miekd

• Less than 10000 bytes of CSS3 Memory

  Posted on Aug 26th 2010 at 01:00 in Web

  You thought you were done with CSS3 Memory? I thought so too. Then 10K Apart came along, and I felt like finding out if I could optimize it to 10 kilobytes. Well, what do you know? It’s possible.

  The original size was 120k (excluding typekit), and it got optimized to 9.3k. (It’s effectively 4k with gzip compression.)

  How did I optimize it?

  • Removed line breaks and tabs from HTML, CSS and JS,
  • rewrote the initialization (which creates the cards) from PHP to JS. (Well actually @maarfijs did most of this,)
  • created a smaller pattern on the back of the cards,
  • removed the ampersand images, and used font-stacks of pre-installed fonts. (The 10K contest allows for Typekit usage, and I wanted to add a 1meg kit – just for kicks – but decided against it)

  There’s a tiny chance that I will win, because there are some really cool entries, but it was well worth finding out if it was possible.

  You can check out the Original CSS3 Memory or the 10k version.

  Update: You can now rate CSS3 Memory 10k

• iPhone 4 Death Grip is a Feature …

  Posted on Aug 3rd 2010 at 11:10 in Miscellaneous

  … if you live near a border, and on the other side of that border are different cell-phone providers.

  I live near the belgian border. I tend to venture into Belgium a couple of times a month. As soon as I get into Belgium far enough that T-Mobile cuts out, I start roaming. Yet when I get back, the belgian cell towers are apparently so powerful that I keep on roaming. There was no solution except the painful multi-minute process of (1) going into your settings, (2) choosing a manual provider, (3) having to wait until it listed the providers – that always takes a minute, and (4) having to go back to “Automatic”.

  But now, the solution on the horizon is the Death Grip. Because the roaming tower will almost always be weaker than the local tower.

  1. Hold the Death Grip (this means touching the phone on the side of the bottom left of the device),
  2. After a while, the iPhone will show “No Service”,
  3. Release, and it’ll go to your local provider again.

  

• Get yourself at least one good pen

  Posted on Jul 23rd 2010 at 11:17 in Miscellaneous

  … and look after it.

  When I recall every office- or college-situation I have been in, there is one subconscious common denominator: cheap pens. Everywhere you see pens that cost a buck, free pens with promotion on them or pens that came in a 12-pack, that cost a buck. Matter of fact, once every ten-thousand pens you encounter, it’ll be a decent pen that actually doesn’t feel like torture to write with.

  A pen that actually feels good and writes smoothly is a delight to work with. It’s like buying the newest laptop out there and constantly being engaged by it, because it is currently faster than you. (just wait till your muscle memory gets a hang of that)

  So I suggest – née – implore you to get a decent pen. If you already have one, look after it.

  Over two years back I bought the most average Parker Jotter ballpoint pen I could find. Two reasons I selected it? It had a ‘Fine’ tip, and the look was full brushed aluminum. My primary reason to buy a pen that was tens of times more expensive than the average cheap pen wasn’t even the fact that I was looking for a better writing experience. It was so I had something to look after, to have a pen that’s worth enough so I wouldn’t lose it in any given random situation.

  Because it is not only about the writing experience, it is about having the same exact experience every time you write something. It is about not having to search for a pen at any random moment in time, and it is about not having an army of cheap, wasteful pens in every corner of your office, home, bag, coat, etc.

  Go out and buy yourself a good pen.

• California with Camera+

  Posted on Jul 19th 2010 at 23:36 in Photography

  About a week into my USA Road Trip, while standing on a tiny ledge at the Grand Canyon, my DSLR decided to break down on me. Due to the planning of the trip I couldn’t get it fixed ad-hoc at a store, so I ended up looking for a different way to visually record my trip. This was either (1) get a new camera or (2) use my iPhone as my main camera.

  I started out with overzealously using Hipstamatic, but soon my app of choice for this became Camera+ (which you might know from the frantic retweeting). I absolutely love using Camera+ for a few reasons:

  1. Gridlines,
  2. The “image stabilizer”, but most importantly,
  3. The simple, but effective, editing capabilities.

  The easy way to slap some effects on might turn off you purists – I didn’t like it myself at the start – but when we were driving across the Highway One and I was able to process 90% of the photos I took on my iPhone, I was convinced I didn’t need to carry my hefty DSLR along all the time for some fancy shots.

  Differences in image quality are night and day. The bokeh of a 50mm f1.4 is non-comparable. And yes, I did miss a lot of shots due to a lack of wide-angle, and a lack of proper depth-of-field. But when you take away what you can’t do and look at what you can do, you start to look at photography differently. At least… I did.

  I know I still went way too far with the effects, but you should check out my Camera+ in California flickr set.

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