Party Pooper Mode

Another sad (but understandable) concession to humourless people who try to squeeze the fun out of everything.

Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page

A geeky run-down of the tricks and techniques used in old driving games.

WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal

As Tim O’Reilly says, it’ll help promote wider use of open source.

Piracy and the App Store

The speed and scale is quite surprising for a device that isn’t jailbroken by most users.

Sudtipos

Some really stylish fonts I’ll have to remember to consider for future designs.

Google Groups is Dead

No spam filtering or anti-spoofing measures? Wow.

Pay-What-You-Want Birthday Sale Wrap-up

I would’ve bought World of Goo when it came out, except the demo was actually too generous and left me feeling I’d played it enough.

Weird Toilet Paper Roll Sculptures by Junior Jacquet

I’d have linked directly to the artist’s site if it didn’t consist of only a single page made from images and a huge PDF catalogue.

Taykt

Instantly set up a UK SMS shortcode (so you can say things like “Text MYTHUMBACHESFROMTYPINGTHIS to 82958”). Could be useful for some offine projects, especially as it allows you to retrieve any info submitted following the main word.

Comic strip mashups

Is there a Garfield spoof that doesn’t improve on the original?

Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries

I still don’t think that fonts should have special treatment, but it seems a compromise format is needed.

Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009)

Clear recommendations for different levels of user.

Yesterday I realised that this blog has just turned five years old; hardly ancient, but not bad going (also realised it’s 20 years since I first got online at university, blimey).

In honour of this uneventful event, I’ve added an area to the weblog home page highlighting entries from a year ago and five years ago, so I can remind myself of all the horribly wrong predictions and misguided ramblings.

If you’ve taken some iPhone/iPod touch screenshots (by pressing Home and Sleep together), you might want to show them off superimposed on a device.

This Zip file of iPhone images simply contains PNGs sized so that the screen area perfectly matches 320x480 screenshots, avoiding any need to faff about resizing things to fit. Included are portrait and landscape pics on white with minimal shadows (no reflection), plus a shadow-free cutout.

1. Most people aren’t particularly good at what they do.
2. Most things aren’t as difficult as they may seem.
3. It’s usually better to have a go at something yourself than rely on someone who isn’t particularly good.

takeaweirdbreak

Strange snippets from those magazines that lurk at supermarket checkouts.

TVCatchup

The iPhone version has superb quality and doesn’t require a login; it’s surely too good to last.

Apple’s Got a New Video Format: iFrame

I can understand the thinking behind a middle-ground spec that strikes a compromise between quality and hardware requirements, but setting an HD camera to use it by default just seems wrong.

fontcapture

Create a font from your own handwriting (other sites have offered this before, hopefully this one works a bit better).

Breaking links

A very annoying quirk that seems to be related to Safari’s event-handling (links within iframes also don’t work properly with middle-click).

Twig

A templating language that compiles down to PHP.

Zombie project REVEALED!

Some nice touches like the list of usernames and photocopying zombie.

Video on the Web

We’re still some way from being able to use the video tag without faff.

Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back

More dating-related number-crunching from OkCupid.

@font-face and performance

Some quite major differences across browsers.

TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit

Anyone fancy organising a whip-round to launch something daft/cool into space?

One thing you can use your own domain for is OpenID. The idea is that you identify yourself to third-party sites using a special URL through which the login process is handled, meaning you don’t need to create endless username/password combinations. More and more sites accept OpenID, and some (e.g. Stack Overflow) are choosing to only accept it.

Various popular services are OpenID providers, but directly using their URLs will tend to lock you in. Luckily, OpenID includes a feature called delegation for pointing one URL at another, meaning you don’t have to run your own OpenID server to have more control.

Choosing A URL

If your web site/blog represents only you, and its URL is unlikely to change or need to represent others, then you might decide to make the home page your OpenID URL. Alternatively, you could perhaps use your personal profile page or set up a subdomain to keep things separate and expandable (e.g. http://openid.yourdomain.com/username ).

The overall idea is to choose something that’s simple, represents you, and is unlikely to change.

Delegating

Here’s how you can quickly add OpenID to your chosen URL using myOpenID, a popular provider:

• Create an account
• Set up one or more Registration Personas (under Your Account); these let you selectively disclose information to sites you use
• Add the delegation tags to the HTML of your chosen page
• Use your OpenID URL to identify yourself to an OpenID-enabled site; you should be directed to myOpenID to log in

That’s all there is to it, and it’s the same process for other providers except that you might have to dig around to find the right settings/tags. You can switch provider at any time simply by changing the tags, there’s no need to change your OpenID URL.

If you’d rather get myOpenID to host everything (e.g. if you’re worried about someone editing your site and changing the delegation), you can set up a DNS record and use myOpenID for Domains (slightly less flexible, but you still control the URL).