Nieke Sybrandy’s curtains show a tree branch design, but close up, you can see that the design is made of up dot matrix printer characters:
There are some other interesting geek-friendly designs at Nieke Sybrandy’s site, including duct tape that looks like band-aids and a tablecloth that looks like a blueprint. If you can read Dutch, I’d love it if you could translate some of the text for me!
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Included with this nice New York Times elegy to Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax is a pretty cool diagram of geek memes:
Illustration by Sam Potts for the New York Times.
Click to see the diagram at full size.
[Found via jwz's LiveJournal.]
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It’s painfully geeky, yet mesmerizing: some guy has taken the names of every Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in order and turned them into a little vaudeville piano rag, resulting in this video.
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Aaron Brazell, b5media’s Director of Technology has a blog entry on his blog, Technosailor, titled 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5. It provides a brief overview of ten features of the very-soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5, which are quickly summarized below:
- New admin user interface. “By far the most comprehensive change in this release was the complete rethinking of how WordPressers do their administrative tasks. Happy Cog Studios was enlisted to do usability research and testing - with the emphasis being on usability research.”
- New menu layout. “One of the first things you’ll notice is the change in the administrative navigation. It struck me as very Movable Typeish. I don’t know if the idea came from them or simply that Happy Cog had such thorough user research that it made sense. Either way… it makes sense.”
- Changes to the way you add widgets to sidebars. “Another MASSIVE shift in philosophy has been in the Widgets page. Before, you could drag and drop widgets into position. You can still reposition widgets by dragging within a sidebar, however, WordPress is relying less on Javascript “bling” for this release.”
- Dashboard overhaul. “…it is completely modularized, and though there is no “tight” way of adding your own, plugin authors can create their own dashboard widgets. The architecture is primitive at this point, but will improve offering a much easier way for plugin authors to do their thing without feeling like they are ‘hacking’.”
- Improvements to the visual editor. “I don’t use WordPress’ visual editor, but I’m told it is a vast improvement over the older version. The TinyMCE team has worked closely with WordPress on this release as well.”
- Flash-based image uploader. “For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear.”
- Auto-upgrading of plugins. “By default, it will try to upgrade plugins that are already in the WordPress plugin repository by writing the new files out to the existing plugins. However, this is an inherent security risk as it would require your plugin files be writable by the world.”
- Custom thumbnail sizes. “In WordPress 2.5, thumb-nailing became a whole lot more useful. You can not only set your thumbnail dimensions globally, you can also have a “medium” sized thumbnail, a la Flickr and an option to crop an oversize image instead of just resizing.”
- New tag management interface. “It works like Flickr tags where tags can be added via a list of comma separated tags or via a “type, click, add” mantra. In addition, the UI has a tabbed interface which allows for the selection of tags by checkboxes and by most used tags, useful to say the least.”
- Password strength indicator. A small enhancement, but a useful one for less security-savvy bloggers.
- Bonus: New timestamp interface. A nice enhancement by b5er and WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith. “By default, a new post has no timestamp module. Instead, it’s a publish immediately, or you can click a link if you really do want to modify the timestamp. When editing a post with a timestamp, there is also no ‘Modify Timestamp’ checkbox that caused so much confusion for so many years. If you modify the existing timestamp, it’s assumed that you actually want to change the timestamp!“
So far, only Release Candidate 1 of WordPress has been released. If you’re feeling bold, you can download it from here and give it a try.
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At the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference, most of the note-takers, myself included, took notes at the sessions using their laptops. One notable exception was designer Mike Rohde, who took notes the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper, or more specifically, pen and Moleskine notebook.
Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
These aren’t your garden-variety lecture notes, but what he calls “sketchnotes”. Rather than being mere points taken down during the presentation, they include elements of layout, graphic design and whimsical illustration. “While sketchnotes capture concentrated concepts for each session well,” Rohdes writes, “I think they’re even better at awakening ideas stored in the minds of session attendees.”
Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
Mike scanned the sketchnotes he took and put them up in this Flickr photoset. You can also read his blog entry about the sketchnotes here.
Image by Mike Rohde.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
This isn’t his first set of sketchnotes — he also took some at the SEED conference in January and posted them in this Flickr set.
[Found via SxSW Baby!]
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With great power comes great responsibility: This could very well be the greatest movie re-enactment photo ever.
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