Seven years after our first date, I’m still so happy to have found you. You make every day — even the really crappy ones — wonderful.
Happy first date anniversary, baby!
Blog
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Press Your Heart Out
Since Christmas, I’ve been brewing most of our coffee through the Aeropress that Sarah gave me. And while we’ve really enjoyed the coffee — especially when you compare it to what we’d get out of our old $20 drip pot — the process has started to make me obsess over all the little tweaks I can make.
I mean, if there’s a better cup of coffee to be had, I seriously want to go to there.
Anyhow, thanks to my desire to over-research everything, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at metal disk filters, grinders & brewing recipes. Which led me to the popular (in coffee nerd circles, at least) inverted brewing method.
To be perfectly honest, inverted brewing is kind of intimidating. Mainly because I don’t like the thought of “flipping” a cylinder of near-boiling water before I’ve, well, had my first cup of coffee.
So when gridwriter mentioned the Heart Roasters Aeropress method — which I seem to have missed in my fairly extensive research — I was really excited. I have yet to try it, but I’m really looking forward to giving it a shot.
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Clean Old WordPress Core Files
For the folks who haven’t committed to cleaning the unused core files out of their WordPress install, the Old Core Files plugin for WordPress looks like it should be useful. I only say “looks like” and “should” because I’m already tidying my site’s files on the regular. But this’ll definitely save me from having to do my future sweeps manually.
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All Basses Covered
I’ve been meaning to write something for almost a month now. It’s not like I have writer’s block or anything. Far from it. I’ve just been a bit preoccupied with work.
Fortunately, I’ve had this mix from DJ Shadow to help me crank through the past few weeks of long, 10+ hour days.
“All Basses Covered” is the set that got him kicked off the stage at Mansion in Miami for being “too future”. Which is a shame, because it’s fantastic.
If you haven’t heard it already — and you’re up for some next level shit — give it a listen. Or, better yet, download it directly from SoundCloud.
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The Kitten Covers
Alright, The Kitten Covers… You win this round.
Also, this site has been a thing since 2011? How have I not managed to hear about it before today? I must be getting bad at using the internets.
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So Busy
Note to Self: Stop saying that you’re “busy” when people ask about the things that are happening in your life. Everybody is busy.
Besides, it’s a boring fucking answer. And it makes you sound like a real asshole too.
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Factory Records
Hah! This Charlie Brown record collection meme is cracking me up. [via]
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Smush.it Alternatives for WordPress
While helping a client come up with an alternative for the somewhat spotty Smush.it plugin for WordPress, I thought I’d do an extremely unscientific test to see what performed better. So I grabbed an image from Kanye Wes Anderson and got to compressing…
Let’s start with the original 221549 byte image. Feel free to grab it (just click on the image) if you want to play along at home.
To start, I tried uploading the file to PunyPNG. But I quickly realized that they cap their free compression tool at 150 KB. And since I didn’t feel like paying to run a one-off test, I gave Kraken a go instead.
Kraken losslessly compresses the image to 214233 bytes. Which gives a 3.3% savings in total size. In a later test, the OS X utility ImageOptim gave the exact same results. That’s not to say that’ll always be the case, but it was definitely interesting to see. Especially when you consider that the command line (see: Linux friendly) alternative image_optim only managed to compress the image to 214746 bytes.
Even though image_optim gave a respectable savings of 3.1%, I was surprised to see that otherwise insignificant variation. At least until the Smush.it web interface returned the “same” 214746 byte file.
So all of them do a respectable job, but it seems as if Kraken & ImageOptim’s lossless compression methods are slightly more aggressive. Since Kraken has an API, it’d be wonderful if someone could whip up a WordPress plugin to leverage it. But until they do, all of this crap needs to be done before the images are uploaded to your site. Which is a total bummer. It’s still better than relying on the really spotty and ridiculously laggy Smush.it API though.
Anyhow, I hope this was helpful to someone.
Oh! And if you want to see the images that each program outputted, feel free to grab them from here.
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Infinite Scroll
Otto‘s done a great tutorial on implementing one of the more glossed over parts of Jetpack 2.0: Infinite Scroll.
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Shumway
I’m all for Mozilla’s open SWF runtime project Shumway, but I really hope its main use is to support legacy Flash content. Because the last thing we should be doing at this point is encouraging people to use Flash instead of HTML5.
