Whatcha think?

Barring minor tweaks, My new layout is now done! Most all of it is a 3rd party theme, a first for me! But I chose to use it because I both learned a lot from modifying it, and because programmers always say don't reinvent the wheel! I chose instead to modify a lot of the spacing and positioning, and add some little touches here and there.

I like how much information it shows, hopefully it doesn't look too cluttered. As Tufte says, information is the whole point so your design should focus on it and provide a high density without making it unusable. This isn't exactly ultra dense, but does give you a quick glance at what I'm up to online, as well as focus mainly on the posts--the whole reason for this blog.

I still want to add a couple of navigation links because right now it's hard to go from post to post (done!), but other than that I'm really happy with how it looks and behaves. Please let me know what you think of it, and offer any suggestions/constructive criticisms. This site is for my readers so I want it to be as easy for you to use as possible!

I've also been uploading my backlog of UrbEx photos. I've recently added the rest of the POL Tanks, Coal Elevator, Building 943, and the Civil Defense Bunker.

By the way, euicho.com is currently not section 508 compliant, but it will be very shortly. Its something I've been meaning to take care of. In the meantime, at least it does render very nicely in lynx.

Although I haven't blogged about them much, some of you may know I have a somewhat-secret love affair with moleskines that has lasted for a few years now. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of undoing that elastic band, opening up to a fresh page, and writing down anything that comes to mind. One day when I was sketching website layouts in in my large moleskine I stepped back and realized that I needed to change my P.O.V.

The layout I wanted was sitting right in front of me! With that in mind I began making a list of the things I wanted on my desk and although I havn't incorporated all of them (I wanted it to look realistic, but not too cluttered) I'm so far very happy with the initial results. If anyone has suggestions I would love to hear them.

This page is meant to have a non-fixed width, meaning you can shrink it down pretty far and still read entries, however you may hide the random goodies like the magazine (which is really meant to be a website title banner with a dash of fun and humor) and latest photo.

The challenge, however, was choosing the height. I assume nobody is using a height of smaller than 800px in this day and age so that was my minimum requirement and that is why you may be thinking that moleskine is awfully short. My laptop is 1280x800 so that's not an unreasonable size, however on non-widescreen monitors it does look a little smooshed. I'll likely make a toggle button to switch from widescreen to 4:3 sizes in the coming weeks. If you are using a smaller resolution than that, lets face it: you need to come join the modern age. If you're on an iPhone your browser will scale the page, and if you're on another moble device that doesn't, use the rss feed.

I hope you all enjoy it, and as I said, if you see anything broken, or that you think needs to be added or changed, please let me know. All constructive criticism is welcome.

A quick google search yielded a painless plugin to palliate my printing problem (sorry I couldn't resist the alliteration). The WordPress Plugin Repository offered up the WP-Print plugin, which is available at lesterchan.net.

Installing the plugin was is completely painless. You just put the extracted folder into your /wp-content/plugins directory, enabled it in the admin interface, and put this:
< ?php if(function_exists('wp_print')) { print_link(); } ?>
where you want the print link (in my case, next to the category listing at the end of the post).

Now whenever anyone wants to print one of my posts, they simply click the "print this post" link, and are brought to a version of the post that prints very gracefully. The printable version of the post includes The title at the top, the categories it was posted in, the article URL, and a legend of the URLs referenced in the post.

A big thank you to Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan for this slick little plugin!

The other change to Euicho.com is the addition of a Wiki link (euicho.com/wiki) in the top navigation. Not surprisingly, it takes you to a wiki, TiddlyWiki of course! More precisely, it's a variant of TiddlyWiki that allows server-side saving of tiddlers called PhpTiddlyWiki. I chose this so anyone who wanted to edit it, could!

Why have a wiki? why not? TiddlyWiki is fun, and I really should have an example of one on my site. Also I needed a place to stow little bits of information, hacks, and code snippets that don't warrant a full blog entry, but that I felt others may find useful. I encourage and even beg that others contribute to the wiki with anything they feel useful.

The URI string could get very large very fast, however, so the converter limits you to 51200 bytes. It also takes a little finagling once the converter spits it out, as you have to take out the single-quotes, tabs, plus signs, and carriage returns. This is done pretty easily with a RegExp search-and-replace for: '*' (replacing it with nothing). once you do that, you have to strip off some bits from the beginning and end, so it looks like this: Me.

Fun stuff!

On a tangent thats parallel with the latitude line where that thing happened with that guy that one time in the place with the thing doing that stuff:

Defective Yeti decided there should be a March Madness Cinematic SuperVillian. My personal favorite is Verbal Kint vs. HAL 9000. Verbal would totally fu$k up his logic, but HAL might possibly one-up him.

Scratchmedia has a wonderful web design tutorial page, I suggest all budding designers check it out.

If you are looking for a new digicam, if you are thinking about getting a new digicam, if you don't know if you can afford a new digicam, if you family member, friend, or pet is looking for a new digicam, hell if your spidey-sense tells you a total stranger that passes you on the street is looking for a digicam, GO TO Steves-digicams.com. You will never see a more in-depth digital camera review site ANYWHERE on the net. C'mon I dare you. I double dog dare you! Can't do it can you? Nope. Didn't think so. This place has about 6 pages of review per camera, and hundreds of cameras, plus printers and accessories. They have close-up photos, sample photos, even 360 degree VR tours of the cameras. They show better specs than the maufaturer's sites, and have links to the best deals on them.

If you feel the need for this bed, I think your money would be better spent on a psychiatrist for paranoid schizophrenia. Unless, of course, you are vacationing in Iraq.

Homeland Insecurity Advisory System is a website that lets you rate the U.S. Government's threat level:

The Homeland Insecurity Advisory System (HIAS) is a public rating system that allows people from across the globe to determine the US Government's Threat Level by collectively rating RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feeds from major US news sources. Turning the "Homeland Security" threat level on its head, the HIAS system will allow the people to collaboratively challenge this internally determined (and seemingly arbitrary) threat condition by rating each major US news source according to its support level for or against the US Government's actions.

If you're wardriving, or just need to find some free internet, check wifimaps.com before you venture out.

Our application displays stunningly detailed interactive street-level maps of the US and of the World, with triangulated access-points from wardriving data. We provide searching for MAC, station name, US state, or by geographic region.

If you consider yourself a photographer, you know about lomography, or 'lomo' (which roughly sounds like the last half of "f#$k your mother" in Cantonese). I've been a fan of lomography for a long time, I like shooting from the hip with my T616 (no not like that kid at safeway ). Its a really interesting artform, so if you're interested go check it out at lomography.com

I've spent hours reading all the how much is inside articles at cockeyed.com. This guy definately leads an interesting life. His Incredable Creations are also really entertaining. His writing is hillarious. Take, for example, these two excerpts from How Much is Inside a Pack of Rolling Tobacco:

There are two reasons people smoke cigarettes. The first reason is to support their federal, state and local governments with vast amounts of tax revenue.
...
Having traveled all over the globe as a child, Steven became an expert at "origami", the ancient Japanese art of cigarette rolling.

I'm on a quest to find a list of all the different Tech/ Geek/ Anime/ Comic conventions that go on throughout the year. So far all I have is

• defcon
• HOPEcon
• boggercon
• dragoncon
• comic-con
• sakura-con
• FanimeCon
• Oni-Con

Anyone know of the kind of site I'm looking for?