brunobergher::blog

Google finally joined the OpenID party.

Well, now the standard is going somewhere.

I know it’s probably not a new feature, but i just realized Wiktionary, Wikipedia’s sister project, has a Rhymes link in the Pronunciation section of every article.

This must be crazy helpful for anyone writing a poem. Or perhaps a rap song.

PS: I don’t find the need for rhymes much often, since my blog and e-mails are usually in prose. But the rest of Wiktionary has become a critical tool for me. It has even become a quick search in Firefox, so whenever I type def word, it opens the definition for that word in the browser.

Seth Godin explained today in a remarkably elegant way what is RSS for non-geeks:

(…) RSS is a little like radio. Every blog and many news services ‘broadcast’ a tiny little signal that you can’t hear, but your RSS reader can. (It’s like a radio tuner). You tell the RSS reader which blogs and news feeds you like, and whenever it senses that signal, it goes out and grabs the post for you. Quick and free. With a good reader, you can easily keep up with 100 blogs in less than an hour.

I’m definitely using this explanation the next time someone who’s not into technology asks me what’s an RSS feed (or when I want to convince this person of how useful it is, which is probably a more frequent situation).

Seth also points to The Ultimate RSS Toolbox, a round up of more than 120 RSS tools. But I must say since I got to know Google Reader, I’ve been in love with it,

Via Seth Godin’s blog.

Jens Meiert works for Google and is involved in organizations such as the W3C itself, and was kind enough to put together this index of all CSS1, CSS2, CSS2.1 and CSS3 properties, with links to their specification.

Meiert also provides this index of HTML elements (including from the not-finished-yet HTML5 and XHTML 2.0 specifications), which is good for a panorama of sorts, but probably not as useful as the CSS one.

The CSS table would gain a lot if it managed to show the current state of implementation of the properties. With the Webkit nightlies pushing the boundaries every week, it must be hard to keep up to, but would be just wonderful. I’ll try to get on to that.

“I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.”

James Nachtwe

I just received an e-mail from TED on the result of James Nachtwe’s TED prize last year, and it’s a moving campaign, based on pictures taken by him from around the world, about Extremely Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (TB).

Boston Globe’s The Big Picture has already told about something like this was coming up, and today they’re posting Nachtwe’s pictures, inspiring awe and hopefully an urge to action.

So, please, if you can, visit XDRTB.org, learn more about the problem, get inspired, and get moving.

Pilot View is a small, wireless camera to be mounted on RC planes and helicopters (or even cars and miniature trains). You can watch it’s feed from video goggles which, only 1 inch away from your eyes, results in a “virtual 80-inch” display for you to enjoy the first person perspective from the air.

I don’t own RC stuff like these and I’m not that into this, but this it so awesome I had to share.

Most of the related videos over at the video’s YouTube page are worth checking out as well.

Just a simple but charming interface detail today:

In Christiane Beaulieu’s portfolio of photo retouching, the intro page hides a delightful feature: when hovering over the text, the magenta horizontal rule moves down, revealing the language choices of the website. The artist’s initials tween to form an emoticon, and if you pay some attention, you’ll see the B blinks at you.

Very simple and not exactly useful, but this kind of surprising and fun detail can make the user much friendlier towards the interface she is using. Specially considering this is the first screen of the website. Congratulations to Philippe Roy, createor this nifty website.

Inside, the way the state between original and retouched photos is changed is also worth noticing. The complete focus on Beaulieu’s work is praiseworthy. The URL (cbeau.ca) is also a nice play on words as it can be read as c’est beau, which means it’s beautiful, in French.

On a different matter, I find it quite disturbing how much retouching advertising pictures undergo. As naive as it may sound, it always surprises how far from reality models and even products are when depicted in these situations.