A very cool low-tech site – and it’s Post 500!!

Bill Westerman’s utilware site is cool. There is no RSS feed. The layout is simple, clean and interesting. The site is different than a lot of others because while it’s modern and unique, he hasn’t used any flash (I think). It’s navigation is kind of book-like in that you can flip through page by page if you like, or refer to his table of contents – and it’s in a horizontal layout. There is nothing ‘below the fold’, since there is no ‘fold’.

He’s got some interesting writing there on a variety of tech-bent topics. He’s developed a GSD (Getting Shit Done) methodology which is ‘brutally simple’ and ‘doesn’t require a lot of forethought or planning’. Right up my alley. Lately he’s into pen and paper, something I can definitely relate to.

Anyway, it would be nice to have him in my RSS reader, but then again, I’d miss the wonderful-ness of his site if he had a feed. It’s definitely worth a visit.

On another, unrelated note, this is my 500th post here on Renaissance Man. I was thinking of doing up a full-on well thought out meaty post on some heady topic, and then realized this would break with tradition! 🙂 – and likely jarr my few regular readers.

In any case, if you are one of my few regular readers, a truly heartfelt thanks for your patronage and be happy in the fact that there’s simply nowhere for this blog to go but up! 🙂

Cheers.

Screencasters Update

There has been significant discussion over on this thread at inkscapeforum.com about our screencasters.heathenx.org site. We received several good suggestions and as a result we’ve updated the site slightly. Kudos to heathenx for his successful journey through video encoding hell, and his patience with my absolute skill at butchering his CSS work. 😉

Here’s the low-down on the changes:

– tweaks to the css to make it suck less in IE browsers

– we’re now streaming the swf files and offering up avi files for direct download (the avi’s are encoded with xvid and mp3 codecs for those interested).

– we now show the size of the avi file so that you know what you’re about to download

– we added anchor links for each episode so if great people like Ryan Lerch and Nico Buculei and other Inkscapers want to blog about specific screencasts they can link directly to the specific episode

That’s pretty much it. If you’ve got more suggestions, keep ’em coming. Although now maybe heathenx and I can concentrate more on coming up with some new screencasts.

Now that’s Damn Interesting…

There are still gems out there on the global interweb. I just found one today via a Digg story ( Do humans explode in the vacuum of space?). It’s called Damn Interesting, and it’s .. er .. damn interesting!

Don’t be fooled by the gruesome subject matter of the example I cited. There are sections relating to History, Nature, Mysteries, Alternative Energy and Medical Science among other things.

Do you know what the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is? Maybe you were just thinking about it the other day? 🙂

…definitely going in my list of bookmarks.