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The major Croatian web conference Web.start moved to a better location, the Hypo EXPO XXI Center. It was so much more convenient for networking, because of broad terraces and numerous coffee shops where we all had endless discussions. Very smart move. Continue reading »
You might have a problem printing to your USB printer connected to your Time Capsule, with the error message “Network Host … is busy” as described in the topic 10.5 Printing Error “Network Host Busy Problem”.
If that’s the case, here’s the quick tip.
First, make sure the Time Capsule recognizes the printer. You can check that under the “Manual Setup” in your Airport Utility.
Next, open System Preferences, choose “Print & Fax” and hit the plus button on the left (i.e. add printer). At this point you should already have your printer drivers installed on the computer.
The default tab is the most probably IP and that is misguiding. Switch to “Default” and wait a couple of seconds. This however could take a while, just don’t close the window too soon. When the list is updated, select a printer from the list (the “Kind” column should indicate Bonjour).
Finally, hit “Add” on the same screen and you’re done.
My Old Man asked me to find a decent mobile phone for him. He wasn’t after anything fancy — “Just to have the large letters on a display”, he requested.
My Dad doesn’t care about the model and make. His only concern is avoiding troubles he used to have when sending text messages. He is having trouble reading text on the small screen.
To make things harder, my Dad is a tiler. Tilers have enormous fists and fingers. Probably, the largest of all builders. When your hands are like paws, you’re having trouble using a small keyboard.
So I bought him a Nokia. I found a model that has both — large display with large letters and fairly large buttons.
The phone I use to talk to my parents is a personal one and we have cheap calls, since we’re on the same carrier. When he calls me on my business phone, they charge him much more than they should. But Dad keeps calling me on that phone. I wondered why.
When I gifted the new phone to my father, I added my business phone number, just in case.
This new phone has large letters on the large display and large buttons. The phone also has large icons which you can assign to any contact in the address book. When I added a new phone number, I automatically assigned an icon to it. Since then, my father calls me to that number.
I will have to remove the icons.
Illustration by Marko Kršul
Web.start is a local web conference with strong focus on Web application development and Web startups. The conference takes place on May 8-9, 2008, at Hypo EXPO XXI Centre in Zagreb, Croatia.
This year the schedule is really, really promising. If you are around and you understand Croatian, you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to hear what’s going on at the local startup scene.
On the other hand, if you have an interesting project yourself, then there is a chance to meet some quality VCs to help you out.
I’ll be there both days, so drop by and say “Hi!”. If I look confused, don’t worry — that’s just me being full of excitement about my presentation ”What the users want?”. The presentation will give a short insight in user’s needs, based on our work with users and focus groups at Croportal.
5 FONTS I WISH WOULD DIE.
Reading that blog post was extremely sad to me.
There are times when those so-called “ugly fonts” work extremely well.
And if the target group loves Comic Sans, they are going to get the Comic Sans. Using particular font or avoiding it — based on a personal preference is utterly ridiculous. That is not designing, that is creating an artwork.
Use what your users love. Use what communicates best.
Even if that’s Comic Sans. And try to live with it.
Watch out for the falling mortar!
The Accessibility Superhero Detective Joe Clark was hired to discover the truth about the subject. We all hoped the situation is not so dramatic, but boy — were we wrong!?
Yea, but why exactly captioning sucks?
So I’m catching up with what’s happening in the industry. You know, one of these days when you zeroed-out your mailbox and entered the “save for later” folder in your favorite e-mail app.
You probably wonder about how do you clean your Inbox? Since you are asking, we intensively worked on the relaunch of Croportal last week, and as a reward, the team had a couple of days off.
At this very moment I’m writing the post in one of the 40+ tabs in Safari. And I still haven’t option-spaced NetNewsWire. There’s recent unpacked shipment from Amazon on a shelf across the table. If only days would last longer.
There was a time when web standards pioneers had all the important stuff only in the Bookmarks, because there was simply just a few resources. It was quite handy and convenient having them all in the Bookmarks bar. I sometimes miss that comfort.
Where there was just a dozen of on-topic resources to follow, now is the hundreds. Where there was 2 or three events a year, now is the ten or 20 at least.
I was introduced by 80/20 rule back in 2004. Fast-forward four years later and I wonder which ones are considered today’s 20% must-read authors? Even if I knew, one would still need considerable amount of time for all the latest stuff.
The above question applies to events, too — are there 20% events that cover 80% of the current topics?
The schedule can be occasionally a serious threat, time and budget-wise. Especially if you have to travel across the continent and have tons of work that just don’t allow frequent travel breaks.
We’ve been practicing various media diet programs. Should we also consider event diet?
How to judge which one to choose and which one to discard from the list? With media, you test it for some period and then decide is it good enough to enter reader’s A-list, but for obvious reasons, you can’t apply the same method with events.
Occasionally, people ask me to create XHTML/CSS template based on provided .PSDs. Most of the time, such projects are pretty straight-forward — I tell the hourly rate and the estimated hours. The prospective client then accepts the offer or not.
It could be zillion reasons why clients reject offers and I’m used to some neutral (read: polite) arguments, like “It exceeds our budget”
or something like that. However, today I received an interesting response:
“You are a little-bit too expensive, XXX is an hourly rate for a programmer.”
Funny, huh? Or sad?
Why on Earth would anyone compare client-side coding with programming. What is it that people (or just this particular client) think some cog of the same engine should be valued more than others?
Is it because the work of accessibility consultant, CSS coder, SEO engineer or usability expert is not something you can point your finger at? Or is it ‘cause people tend to care for web standards in a way of questionably increased initial exposure on endless, but completely irrelevant CSS showcase lists?…
“The more I hear about people automating things with scripts and programs they write themselves, the more it seems that being able to write code is a good skill to have—at any job. I'm not a programmer, but I'm interested in maybe becoming one. What's the best language for someone who's savvy but still very much a beginner to learn?”
