When debugging website issues that other people report, if you need to ask them what OS/browser/etc they are using, you can just ask them to go to
http://www.whatsmybrowser.org/
and email you the link. Nice and easy!
Inexpensive Home Improvement
If you’re looking to do some home improvement and make your home look new again, here are things to do and items to buy based on my experience.
Paint
- Doors
- Ultra Pure White (semigloss or glossy)
- Kitchen and Bathrooms
- Walls: Cream in My Coffee (semigloss)
- Ceiling: Swiss Coffee (semigloss)
- Baseboards
- Ultra Pure White (semigloss)
- Everywhere Else
- Walls: Cream in My Coffee (flat)
- Ceiling: Swiss Coffee (flat)
- Home Depot has both of these colors premade on shelves so you don’t have to wait for them to make them.
Door Knobs / Handles
What Font? Chrome Extension
Easily determine the font and font properties of text on a web page with the What Font? Chrome browser extension. Much faster and easier than looking for the font in an inspector.
Download on the Chrome Web Store
Easily Create Panoramic Pictures from a Series of Photos
Recently I wanted to take a picture of one of my bathrooms. Unfortunately, the half bathroom is a bit small and my phone’s camera couldn’t take a shot that could show most of the bathroom. Even though my phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, has a pretty impressive panoramic picture feature, it only creates horizontal panoramas. Fortunately, though, there is a free program called Panorama Plus which can take a series of photos and stitch them all together. Below are the individual pictures I took of the bathroom from different angles and below them is the panorama of all of those pictures stitched together. Not bad!
Continue reading Easily Create Panoramic Pictures from a Series of Photos
Google Chrome: Preserve Network Log Across Multiple Pages
Google Chrome Inspector’s Network tab allows you to see HTTP requests and responses when a page is loaded. However, by default, if you click on a link and go to another page, the network log is cleared and HTTP requests and responses for the new page is shown. If you’d like to preserver the network log across multiple pages / page loads, click the Preserve Log checkbox. This is especially handy if you are filling out a form which posts to a page that causes a page reload and you want to see the request form data sent.
SmartSVN: Show Diff Between 2 Non-Sequential Revisions of a File
To see the diff of a file between two non-sequential revisions, open the log for a file and select the two revisions and then click the Change button as shown in the screenshot below.
Kraken.io: Reduce Image File Size More Than Photoshop Save-for-Web
We all know that images are the heaviest assets of websites by file size and should be optimized first more than anything else. Pretty much everyone uses Photoshop’s Save-for-Web to optimize images for web use. But, it’s possible to easily get even smaller file sizes without any noticeable different in image quality. I recently tested a service called Kraken (https://kraken.io/) and it reduced a banner background image by 44% (126 KB).
Without Kraken: 282KB
With Kraken: 157KB
The two images are below. Can you tell any difference between the two? Click on the image to see a larger version.
Update: Actually, Compressor (https://compressor.io/compress) was able to compress the image by even more (70%)!
Some other image optimization sites are:
- https://tinypng.com/
- http://pnggauntlet.com/
- http://optimizilla.com/
Easily Browse Popular Javascript Libraries
With so many Javascript libraries on the net, finding one to meet your needs can be really difficult. Javascripting.com can help you with that. It offers a searchable list of libraries sorted by popularity and grouped by category.
https://www.javascripting.com/
The Starter Kit: A Collection of Various Tools for Web Developers
With so many tools available, it’s hard to keep track of them. The Starter Kit offers a nice collection of many of the best tools for web developers all in one place.
The Different Types of Dashes
Hyphen
You know how to type a hyphen and that’s exactly why you use it so often in all the wrong places. The hyphen is used to break single words into parts (like when lines of type break within a word) or to combine separate words into one single words.
I’m hungry in a get-in-my-belly kind of way.
En dash
The en dash is used in dates to replace “to” or “and”. It can also be used to indicate the relationship between two different words. In German it is also used for a break of thought, with a space before and after the en dash.
I lived in the United States from 1976–1978.
I have a love–hate relationship with San Francisco.
Em dash
The em dash is used for a break of thought that is stronger than a thought within parentheses. It is a break in the sentence in order to create attention or stress a thought. The em dash is uncommon in the German language and most common in American type setting.
I once had to replace 1,000 hyphens in a single document—exhausting.
For more related information, visit http://www.typogui.de/