jasonSeney();

Every solution is great in some circumstances and terrible in others. Design debates are best settled by inviting everyone to present their solution, but also explain under what circumstances their solution is terrible. Finally they’re asked to explain under what circumstances their colleague’s solution would be better. This is what Bill Buxton refers to as walking on “both sides of the street”.

(Source: Intercom Blog)

Every solution is great in some circumstances and terrible in others. Design debates are best settled by inviting everyone to present their solution, but also explain under what circumstances their solution is terrible. Finally they’re asked to explain under what circumstances their colleague’s solution would be better. This is what Bill Buxton refers to as walking on “both sides of the street”.

(Source: Intercom Blog)

Having the reduced syntax as optional is nice, and I can use only the small number of features I need without converting all my CSS files. I’ve been avoiding LESS for awhile, but might give Stylus a shot in some new projects.

Check out some examples on the Stylus Page on GitHub

(Source: vimeo.com)

xharekx33:

A quick list of problems I see with with tumblr’s latest interface changes:

There’s too much padding between elements. They feel disconected, not part of a common set of actions

They attract too much attention. I understand that tumblr wants to encourage people to reblog and check the posts notes, but they’re too noticeable (I guess the novelty is part of the reason, but still). Too large. Too dark. That distracts from the actual content. Not good.

The look isnt consistent. If tumblr wants to start using more flat icons (as they did with the top menu) they should do it with all the actions and not mix text and images randomly. They could use an X icon for the delete action and a little pen or gears for the edit action.

In case they want to use text and images instead of plain simple icons for every action… they should still keep text consistent. If the number of notes is inside a box to make it more iconic, “edit” and “delete” should be too.

The neat row of icons (like, reblog, reply, photo reply) you get on other people’s post is, in contrast, just awesome. I would just use a slightly lighter color to make it perfect

Agree on all these points. I also wish they would change that “hidden” corner earmark permalink. I can’t imagine how long it takes new users to figure out how to hover there then click that.

I feel the order should be consistent too, if you look at the buttons a on post page, you notice how it goes reblog, edit, delete.

Buttonst

Red Teams: Crude Steganography with command line

redteams:

Jason’s post reminded me of another neat trick to have: using cat as a steganography tool to hide a RAR archive inside a simple jpg image.

The following will work on any Unix, including Mac OS X (for Windows see at the end of the post):

Step 1

Create a file with the data you want. Create a file with the data you want. You can use Jason’s trick to create an encrypted file…

“I thought maybe VCs had access to some brilliant new software that evaluated prospective investments in startups. But no. What we’re talking about is good old fashioned experience, which is what you get to call induction when you’re making money and what you say you earned instead of cash when you were losing money.”

— Alex Payne - On Business Madness

A great article, and hat tip to pattern matching reference in programming.

xharekx33:

The Sword Maker.

As one of Japan’s last remaining swordsmiths, Korehira Watanabe has honed his craft for 40 years while attempting to recreate the mythical Koto sword.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

– Albert Einstein (via decrepito)

Snow Shoveler on Omoide Yokocho, Shinjuku, During Last Wednesday’s Snow

BIGBANG - New music video filmed in Williamsburg Brooklyn!

“Finding the root cause of a failure is like finding the root cause of a success.”

John Allspaw on when complex systems and humans go wrong (via matthew)

Open, Edit & Save Encrypted Files with Vim and GPG

If you’ve ever want to save sensitive text on your computer - encrypting it is the only way to ensure it is secure. Using vim and gpg we can open, edit, and save only the encrypted file and leave nothing in plain text on the hard drive.

Note: In order to run gpg on OS X, you’ll need to first install MacGPG2.

To Open an Encrypted File (from shell)

gpg -d myfile.mkdn.gpg | vim - -n -i "NONE" "+set filetype=markdown"

-d to decrypt
| pipe stdout of gpg into vim
- to accept stdin instead of file
-n turns off swap file - important!
-i turns off .viminfo - important!
+set filetype set the file type (for syntax highlighting, etc) since there is no file name for vim to detect

Bonus: Add a function (and easy alias) to your ~/.bash_profile file:

vimdecrypt() { gpg -d "$1" | vim - -n -i "NONE" "+set filetype=$2"; }
alias vd="vimdecrypt"

You can now simply type (2nd argument optional):

$ vd myfile.mkdn.gpg markdown

To Save and Encrypt a File (from vim)

:w !gpg -c -o myfile.mkdn.gpg

:w to write buffer
!gpg escape to shell and run gpg, accepts vim buffer as stdin
-c to set symetric encryption
-o to set file name

Bonus: Add a command to your ~/.vimrc file:

command -nargs=1 WriteEncrypted w !gpg -c -o <q-args>

Now, from within vim you type

WriteEncrypted myfile.txt.gpg

(Source: coffeenotes)

(Source: yujinchoi)

Slothnought: The Bane of Share Buttons

pauljwilliams:

If you have this on your site, please remove it. Just delete the code. Please.

Why would this look good — anywhere? Seeing a variation of this row of share buttons is just as vexing as seeing Flash ads initiate without your consent. Services like ShareThis are the bane of the Internet. If…

Minimal Mac: Microsoft's Biggest Miss

minimalmac:

Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.The failure to take the iPhone…