Embezzle a bit more of your building’s heat.
Here’s a useful trick to unfairly get more heat into your apartment than the others in your building: Use a box fan to convert your passive radiator — in effect, a giant heatsink — into an active heatsink-with-fan combo.
Of course, you can also just remove the shelf that’s sitting on top of the radiator and blocks 90% of the (purely heat-induced) airflow. Less noise, too.
There has been an interesting decrease in attempted comment spam on my website over the last two weeks. This may have to do with the recent attack on the Mega-D botnet, which was effectively destroyed by security researchers. The possibility of taking out botnets has been debated for a while, but so far only as a theoretical idea. The results of this attack speak for itself, and I hope that this will be done more in the future.
The OpenOffice Mouse. This is exactly what’s wrong with usability and Open Source.
Unicorn Sales Dashboard. Via @r1c1 on Twitter.
Comment spam has been a part of running my website almost from day one. Until about a month ago, I used reCAPTCHA, which is a very clever implementation of a CAPTCHA that at the same time helps digitize scanned books.
It started with a few spam comments that got through, and developed into waves. I would get bursts of about a dozen comments in quick succession once or twice a day. I had turned comment moderation on at that point, but it was still annoying. Then the waves intensified to the point where I got several hundred spam comments per day. Something needed to be done.
I had looked at Mollom before, but didn’t want to hand over control over my comments to a third party. At first, it also didn’t work too well, letting about half the spam through. But it improved over time, and it’s rock-solid now, to the point where I have turned off comment moderation again. Most of my users never see a CAPTCHA and don’t have to wait for me to moderate their comments.
There are other spam block modules for Drupal, but Mollom is much better integrated than the others. It does pay to have Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, also behind Mollom. The integrated comment moderation queue and the clever report interface are simply excellent. The only thing the report charts is missing are false negatives.
What has also helped is another module named Comment Closer. It simply deactivates comments on nodes that are older than a given threshold. I don’t generally like closing comments on older nodes, because I don’t see my articles as being so tied to the current moment that they will lose relevance very quickly. But experience also shows that I get hardly any comments on nodes that are a week or two old, so I’m not losing much. And reducing the number of targets for the spam bots has cut down the spam attempts by about 2/3.
It’s still shocking to see the force behind these spam attacks, but I’m also glad that there are tools that are keeping up and making it virtually impossible for that crap to be posted.
I’m working on a redesign of EagerEyes, and while I have some reasonable tools, things still take way too long. I know that designers like PhotoShop, but I don’t have that, and it’s out of my price range. PhotoShop Elements is too limited in the functions I’d need (I have an older version of that that I never use).
My main tool right now is Acorn, which has most of the features I need, but it also lacks a lot of convenience. There is no way to group layers, making it hard to keep an overview when trying out lots of things. It also requires a few additional steps for inner shadows (which I may or may not use in my redesign ;), etc.
The tool that would be perfect for my purposes in theory is DrawIt, which is a vector-oriented tool that can also do pixel-stuff like apply CoreImage filters. It takes some getting used to, but it’s really powerful and has some incredible workflow features. The main downside is that its text rendering is really ugly, and it doesn’t look like there’s a fix in sight.
I also have a license for VectorDesigner, but there are some issues with getting that to really do what I want it to. I need to play with that a bit more, though.
Is there some other tool that’s used by designers, runs on a Mac, and is affordable? I need mostly pixel-oriented stuff, but a hybrid like DrawIt would be great, too. Any suggestions?
I made a flow chart, that we might better understand.
Once upon a time I was falling in love, and now I’m only falling apart.
Brilliant. (via @ryanmcgrath on Twitter)
Imogen Heap’s new album Ellipse. Good stuff.
