Vintage “Internet-age” posters
Of Skype, Facebook and YouTube. Utterly brilliant 
vermaeckelijkheden
ancient dutch for 'amusing things'
Aug
6
Jul
11
Not being an employee…
Switching jobs had not solved my problems. The truth was that I hated working in a conventional structure. I hated having a boss, working on someone else’s creation and sitting in an office all day. My time was not my own, and I was miserable. I could not bear it for even one day longer. So I quit and decided to become an entrepreneur.
Exciting as it may be, however, the entrepreneurial life is far from easy. Stress is a regular part of the day. Money is tight. There are frequent emotional highs and lows, and the desire to succeed can become all-consuming. Underlying all of this is the knowledge that failure is the most likely outcome.
Yet, no matter how tough things get, I wake up every morning with renewed hope and excitement for what lies ahead. The fact that I am working on my passion gives meaning to even the most mundane tasks.
My future is perhaps more uncertain than it ever has been. I may end up wealthy, or I may earn barely enough to support myself. But the realization that I face a high likelihood of failure is not enough to send me back to the corporate cubicle.
Very true. From The New York Times.
Jul
8
Jun
24
Flexible grid & flexible images
Open this web page and resize it - from iPhone-size to XXL. Notice how the design changes based on how much space is available. Notice how the images scale based on big your screen is. Explained here and here (thanks A List Apart!).
Jun
20
Jun
11
Jun
7
May
23
Make any song swing
Take a song, time-stretch the first half of each beat and time-shrink the second half - and what you get is a remarkable swing version. Some examples:
Daft Punk’s “Around the World”
or
“Every breath you take” by the Police
More examples - including a link to the source code so you can do it yourself (to any song).
May
23
May
21
May
12
Business plans
I think I’ve had this conversation… let’s say… ehm… regularly? If only they would accept my equity 
From “8 Websites You Need To Stop Building“
May
11
Rowan Atkinson at a Conservative Party Conference
Only 3 minutes but brilliantly funny. Another apparently classic Rowan Atkinson:
I didn’t know this guy is actually funny
May
3
“Bad Romance” a capella
Brilliant a cappella version of Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” by 20 regular guys in shorts & t-shirts (University of Oregon’s “On the Rocks”):
Apr
30
Apr
26
Apr
21
Apr
16
Apr
13
Apr
13
Apr
8
Apr
3
Apr
1
Mar
31
Disney meets Magritte
I really like Brian Cook’s crossover between Snow White & Magritte.
Actually, I like most of his work, like this “cavemen graffiti”:
Check out his blog.
Mar
26
Mar
24
The basic laws of human stupidity
From this article comes a nice, succinct definition of “stupidity”:
The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see below).
If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom’s mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
When confronted for the first time with the Third Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour. But let us abandon the lofty plane of theory and let us look pragmatically at our daily life. We all recollect occasions in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his gain and our loss: we had to deal with a bandit. We also recollect cases in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his loss and our gain: we had to deal with a helpless person. We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent. Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful reflection you must admit that these are not the events which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
Note that I’m in no way implying that I’m NOT stupid
Mar
21
It’s like, argh, you know?
Stating that she wasn’t in the best place right now, and that things have been sort of you know, Belmont resident Megan Slota announced Thursday that sometimes she just feels….
Due to a general sense of…well, it’s hard to explain, the 28-year-old dental hygienist reported that she just needed to work some stuff out, and that she would probably be a little I don’t know for a couple weeks or so.
“It’s not anybody’s fault, honestly,” said Slota, standing in her kitchen and holding a mug of tea with both hands. “Sometimes I just get like this where it’s like I’m not, I guess, whatever. We don’t have to get into it right now.”
Added Slota, “I’m really, like, argh, I don’t know.”
Ah, The Onion…
Mar
21
Future is now: IBM building human brain
IBM has completed a test setup that models 4.5% of the neurons in the human cortex. It used 147,456 CPUs and 144 Terabytes of RAM to accomplish this, but alas. A 100% simulation coverage is expected around the year 2019. This is not a joke. Academic paper here.
Mar
17
Microsoft’s tablet: surprisingly good
This prototype of a Microsoft iPad-alternative looks surprisingly useful and well-designed. This video is dated before Apple’s announcement, so it’s not a iPad clone.
Given this video and their pretty decent IE9 preview release, can we conclude that Microsoft is not really going extinct after all?
Mar
11
Close to where I live
Christophe Gevrey took this picture of the Promenade, close (<200 meters) to where I live.
Still can’t believe I actually live there
Mar
8
“Show them to me”
As sung by Rodney Carrington
No-one thinks of fighting, when they see a topless girl
Maybe if you’d show yours too, we could…
…saaaaave the world
Mar
3
Feb
25
Feb
23
Feb
15
Statistically correct love song
In honour of yesterday’s Valentine day: Tim Minchin’s “If I didn’t have you”. A cynical, statistically correct love song. The engineer in me appreciates this
Lyrics:
Read more »
Jan
26
Web typography solved
When choosing a font for use on a website, you are restricted to one of the 15 or so “web fonts“. That sucks. The only way you can use a different font is by resorting to hacks such as Cufon, sIFR or FLIR.
But if you do that, you’ve only solved half the problem. You’re still in muddy waters regarding the licensing of the fonts you’re using, possibly opening yourself to future litigation. And, whether you choose Cufon, sIFR or FLIR, the text that’s in a different font will behave differently than ‘regular’ text. You can’t select it, copy it or edit it like ‘regular’ text. That’s because it’s not regular text. It’s a Javascript image, Flash movie, or plain image - respectively. That sucks!
Fortunately, there’s a solution for that: the CSS3 @font-face tag. It allows you to set the font of any given text on your web page. If the user does not have the font you indicated, it will be downloaded and used. It even works cross-browser.
So only the legal issue remains. Obviously, you can’t redistribute high quality commercial fonts like Minion or ITC Franklin Gothic. The companies holding the rights won’t allow it, and probably rightfully so.
So what to do? As Mark Pilgrim so eloquently stated: Fuck the foundries. If we can’t legally use their fonts on a web page, then we’ll have to look for high quality fonts that we CAN use on a web page.
And that’s when I came across Font Squirrel, and I must say: I LOVE IT! Free high quality fonts that you can use on your website. 100% free for commercial use. No licensing issues! Just what web typography needed
Jan
23
This is not a real volcano
Matthew Albanese creates fake photorealistic pictures by building scale models and photographing them from a specific angle.
For example, this image does not show a real volcano:
Really, it doesn’t. Proof: Read more »
Jan
23
Why the meltdown should have surprised no one
Peter Schiff is the clearest thinking American economist.
Jan
21
Jan
20
Jan
4
The “Big Lie”
I read this quote today and it somehow reminded me about Fox News…
never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
But the thing is, it’s not about Fox News, but from a psychological profile prepared during WW2 by the United States Office of Strategic Services.