Soapmaking's been popular with the gourmet soap folks, but I was totally unaware.

Starting up a new list of possible companies to use for nonprofit left, left-center.

http://tumis.com/section/view/about_us
http://www.echoditto.com/about
http://www.advomatic.com/about
http://www.forumone.com/about_us
http://webtraxstudio.com/

This is a list of various art projects. People put their portfolios online.

This is a cool video. If only every industrial guy or gothic girl would dance at the mall to some silent, inner song.

This is the best riceball video I've ever seen. The recipe is at the end of the video.

They also have an awesome oden video. I don't really like oden, but theirs looks so amazing that I want to eat it all up.

I found out from a two-year-old post on Game Set Watch about the Super Mario Brothers theme song that part of it ma

InDesign Help had an article about this problem, where you think you're printing black, but it's coming out of the printer as g

This is simple but striking.

This is a fascinating set of videos that were take by Converse (the shoe company) of several Oakland area spraycan artists from the early 90s. The commercials were never used.

The "short" commercials are so different from the lengthier interview footage. It's like night and day, or, maybe, "child" and "young adult".

See: the videos

Nice Mullets!

See: http://crayone.com/ for more.

Additionally, this fascinating article about vernacular mathematics, and stylized graffiti as a form of community cryptography: Street Math in Wildstyle Graffiti Art.

Finally, after all these years, I've installed Gentoo. It's really nice, and reminds me of BSD Ports, except that the documentation is more thorough. Ports is good, but Gentoo's emerge is really, really nice. It's also fast, as expected, and took a long time to build, as expected.

See: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-231700.html

KVM switchers read the ScrLk LED, switching computers when the see the LED toggle. Normally, you toggle it by pressing Scroll Lock twice. Ubuntu doesn't accept ScrlLock, and doesn't turn the LED on. Not finding a way to enable it, I opted to use the suggestion in the linked article, and created a KVM switching script.

The script here creates a new command, switchkvm.

echo "xset led on; sleep .25; xset led off" > switchkvm
chmod a+x switchkvm

I put an icon in my toolbar so it's one click away. Attached in an ugly icon for it.

Put a bunch of bumper tracks and skits on the CD so that a download is like, 25 separate files.

The other flipside is to go the Jazz opus / Pink Floyd route -- the entire album is 2 to 4 tracks, and each one is expensive.

One cool thing about geeking out with Josh is that new ideas happen. The latest one that came up was to make <SPAN> and <DIV> (and their closing tags) part of the PHP language syntax. This isn't going to happen, but think...

Those two tags could be treated like double quotes, and the content within them can, by default, echo to the page. Example:

if ($i==true) 
  <div>Hello, world.</div>

If you need to evaluate:

if ($i==true)
  <div>Hello, {ucfirst($name)}</div>

Looping

while ($line=readline($fh)):
   <div>$line</div>
endwhile;

On second thought, this isn't just for PHP. Pretty much any language could use it. It just doesn't make sense in other languages, because they don't spit out web pages.

CBP has released a bleak report about wages.

LAANE has as well.

The Phoenix Bonsai Group has an interesting biography about a JA bonsai master.

An inspiring show-and-tell about rescuing a mass market bonsai headed for demise.

The original vision of BFJ5's Participate system was an idea I'll call Social Flower (it never had a name). The idea was to create a game where you go around collecting petals to complete a flower. Each "friend" you add gives you another petal. When you complete a flower, you get an animated flower on your profile, that displays your friends' photos when you touch the flower. Maybe it would become a virtual group photo of sorts. The idea was that there was an aesthetic reward for completing the flower.

I liked, and still like, this idea because there is a start and end, and it's not that hard to achieve the end. Moreover, the number of slots is a limited resource, so you have to think a little harder about who will be on the flower, and who will be left out. (Maybe let people have multiple flowers?)