Bearfruit

Today Apple is supposed to make a big announcement. I don’t know yet what that will be but many people think it’s related to a Tablet PC. Apple’s success in the iPhone and App Store business has reminded me of one of the web’s biggest mistakes and we seem on track to repeat it. I’m stunned because it really hasn’t been that long. How can we be doing it again so soon?

(as a follow-up to “How data affects wifi range”)

It’s also important to realize that if a country consumes more media on the Internet than it produces, the electrons will get shifted from the creating country to the consuming country.

Because electrons have a negative charge this will leave the creating country with a positive charge and the consuming country with a negative charge. In effect, “polarizing the nations.” This was actually discussed in ancient biblical prophecy and is a sign that the battle of Armageddon and the end of the world is near.

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:53 AM, David McLaughlin wrote:
> I’ve had much better luck with range by placing the router as high as
> possible within the house.

That’s because the newer wifi signals are actually slightly heavier than air so they fall down gradually after they’re broadcast. Kind of like the branches of a willow tree.

It’s that time where people make their predictions. I’ll chip in my 2 cents worth regarding technology changes in the future. The last decade, I think, can be described as the decade of the web. The next, in a word, will be mobile.

Among the elite hacker community it is sometimes considered cool to have an unstyled website. I’m not certain what makes this cool, but I respect it none-the-less. However a few absolutely minimal styles can make your site easier to read. Here they are:

The latest craze is to write an iPhone app. I’ve been preaching for a while that mobile apps are the way of the future but I don’t like the idea of iPhone apps and here’s why.

Designers have been using grids for a long time in the world of print and advanced layout. Websites have kind of used grids in the form of tables but this become unpopular with the rise of the semantic web and css based layouts (for good reason). Modern CSS frameworks give you a powerful grid for laying out your web pages and often bundle in a multitude of extra features. I’ve now reviewed four grid systems and thought I’d quickly summarize them.

Amazon sent me some recommendations and they are good. 7 out of 9 look like something I want to read. Kind of for my own future reference here are the books they recommended:

• Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers by Steve Souders

I’ve been using my new computer for a little over a week now. I bought the Mac Book Pro 13. One of its features that may not jump off the page to you when looking at the tech specs is how great the screen is. To my horror I’ve gone to some websites and realized I’ve made some serious errors in optimizing my images. Things that look fine on a typical computer screen but look retarded on a really good quality monitor.

Well, blame it on Twitter. I’ve been blogging much less lately (I’m @newz2000 on twitter and identi.ca). I’m going to resume writing soon and have some great material to start out with.