Hivelogic is a website about discovering quality, living more efficiently, and leading a simpler, more mindful life. This site was established in 2000 by Dan Benjamin, a writer, software developer, broadcaster, and usability geek (read more). There are over 495 items contained in the article and link archives.
Thomas Birke, a master of urban photography:
I went to Tokyo in the summer of 2008 for three weeks to take pictures of “the future”. What I found was even more impressive. The future began a long time ago in Tokyo, and so the whole city has a face, there has been so much organic growth – there is no master plan, the city has been shaped by individuals’ desires. The result is a structure that seems alive, even if you do not see the inhabitants, as usually the case with long-exposure photography.
Even more in his Flickr set.
My photography mentor, JDD writes:
The iPhone photo here doesn’t quite do the scene justice, however. The auto white balanced slurped quite a bit of the intensity out of the yellows and pushed in too much blue [but] never fear. I didn’t just rely on the iPhone for this one.
Nice.
El Niño helps prevent hurricanes by creating stronger vertical wind shear. But it’s changing:
“It’s as if you had a big aquarium, with a Bunsen burner below it,” [Webster] says. “The heat causes a rising and sinking motion in the water. If you shift the position of the burner, you shift the motion of the water too.” The El Niño Modokis also result in reduced vertical wind shear, which promotes the creation of hurricanes.
This means more hurricanes.
Baking soda, vinegar, and boiling water.
I’ve been using this technique for years. The fewer chemicals we expose ourselves to, the better.
This week’s RSS Feed is sponsored by one of Hivelogic’s longest-running supporters, New Relic, makers of Rails performance monitoring tools, like RPM Lite. RPM Lite helps you instill best practices from the start. You get 24x7 monitoring, Apdex scores, response times, slowest controller actions and more. RPM Lite has no time limits, unlimited users and unlimited hosts. Upgrade as you grow.
Don’t be fooled by the title — there are quite a few valuable tips in this article, which features both right and wrong examples for each tip.
My favorite is #47.
We don’t wear shoes in our home (nor do our guests), and based on a recent study, it looks like my thinking has been validated:
Our study also indicated that bacteria can be tracked by shoes over a long distance into your home or personal space after the shoes were contaminated with bacteria.
Sure, there should be limits to how germophobic we allow ourselves to be (in some cases germs are good things), but if we know what we’re bringing home with us, we can make an informed decision.
Dan Cederholm, noted designer, author, and speaker, has just released a brand new book, Handcrafted CSS, set to come out next month, and available via pre-order from Amazon. In a post today, Cederholm writes:
The book is largely a culmination of the talks I’ve been giving around the world over the last year or so. In some ways, it’s a continuation of Bulletproof Web Design, in that it was convenient to be able to jump right into examples and the core of what I wanted to write about. There are a lot of CSS books out there, and the last thing I wanted to do was just write another general overview.
There’s also a DVD edition, featuring Cederholm, for which he provided musical accompaniment on ukulele. How cool is that?
UX Booth:
It is critical to be keep the user informed of what is happening and how much longer the process should take.
Nice real world examples. My favorite is the crosswalk countdown.
A few tips to make your website pop such as brightening colors, using grid layouts, and defying image boundaries.
It would be great to see some additional links with tutorials for newbies, because my guess is that the people who know how to implement these techniques wouldn’t need this list.
I rely on instant messaging to communicate with my friends and colleagues. It’s a necessity for me, as I work from my home office with co-workers across the world. It’s more immediate than email and handy for quick exchanges of basic information when a longer email or a phone call isn’t necessary.
Like many people, I tend to think of IM as a necessary distraction. I don’t really like using it, but it’s often the best way to get things done.
IM has the potential to create more problems than it solves. In email, most people take the time to express their thoughts carefully. When instant messaging, people intending to be brief can come across as terse, creating a style of communication that can send the wrong message.
I believe the cause of this problem is the mindset and circumstances surrounding email vs. IM use. When people are working through their email, the task is usually their primary activity, while most people on IM are multitasking. The IM receives less attention and therefore less time and importance, and sometimes this results in an unintentionally pithy response.
There are two ways to fix this:
Many people unintentionally abuse their friends and colleagues with incorrect away statuses. There’s a good chance that you may be one of these people without knowing it.
Setting an accurate away status can be incredibly helpful to the people you communicate with on IM. Setting an effective message sends a clear signal to your colleagues as to your real availability. If your status is Available, most people probably won’t bother reading your away message and will just message you. If your status is Away, many people won’t contact you, even if it’s important.
There’s a simple guideline you can follow to help people in this regard:
When you’re available, set your status to Available. When you’re busy or away from your computer, set your status to Away. Many IM clients can automatically set your status to Away if you’re idle for a specified period of time.
This recommendation sounds logical, but too often, people will leave their status set to Away or Available into perpetuity. Are they really available at 5:30am? Are they really away at 2pm? This practice probably sends the wrong message to people. It says you don’t care enough to take a moment to let people know if you can be contacted or not.
Setting an accurate status means pausing for a moment when you’re leaving or returning to the computer. It’s a good opportunity to be mindful of the present moment, too.
Here are some guidelines which can really help your friends know when it’s best to communicate with you:
Some people get creative with their status messages, beyond the more typical “song title as away message” type of thing. A few of my friends use unicode symbols like stars (✭) as a kind of “rating” in their away status. This is pretty clever, but I don’t actually understand these statuses or what they are supposed to indicate. Would three out of five stars (✭✭✭✩✩) mean that I can ping the person? Should I wait for four stars? What if their status is set to Away, but has all five stars? Do the stars just represent how their day is going? I have no idea.
One day I believe we’ll have a better way to communicate quickly and efficiently, but until then, IM will have to do.
This is just a start. There are hundreds of articles in the archive.
