• Behold VHEMT, The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

• Among these cool <canvas> demos is Torus, a circular Tetris clone. There goes my productivity. (via reddit)

• We probably can’t appreciate these never-to-be-syndicated Dilbert cartoons about the iPhone prototype the same way the intended audience can, most of which doesn’t follow Apple every single day, and has merely heard of the drama. They’re a bit too ‘obvious’ to me. (via John Siracusa)

• Since Denis asked me earlier, I thought it’d be worth linking the OS X theme I’m using. It’s only a bunch of subtle, mostly iTunes-inspired adjustments, hence the name iTunesque. Apologies in advance for the terrible page navigation. The variant I use is SPL 9 + RecPil for Snow Leopard, which adjusts scrollbars, progress bars and list view headers to look like iTunes’s, and changes Mail’s and Preview’s bizarre pill-shaped toolbar icons to be rectangular and more button-like.

  I usually abhor the idea of theming, but I’ve been using this one for months and it just feels right, probably in part because its elements are largely Apple-inspired. Some of OS X’s UI elements, especially its scrollbars, are starting to feel out of date. As Aqua has matured to be more subtle, it hasn’t taken everything with it.

• In case you haven’t seen it: Daniel Jalkut’s “Elements Of Twitter Style” has a healthy mix of common sense and good thoughts. Not sure I agree with everything, but I fully agree with the premise that Twitter has evolved into much more than trite answers to What Are You Doing?.

• A stop light. With a progress bar. (via reddit)

• Seems a bit basic (no assertions?), but could be of use to me: TSQLUnit, a Transact-SQL testing framework. Found through an idle-curiosity search for, uh, pretty much exactly that.

• The Starry Expanse, a project to rebuild Riven (and the related ages Moiety and Age 233), keeps making good progress.

• Best iPhone case, ever. (via Denis)

• Behold the inevitable: the first iPad laser etching I’ve seen in the wild. (via @tristan)

• It was only a matter of time. Classic iPod OS¹ had iPodLinux, and now iPhone OS has, well, Google Android: Android running on iPhone! (via Tim Bray)

• Some unexpected and hilarious input on the iPhone prototype story: Lufthansa USA offers the Apple employee a flight to Munich. (via sophiestication)

• The “we can’t optimize H.264 video playback because Apple won’t let us access their hardware decoding” excuse for Adobe Flash? Gone. As of 10.6.3, it’s a public API. Apparently, this document went up March 29, so I’m surprised to only find out about it now. (via Michael Tsai)

1. The Pixo OS-based one, that is. ↩

I’ve been working on a ‘touch/mobile’¹ skin for MYSTcommunity, i.e. one optimized for low-bandwidth/high-latency connections, small screens and finger- rather than keyboard-/mouse-operated user interfaces.

You wouldn’t believe how liberating it is to throw away tons of code, start from scratch with just what you feel you do need, and end up with an improveable but overall fairly satisfying result.

These are early drafts. They’re ugly, and there’s room for improvement. But… the code! The template code for a single post went from 6543 characters to 555. Less than a tenth. It’s so awesome that it’s quite tempting to rewrite the regular skin from scratch, do a double-take on the necessity of each and every feature, and likely end up with something far nicer, simpler, and more maintaineable.

As Gruber put it:

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

1. Okay, truth be told: I primarily got asked for this by iPhone and iPod touch users — but if it works on Android devices and others, all the better. Same goes for Palm webOS, MeeGo (née Maemo), BlackBerry OS and others. No love for yesteryear’s IE on Windows Mobile, though. ↩

• My commentary on the “lost” iPhone prototype / Gizmodo story shall consist of pointing to “Schiller Describes Wild Weekend”, quoting «Bill Gates tried leaving his new Microsoft “Kin” phone at a bar… It’s still there.» and remarking that I find this whole melodrama rather trite. I sure hope the actual product comes with fewer seams, though.

• Does this count as getting ✪df-rolled?

• The “Right To Use”¹ license for Sun’s err Oracle’s MS Office ODF plug-in is $90, with a minimum order quantity of 100, and another $19.80 per license for “First Year Support”.² The astute meme connaisseur will be unable to resist. It seems safe to say that Oracle’s approach to end user licensing is remarkably different from Sun’s. Shocking.

• iSendr is sadly Flash, and took a moment to get started when I tried it, but is otherwise a very smooth send-file-from-A-to-B solution. We need more it-just-works solutions like this. (via proggit)

1. Who comes up with all this crap, anyway? “Release To Manufacturing (RTM)”. “Right To Use (RTU)”. “Crash To Desktop (CTD)”. ↩
2. Despite this, the link still says “Get It Now. Free »”. ↩