Ninjawords gets some print press! It was mentioned in the article Top 100 Undiscovered sites.

Here’s a video from a talk at siggraph 07. It’s a technique for resizing an image in one dimension (horizontally or vertically) without scaling the image — it intelligently removes pixels from the image as it get smaller. It’s outstanding and looks dang cool; watch the whole thing, because at the end they demo removing an entire person from a picture with just a few clicks.

Thanks for the pointer Michael.

I’ve never had much luck with routers from any of the major brands (although I haven’t tried Apple). I mean, it’s a simple piece of hardware/software, so it shouldn’t be that hard to at least make it work. They either require random reboots or “power cycling,” or they have some silly deficiency like crashing when Azureus exists or the inability to do static DHCP (without it, your IPs will frequently change when using DHCP, making port-forwarding useless).

Then I installed Linux (OpenWRT) on a new Linksys router and hooked it up to its own power supply, so storms don’t knock it out. Since then, my router hasn’t turned off or stopped working in 2/3 of a year. Here’s its status:

Host Name: OpenWrt
Uptime: 265 days

Haven’t had to think about it in a long time. It just works, always. Not bad for consumer hardware.

Just discovered this great software called Zooom, for Mac (it’s $20).

If you don’t use software like this and you’re mouse-click crazy (I’m looking at you Neha), you really should. You can basically hold down a hotkey and click anywhere in a window to drag&move that window, so you don’t have to click on the titlebar at the top. Works with resizing, too. This feature really should be in all operating systems (it is in Gnome & KDE). Clicking those tiny areas to resize or move a window is terrible usability, and it gives me serious RSI — it makes me want to drive my car into the lake!

If you’ve ever used Gnome’s alt+click dragging function, this is a bit better, because you don’t actually have to click. There’s an option to just hold down the hotkey and move your mouse. Very elegant.

There are apps like this for mac (MondoMouse (non-free) and WindowDragon (free)), but neither work as well as Zooom does, and when you’re dragging windows around all the time, the smallest bugs will drive you insane. Zooom can resize Firefox smoothly, and it works with Textmate, neither of which is true for MondoMouse or WindowDragon.

Finally a key window management feature done properly in OSX.

Jjot now has a blog, and fancy new popout support for notes (ala Gchat). Except the popped-out notes stay open even when you close the main Jjot window

An artist doing interaction design:

Tom Otterness creates playful, storybook sculptures, many permanently positioned around the city. He spends hours secretly watching kids and adults react to his sculptures, then takes insights back to the studio, incorporating them into his next pieces.

From Ideaspotting, by Sam Harrison.

Saw this while trying to use a shipping feature on paypal. They show me this warning and omit firefox from the recommended-browser list (what is netscape’s market share?), even though they have a version of safari from 1993.

So I marked up the image a bit and emailed it to them.

… is my new personal page. I just can’t resist buying fun domains.

Personal pages are a great place to try something new with design, so that’s what I did. This design is hung on a strong grid, which has its middle point in the center of the page. Grids are hard to do on the web, especially horizontal ones, since text can reflow all over the place; so this page was a beast to finish. This thing even scales with font-size — try increasing your font sizes (ctrl+ and ctrl- in Firefox). And it works in all browsers to boot (except you, Lynx!).

Got tired of the old page; needed more color! I even have the version from one year ago. That page has come a long way =)

Let me know what you think.