A colleague of mine was checking Dutch user interface design website ddux.org when this strange bug happened. In every title in on the page, the all ‘t’s were dropped to the next line. It was gone after a simple refresh of the page, but it was fun while it lasted. I didn’t know how to make Archie better until I read about “Informaion Archiecure (ttt)”.

Swedish company Medison has started offering a $150 laptop on their website. For the price the celebrity it’s very decently specced. It puts the OLPC and the Eee PC to shame, and looks pretty sleek as well. I’ve read predictions that laptop prices are going to drop, but this is ludicrous. Too good to be true? Will this turn out to be vaporware? Or will I be missing a unique opportunity by not clicking the ‘buy now’ button just yet?
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Matt of bestwpthemes.com contacted me a couple of days ago to let me know he added my Tranquility themes to his list of best WP themes. It’s always nice when someone adds your work to any kind of shortlist. Thanks Matt.

I’ve been looking at Second Life at work, and I keep running into articles about SL in the context of Web 2.0. But is it really part of that revolution? The best definition of Web 2.0 I’ve come across describes it as a movement towards a more social and democratic web. Based on this definition I think Second Life (and other 3D communities) are only partly Web 2.0. Sure, you can talk to other avatars, meet new people and hang out. So despite the fact that it’s still basically IRC chat with a game-like interface, I’ll grant the ’social’ part.
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I’ve been using this trick for years but it seems it’s never really been blogged about. When saving JPEG files using the “Save for Web” feature (”Save for web & devices” in CS3), the quality slider exhibits some strange behavior. Increasing the quality setting by a single percent usually adds only a little extra file size (about half a kB for the test file I used). Going from 50 to 51 with the same file added a full 10 kB. There’s also quite a difference in image quality between 50 and 51. In fact I feel 51 looks pretty good and is the optimal setting for most web projects. Anything above that is a waste of bandwidth, except perhaps for photography portfolios and such.
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When I need a new web host, I tend to go by other people’s recommendations. People I know in real life that is, because online hosting review sites tend to be fake, with everything geared towards making money from affiliate programs. Some hosts pay more than $50 per sale, so many hosting review websites just recommend the highest paying company.

Suzero recommended Hosting Zoom to me and I thought I’d write about my experiences with them so far.
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For a project at work, I needed to set up a bunch of blogs yesterday. All with pretty much the same setup and no special needs like exotic plugins or anything. Instead of going through WordPress’ famous 5-minute install six or seven times I decided to try WordPress MU. Considering how MU is a solution aimed at sites looking to run thousands of blogs off of dedicated servers (it’s being developed at wordpress.com), I thought it would be hard to install and pretty much unusable by mere users like me. But instead there was almost nothing to configure and the installation is even easier than that of a regular WordPress install. Go figure.
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