random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
Thought about iTunes Music Store: why doesn’t it allow you to use your/other people’s playlists/libraries to generate personalized suggestions?
Speaking of music, Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1990s Redux is all up. Wish I owned more of these, there are some classic gems in there.
Why ALA’s “JavaScript Image Replacement” Sucks – ppk blasts Christian Heilmann’s JavaScript Image Replacement article. Overly harsh maybe, but for the most part accurate. The arraying and O2 looping is fugly, and ppk makes a really good point about replacement after image-loading (this would solve the Mozilla incompatibilities as well, yeah?)
ppk also launches into an attack on ALA’s JS articles, which again, while harsh, is… true. I love the design stuff, but the dev/tech stuff is hit or miss, which probably is most attributable to the lack of actual domain expertise of the editor(s).
Wireless local number portability: Guidelines for switching carriers
I’ve been paying $5/mo for the past year to retain my old SprintPCS number with call forwarding to my T-Mobile line. For a while, this was quite useful, and I had a couple months to make sure that anyone I talked to regularly had my new number. I’ve realized, however, that nowadays, no one uses my old number at all.
I really should have just waited a couple days and gotten a new activation with my T-Mobile number (and gotten an activation discount), but it looks like at the very least, from an email exchange with Sprint Customer Service, I should be able to port the number over without too many shenanigans.
I take it that this guy didn’t know that he could get an iPod replacement battery for $50.
This caters directly to the hearts and minds of file-sharing users who frequently seek rarities, out-of-print recordings, singles and b-sides through peer-to-peer trading networks. A service like Bleep.com eliminates the need for users to host rare files or spend hours scouring for the few rare songs they can’t find or are only available in poor-quality or corrupted files. In addition, the service isn’t beholden to the limitations imposed by a service like iTunes; anyone can have access to the music without installing the proprietary software.
!!!, Anti-Pop Consortium, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Broadcast, Plaid, Prefuse 73, and Squarepusher are among the label mainstays whose entire Warp output will be available through the service, which is being designed by the estimable Designers Republic and Kleber (the same madmen responsible for the Warp site’s distinct look and feel).
New at Freeway Blogger
How do you organize your gear?
My Treo’s touchscreen was freaking out on me for a little while, but it seems ok for now. I’m thinking I’ll need to give Handspring a call and see what’s up. In any case, I think I’ll do a little blogroll list a-la what I did for the hiptop (to this day btw, most of the list remains accurate; Danger never fixed anything).
The Blazer 3.0 browser has fairly complete CSS + JS support; and for the most part renders stuff well. It does take a while to render stuff (it’s not efficient about letting you navigate partial pages – still not bad, avg time to navigation is about 20s from hitting the request button, full page typically loads in about a minute), and doesn’t seem to be very smart about its caching (it’ll try to reconnect the last page when you don’t have a signal but won’t load up the cache). I’ve included the page sizes that it gets (spoiled by broadband). These are of optimized views (wide layouts seem to be even better; congrats Blazer team):
+ randomfoo.net - no header in optimized mode; 270.5K + a.wholelottanothing.org - header compressed, otherwise good; 221.1K + lyd - looks real good, miniblog shows up first; 47.4K + waxy.org - looks real good; 55.2K + torrez.org looks real good; 10.3K + sixfoot6 - looks real good; 192.2K + onfocus - loads, eventually; 334.7K + megnut - looks real good; 48.8K ! kottke - causes a soft reset! no joke; tried multiple times + anil - legible, has two columns (?) ~ Simon Willison - wraps just a little wide; 37.3K - 0xDECAFBAD - content space is a thin sliver, funky even in wide mode; 216.5K + Zeldman - nav first, otherwise good; 103.7K + Mezzoblue - long nav at top, works; 108.7K + whatdoiknow - scaled headers, otherwise good; 74.4K ~ Clagnut - text column half-width; otherwise ok; 139.4K + meyerweb - some design overlap, but quite legible; 77.6K + eatonweb - all nav on top, otherwise good; 45.0K + unoriginal creativity - nav appears first, otherwise good; 53.8K + disastro - no header, nav text/bg color rendered the same, otherwise good; 14.9K + boingboing - looks real good; 298.6K ~ mefi - slightly thin text columns; 63.6K + /. - looks really good; 82.9K Friendster, Tribe, and Upcoming.org load up fine. Friendster sometimes renders weird (ads or frames space weirdness?), but I was able to use it well enough over the weekend to look up an event location from a bulletin board posting.
Browser improvements I’d like:
To look into: more into browser info, does it support handheld stylesheets?
Jon Johansen (of DeCSS fame) has released QTFairUse, a QuickTime AAC memory dumper.
DRM has not, does not and will not prevent commercial ‘piracy’; it just restricts the utility of digital media formats to the average consumer.
(note to self: get lessig vs rosen debate tapes)