links

Link Roundup: Random

pffft. pffft. Is this thing on? 1, 2, 3, test.
  • NYT Slideshow: What's Your Sign?, a look at the new highway sign font ClearviewHwy.
  • 5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know.
  • Birthdays Without Pressure is a site by parents who want to downsize birthday parties. It's nice to see like-minded parents using the web to organize against their children. I mean someone has to stand up to big children, they're a powerful lobby.
  • pastebin is a site for sharing/debugging code with a group.
  • Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped fame is working on a Google Office Hacks book for O'Reilly.
  • Desktoptopia is a cool little Mac application that sets a desktop background from their pool of images. You can rate or block any background you don't like. It's been buggy for me (crashing on start), and I wish the collaborative filtering was a bit more transparent (a la public ratings), but this is a great start on a fun idea.
  • Wikipedia image: Broadway tower. Love this photo.
Here are a few parenting blogs that have made it into my regular rotation:
  • Daddy Types - the weblog for new dads.
  • Geekdad - Lego projects and occasionally other stuff. part of Wired blogs.
  • Nested - hip kid products + commentary.
  • Nesting - more hip kid products + design commentary.
  • yokiddo - even more hip kid products (with little commentary), by David Galbraith.
  • Parent Hacks - shared parenting tips.
On review, I think I should subscribe to some frugal-parenting blogs. Most of these are heavily stuff-oriented. Being a new parent does put you in a new class of consumer, but there's a lot more to learn than what stuff is available to buy. The parenting blog search will continue. I also subscribe to posts tagged with parenting at Ask Metafilter. I've found a ton of seemingly useful parenting advice on Ask Metafilter, and I'll try to include some examples in my next post.

This has been a not-too-organized link dump. Until next time, as you were.
Aug 27th, 2007, 12:05 am

Link Roundup: Economics, Color, Misc., iPhone

Here's another batch of links that have crossed my desk recently.

Last time I was talking about the news providing an excellent civics lesson, and yesterday was the day for an economics lesson. The New York Times had a couple of good articles about the current state of the economy:
  • NYT: A New Kind of Bank Run Tests Old Safeguards. "...a new financial architecture emerged in the last decade — one that relied more on securities and less on banks as intermediaries. With the worth of those securities now being questioned — and no equivalent of deposit insurance — some who financed the securities want their money out, a fact that has created the 21st-century equivalent of a run on a bank."
  • NYT: Keep Your Eyes on Adjustable-Rate Mortgages. "The peak month for the resetting of mortgages will come this October, according to Credit Suisse, when more than $50 billion in mortgages will switch to a new rate for the first time."
  • Metafilter: great comment by bookie in a thread about stock analyst Jim Cramer melting down on MSNBC: "this morning we saw the london interbank market effectively cease to function. This is the marketplace where banks source their daily funding requirements for ongoing operations...What these banks were saying was, in effect, 'I don't trust any of these other banks enough to give them any cash at 4%pa overnight, because I'm not sure I'll get it back.'"
  • For even more background on the subprime/credit squeeze, check out this post on Metafilter from last month: A world of Casey Serins. This post has a bunch of links to articles explaining how we got where we are, with some interesting discussion.
Color:
  • Speak Up: Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies. Nice visualization of the dominant colors used in movie posters—broken down by film rating. As you'd expect: dark for adult movies, bright and colorful for kids.
  • I've been having fun reading and playing with the techniques in Photoshop LAB Color by Dan Margulis. I hadn't played with the LAB color space in Photoshop too much before, but I like the results so far. Here's a photo of mine that I've processed three different ways:

    no process
    No Process

    standard process
    My Standard RGB Process

    LAB process
    LAB Process

    I feel like I've been getting better colors out of my photos with the techniques in the book. (And sharpening in the Luminosity channel does seem better than sharpening in RGB.) I've been meaning to do a longer post about this with better examples.
Grab Bag: And finally, what link roundup would be complete without some iPhone news? A: none.
  • cre.ations.net: Tether your iPhone: EDGE internet on your laptop. These hackers show how to get the iPhone working as an Edge network proxy for a laptop. I can't believe this isn't built into the iPhone already (my two previous phones acted as bluetooth modems). Well done.
  • Interesting example of Amazon reviews + comments not working in favor of the product for sale: Don't buy this [Belkin iPhone adapter]. Though trimming didn't work for me, ruining an aux cable in the process. My kingdom for a stupid simple iPhone auxiliary adapter. Why did you go non-standard, Apple? Why?
  • Leonard posted a cool screenshot of his hacked iPhone. I want to try out MobileTerminal and NES emulator, but instead I've been putting together this post. SSH out would be a killer app for me, wonder if MobileTerminal handles that yet.
Until I link-dump again, huzzah!
Aug 11th, 2007, 5:26 pm

Quick Links 09/28

Quick Links 09/28 — Quick Links via del.icio.us/onfocus
Sep 28th, 2004, 9:25 pm
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