Exceive

This site asks people to draw small black and white sketches online. The idea is to collect half a million pictures, and educate people about the fact that there are 6 billion humans on the planet and rising.

The site also sells posters of the drawings, 6000 selected drawings per poster. There are three posters at this point. They cost US$17 each.

Some of the sketches are surprisingly good for low-rez monochrome mouse drawings.

Kind of a nifty concept on the art level. The connection to population growth is a bit artificial and vague, but I guess it is one way to get people looking at the information.

You draw : online drawing

Serious technology is not all that interesting lately. It gets the job done, same job as yesterday, maybe a little faster, maybe a little more reliable, maybe cheaper. More ways to tie yourself to work.

But some people are still exploring. Still having fun with it. Still making it interesting.

ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show

The Internet is important because it provides new ways for people to communicate. Some, like email, fit pretty will into the linear model. But there are other communications that become possible.

This, for example. It simulates a big refridgerator with magnet letters on it that a whole bunch of people move around trying to make words. Unfortunately, the people playing on it tend to be crude and artless, but the possibility is there.

I haven’t had cable since my Mother-in-law moved out a couple of years ago.

Three months ago, we bought a nice big TV. It doesn’t get the local stations at all with the coathanger antenna we used on the old TV. I tried the rabbit-ears from my bedroom (Mrs. 404 likes to watch reruns while she goes to sleep, I had to return them to the bedroom) so I know a decent set of rabbit-ears, which costs about $10, will make it work. And eventualy we will probably get a set, but it’s been 3 months and we just haven’t bothered yet. We use it for VHS/DVD and video games.

On Friday, the electric company decided to be picky about the finances and cease to provide me with their wares. God, it is ever pleasant. If there were a good alternative for the fridge, the washers, and the pilot light in the furnace, I’d seriously consider not getting reconnected. Mrs. 404 and the little 404s do not agree. We go back on-grid today.

The land-line phone has been gone for a few months now, and I don’t miss it.
The cell phone is plenty of connection.

I do have a cable modem. That is very nice. Not nice enough to warrant electricity in the house, but since the electricity is there anyway I’ll take it.

(I wrote this in reply to a Hullabaloo post about not watching cable news.)

Evil clown generator. Exactly what you need on a day like today.

Yes, I am in the kind of mood where I’d categorize this as art.

Thanks to Susan

The Box Model Problem

Internet Explorer 5 for Windows does not handle text box heights and widths the way every other browser (including other versions of Internet Exporer) does. The link is to an article on how to work around that. I’m blogging it for my own reference here, but if you find it handy, great.

The difference is that other browsers take the height and width to be the inside height and width, so when you specify the size of a text box, that’s how much room you have for text, and the borders, padding, and margins add on to that. IE5 Win considers the size to be the outside size. This can really mess up the layout of a page.

I was using Blogger. Other people have encountered lots of problems, but it was working reasonably well for me. Probably because I use a paid-for server and I don’t have much traffic. But I decided to try something different.

I like this.

I like the templates, I like the categories, I like the interface. I like being able to post-date posts and pretend I post more regularly than I really do. For example, this article is going to appear on Sunday, April 10 - a day when I probably won’t actualy post anything. Most of what I write isn’t time-critical.

The template I’m using now has a set of 10 random header pictures. No, the ones there now aren’t mine. I’ll be replacing them with mine soon.

Everything on the ‘net is really done by IP addresses: sets of 4 3 digit numbers. Kind of like phone numbers. For example, my domain is really 69.93.235.194.

But that’s a pain to keep track of. So we give some IP addresses names. The DNS is a directory assistance service that tells you the IP number for a domain name. So when you look at www.moonwaves.com, your browser asks a DNS “what’s the number for www.moonwaves.com?” the DNS answers “69.93.235.194″ and your browser connects to 69.93.235.194.

When the DNS is down, your browser can’t get the IP numbers.

I’m glossed over a bunch of things that people who know about these things consider important in order to keep it simple, but that’s the gist of it.

Sometimes you just need to see something on a church sign. Church Sign Generator.

Another link from CitrusMoon.

Image * After > Abstract Search
This is a very neat idea - searching for graphics by graphic characteristics rather than words. You select qualities from several lists, and the site presents a list of graphics that can be described by the qualities you selected.