Blog

  • Swissted

    I really wish these posters from swissted were real. Swiss design and punk rock are two things that I love like crazy.

    To be honest, if I had the opportunity, I’d probably buy way too many of them. So maybe it’s a good thing that they’re just images on the internets… [via]

  • Shut Up and Play the Hits

    SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS Trailer (2012)

    There was talk that LCD Soundsystem was eventually going to release the footage from their three and a half hour long final show on DVD. And while I was pulling for that (and a decently mastered audio version) I’m almost more excited that it’s getting the documentary treatment with Shut Up and Play the Hits.

  • None More Blackletter

    Tim Denee has put together this really beautiful, free PDF calendar for 2012. If you’ve got a ream of A3 paper sitting around your office, don’t hesitate to print it off and hang it up. [via]

  • Check Yr Head

    I just found out about head.js, but it definitely seems like something I’m going to have to play with really soon. Fortunately, somebody has already made a WordPress plugin that leverages it — so I guess that I don’t really have much of an excuse for not looking into it now, do I? [via]

  • Plimpton & Hemingway

    He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

    Reading these bits about Hemingway’s process from George Plimpton’s interview in the Spring 1958 edition of The Paris Review are fascinating. I mean, homeboy had a standing desk!

    A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.

  • WTF by the Numbers

    Mitchell Scherr has done a statistical breakdown of what Marc Maron calls his listeners during the intro for WTF over the past 50 episodes. I’ve always really enjoyed hearing “What the fuckstables.” so any time I can see that in print, I’m happy…

  • Moving Day

    If anyone notices a significant speed increase on the site here, it’s because I’ve finally gotten around to moving it from a well meaning but poky VPS over at DreamHost to a shiny new supercharged account at WP Engine.

  • Peel Slowly & See

    Does anybody want to buy a lightly used, month and a half old Peel? It’s a pretty great little device — and its complimentary iOS app is fantastic — but we’re just not using it as much as I thought we would.

    What can I say? Sarah is too damn fast with the normal remote for me to even compete. The show discovery functionality is top notch tho, and that’s what I’ve been using the most.

    They normally go for $99 (and they’re on sale for $79 right now) but I’d be willing to part with mine for $60. Dive into the comments and make me an offer if you’re interested.

    Update: Seriously? No takers? Even if I say that I’ll take $50 for it? Am I going to have to try to sell this thing on eBay?

  • Cleaning Up Unicode Cruft in WordPress

    While helping someone with WordPress move earlier this week, I noticed a bunch of weird Unicode cruft (like ’ and –) in their posts and comments. Apparently, MySQL databases don’t like it when you switch their default character encoding. But different web hosts have different ways of doing things — so default character encodings can (and sometimes do) change while you’re moving a site around.

    Anyhow, after a bit of digging, I found a really handy set of MySQL commands that fixed things up. But I like to save time, so I made myself a Gist for future use and decided to share it with y’all…

    Hopefully someone else out there finds this useful! I know I’ll probably use it at least once or twice a week now that I’m doing a lot more work with MySQL imports.

    Good luck!