It’s always nice to see that insanity among the geek set isn’t a purely American phenomenon. Case in point: one Briton’s construction of a PVC flamethrower from bits available at any hardware store. This isn’t perhaps as crazy as Interpretive Arson’s Dance Dance Immolation, but probably equally likely to instantly remove your eyebrows should a mishap occur.
Need to make readable signage, but your handwriting with a Sharpie is wanting for legibility? Enter Instant Labeling Tape, which allows anyone with a black marker to crank out labels that are at least as readable as a typical cash register display.
Stealing in online games is becoming high tech. Now clever criminals are using bots to kill player characters and rob them in Lineage II. And I thought PvP was hard against other humans.
The Escapist is an attractive magazine that covers gaming, both the digital sort that’s so popular with the kids today and the more analog variety that keeps older gamers like me playing tabletop and roleplaying games. It’s beautifully rendered, and the articles are, for the most part, thoughtfully written and thought-provoking.
It’s unusual to see the topic of gaming contained in such a beautiful package. Even the best gaming publications I’ve read lack the crisp layout and artistic vistas present in The Escapist. It’s a treat to read something in which good words are artfully combined with good design, especially when it covers a topic so dear to me.
Here are a few handy references I’ve run across while attempting to get perfectly reasonable CSS layout to work in an unreasonable browser:
In the “stunning waste of time better spent doing something productive” department, it’s hard to beat the list of company name etymologies at Biography.ms. There’s more trivia here than you’ll find in most very trivial things.
How To Attack An Internet Explorer (Win) Display Bug contains details of the “Holly Hack,” a clever CSS trick by Holly Bergevin that fixes, among other things, the infamous Internet Explorer peekaboo bug. I was recently bitten in the ass (again) by this obnoxious IE problem, and it’s nice to see a fix for it that doesn’t appear to have any ill side effects in other browsers.
Obfuscating Email Addresses is a handy and quick tool for transforming an email address from plaintext to something composed entirely of HTML entities. It won’t stop dedicated spammers from using slightly better software to scrape an address off your site, but it does a decent job with the lazy ones who can’t be bothered to do more than look for “at” signs.
Way! Transparent custom corners and borders presents a technique to create resizeable boxes with custom-shaped corners, entirely in CSS, with a clever bit of Javascript to insert the empty div elements that make it all work. By the time I read through all the code, I decided it’s a hack to make other hacks blush, but its results are remarkably elegant. The rest of Roger Johansson’s site contains other equally remarkable tips and tricks for Web design.
I love it when someone else beats me to a project so I don’t have to do it myself. Essential Bookmarks for Web-designers and Web-developers is a fantastic (and obsessively large) collection of links to Web design and development resources. I suspect I’ll be spending hours clicking through links.
Just in the few short minutes since discovering the site, I’ve already followed one link to a gem of a site: The Best Brands of the World. The site has vector art for pretty much any logotype you can think of, as well as several thousand you’ve probably never heard of before.
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