John Cox

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pixelmatortutorials.net

Stylish Borders using Quick Mask Mode » Pixelmatortutorials.net

This is the front page of PixelmatorTutorials.net, a long-running tutorial site for the Mac image editor Pixelmator that claims over a thousand daily visitors plus podcast downloads through iTunes. It features two recent posts: a video tutorial from April 2016, after a months-long gap, on using a map as a tattoo-like image on a hand (with layer masks, overlay and soft light blending, dodge and burn, and pinch distortion), and an October 2015 PDF text tutorial on building a textured collage from layers and blend modes. Worth keeping mainly as a pointer to this specific Pixelmator learning resource and those two techniques.

Permalink designsoftwaremactutorial

inspectelement.com

sigmajs.org

sigma.js | a lightweight JavaScript graph drawing library

This is the homepage for sigma.js, a JavaScript library that uses WebGL to render and interact with large network graphs (thousands of nodes and edges) in the browser. It pairs with graphology, which handles the graph data model and algorithms such as ForceAtlas2 layout and community detection, while sigma.js only does rendering and interaction. The page lays out four use cases (display, explore, interact, customize) and an FAQ that is candid about the tradeoff against d3.js: WebGL draws big graphs faster but makes custom rendering harder, so d3 suits small or highly stylized graphs. It also covers React (via @react-sigma) and Angular (manual wiring) support, and lists real-world users like Gephi Lite, BloodHound, and Retina.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentopensourcedata

css3please.com

CSS3 Please! The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator

CSS3 Please! is an interactive cross-browser CSS playground where you edit one rule, such as border-radius, box-shadow, gradients, transitions, animations, transforms, or box-sizing, and the vendor-prefixed variants update automatically to match, ready to paste into your own stylesheet. A note at the top says Autoprefixer has replaced it as the recommended approach. The long changelog from 2010 to 2013 records the tool's history, including dropped IE6-8 support, the arrival of unprefixed syntax in Chrome and Opera, and the matrix-transform demo contributed by Peter Nederlof.

Permalink designdevelopmenttoolscss3

Gizmodo

The Case Against Google

Writing in early 2012, as Google merged its privacy policies and launched Search Plus Your World, the piece argues that Google no longer treats search as its core product. Instead it is racing to answer subjective real-world questions, such as the best restaurant on the way to Tahoe, in a post-PC, post-Web era where Facebook and Twitter hold the social and real-time data it can't index. That ambition requires pulling users into Google+ and collecting everything about them, which explains the polluted search results, ad-heavy pages, and tracking scandals like the Safari workaround. The author then holds Google to its own "don't be evil" standard, using Sergey Brin's 2003 definition (trickery, subverting the search engine for commercial ends, violating user trust), and concludes the company now fails it. The closing question is why anyone should keep trusting Google with their personal data, a trust the author admits he once extended himself.

Permalink technologyprivacygoogleinternet

mobile.tutsplus.com

HTML5 Apps: Positioning with Geolocation

A circa-2010 tutorial on the W3C HTML5 geolocation API, built up in jQuery code examples. It covers getCurrentPosition with success and error callbacks (permission denied, position unavailable, timeout), explains why the calls are asynchronous (the browser can't freeze while the user decides whether to share their location), and lists the fields in the returned coords object, including accuracy, altitude, heading and speed. It then adds an IP-based fallback through the YQL Geo library for browsers without native support (then Safari desktop and IE), notes that this is far less accurate, and finishes with a Google Static Maps display and a watchPosition/clearWatch example that tracks a moving device.

Permalink programmingmobiledevelopmenttutorial

deadspin.com

What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?

Drew Magary, prompted by a reader's question about whether adults would fare worse on standardized tests, took a College Board sample SAT cold at 35, using a No. 2 pencil, bubble sheets, and the original time limits, and compared the result to the 900 he scored in 1993. He rants his way through the experience: the absurd pre-test paperwork, the essay placed first, the draconian instructions, the physical agony of handwriting, math he'd completely forgotten, and dreary reading passages. He argues the test measures endurance and exam conditioning more than brainpower, and that the essay is graded too quickly to mean much; a Princeton Review teacher gave his South Park–and–"Chinese Democracy" essay a 4. He ended up about 190 points higher than before (2140 on the new scale), which he credits to reading and writing daily while his math slipped, and he concludes the SAT is an outdated, arbitrary test nobody should have to take.

Permalink comedyeducation

tympanus.net

Parallax Content Slider with CSS3 and jQuery

The saved text is placeholder filler, not a real article: four teaser blocks titled "Warm welcome," "Easy management," "Revolution," and "Quality Control," each filled with the familiar "blind text" story of Bookmarksgrove, the Semantics ocean, the river Duden, and a line of Lorem Ipsum leaving for the World of Grammar. It makes no argument and reports nothing, so it looks like a website template or theme demo captured by mistake. If you saved it hoping for substance, the original page probably didn't load or you grabbed the wrong one.

Permalink designdevelopmenttutorialjquery

Popular Science

The Boy Who Played With Fusion [via Longreads]

Tom Clynes's 2012 profile follows Taylor Wilson, a Texarkana-raised prodigy who built a working nuclear fusion reactor at 14, and asks why his path ended in prizes and federal meetings rather than the hazmat cleanup that ended David Hahn's, the "Radioactive Boy Scout." The answer it gives is support: Wilson's parents chose to nurture rather than forbid his obsession, and his charm drew in a physics professor, a young fusion hobbyist, a technician, and the founders of Davidson Academy, who supplied equipment and guidance. The piece also traces how his grandmother's cancer led him to imagine small fusion reactors for making medical isotopes, and how that led to a neutron-based scanner for detecting weapons in shipping containers. Scenes of uranium prospecting, a hunt for a lost hydrogen bomb's debris, and the reactor firing up at the university round out the portrait.

Permalink technologyscienceeducation

Scientific American

Can Radical Efficiency Revive U.S. Manufacturing?: Scientific American

Rocky Mountain Institute's case, adapted from *Reinventing Fire*, is that U.S. industry could produce 84 percent more output by 2050 while using 9 to 13 percent less energy and 41 percent less fossil fuel, with no technology breakthroughs needed. It would get there by putting new technologies into old sectors (electric arc furnaces and gas-based iron reduction in steel, black-liquor gasification and Kalundborg-style waste exchange for paper) and by applying established efficiency methods to new ones (whole-system design in chip fabs and data centers). Company examples back the argument: Texas Instruments' Richardson fab cost $230 million less than a conventional design and kept the same yields, and Dow says $1 billion of efficiency investment saved $9.4 billion, which it presents as proof that efficiency builds competitive advantage and keeps jobs onshore.

Permalink sustainabilitybusinesseconomics

Scientific American

Can Radical Efficiency Revive U.S. Manufacturing?: Scientific American

Adapted from Rocky Mountain Institute's *Reinventing Fire*, this piece argues that a systematic push for industrial energy efficiency, using existing technology, could let U.S. industry produce 84 percent more output by 2050 while using 9 to 13 percent less energy and 41 percent less fossil fuel. It splits the opportunity into new technologies for old sectors (steel's shift to electric arc furnaces and gas-based iron reduction, pulp and paper's potential to become a biorefinery, Denmark's Kalundborg waste-exchange network) and proven techniques for fast-growing ones (Texas Instruments' cheaper, efficient chip fab, data-center cooling redesigns). Dow's $9.4 billion in savings from $1 billion of efficiency investment anchors the case that efficiency is a competitive and job-retaining strategy, not just an environmental one.

Permalink sustainabilitybusinesseconomics

www.humblesoftware.com

envision - demos

Envision.js is a JavaScript library for building interactive HTML5 charts, and this page is a gallery of demos showing how it works. Most use prebuilt templates for common cases: a real-time TimeSeries that animates its selection as new data arrives, a zoomable TimeSeries, and a Finance chart with a preset selection and custom axis and mouse-tracking formatters. Two demos show how far it can be pushed: an Ajax-driven Finance chart whose selection callback fetches data, and a custom fractal built from the lower-level Visualization, Component and Interaction pieces with a custom flotr chart type.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentdataajax

mobilehtml5.org

Codrops

CSS Buttons with Pseudo-elements | Codrops

A CSS tutorial showing how to build five styled buttons from a single anchor tag each, using the ::before pseudo-element to generate the extra visual parts that once required sprite images. The examples are a button inside a gray inset container, a 3D button that presses down out of its base, a split button that "breaks" on click, a button with an arrow icon as a pointer, and one with a heart-image panel above it. The key technique is making the anchor position:relative so the absolutely positioned pseudo-element follows it, then offsetting the pseudo-element's `top` in the :active state to cancel out the parent's movement. The author skips transitions because only Firefox supported them on pseudo-elements at the time, and leaves vendor prefixes out of the post, though they appear in the downloadable files.

Permalink designdevelopmenttutorialcss3

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Gridpak - The Responsive grid generator

Ce que vous avez enregistré n'est pas un article, mais une page d'accueil ou un bloc « À ne pas manquer cette semaine » d'un site de technologie français, qui ne présente que des titres et de courts chapeaux. Il propose une quinzaine de pièces très hétérogènes : systèmes de contrôle de moteurs pas à pas (Phylogic), durée d'un forfait de 170 ou 300 Go, UI vs UX, casques anti-bruit en open space, coffre-fort numérique pour bulletins de paie, option bancaire « tranquillité », messageries comme Netcourrier et Akeonet, ainsi que des profils comme le DJ Tchanami ou la plateforme Netypareo. Aucune thèse ni information détaillée n'y figure, et le contenu ressemble à du texte de référencement web : si vous cherchiez un propos précis, il faudra retrouver l'article individuel concerné.

Permalink designdevelopmenttoolscss3

fico.lensco.be

Web Designer Depot

20+ examples of beautiful and inspiring fonts | Webdesigner Depot

A roundup of about two dozen free display fonts for logos, posters and headlines, each given a short blurb and a mock-up image. The range runs from clean, light faces like Neo Deco, Code, Intro and Satellite, to bold headline types like Kilogram, Hagin and Nevis, to more distinctive picks such as the vintage Absinthe, the handwritten Lavanderia, the 3D Tetra and Moleks, and the textured Homestead. Practical notes are scattered through: Paranoid is hard to read so it suits titles, not body text; VAL needs all caps or all lowercase and fails at small sizes; Accent's open glyphs work over photos. The author also reminds readers to check licences before commercial use.

Permalink designfont

www.ianlunn.co.uk

Nikebetterworld.com jQuery Parallax Effect Demo

What's saved here is mostly a fragment of a parallax-scrolling demo page, not a full article. The only real content is a short note on a "Multiple Backgrounds" section, where several CSS background layers shift position with each pixel the user scrolls, using the same technique as the page's first section. The rest is lorem ipsum filler, so the page's value lies in the demonstrated effect rather than any written argument, and you may want to revisit the live demo or its source code to recover the technique.

Permalink designanimationdevelopmentjquery