Font Awesome 3.11 was just released and it includes two icons I made!

icon-microphone

icon-microphone-off

We’re using this icon already on popexpert but it was inserted as a plain PNG hoping that the author of Font Awesome would include it some day.

Just got a copy of How to Build a Time Machine (awesome book by the way, this is my second copy because my first one grew legs at some point). I could instantly tell it had been digitally printed. Why? Because the cover looks like crap.

“That looks great,” you say. Look closer. The text is blurry and there’s an atrocious halftone pattern visible everywhere, even in the areas that are supposed to be completely white:

Then there’s the back:

Believe it or not that’s actually in sharp focus as far as the camera is concerned. The blue/black text is blurred because of the halftone pattern, but can you see the faded lines of text in the center, where it’s supposed to be completely white? It’s like they scanned a paper-thin version of the back cover and actually captured some of the last index page as well! (I can confirm that by opening the cover and looking at the page underneath that the faint shadow here and the text on that page line up pretty well.)

This isn’t the only digitally printed book I have that is bad, but this is the worst one I’ve seen so far. Is it really that hard to print a nice cover digitally? It seems like they could have spent a few minutes in Photoshop touching up the scan and had a passible cover here. Instead it looks like it went right from a 3MP digital camera to the printer.

Just for comparison, here’s part of a cover of Make magazine that’s been printed beautifully:

I just finished building wood cabinets for my Logitech Z623 speakers:

A full set of photos including disassembly of the original cabinets and construction photos are over at flickr: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cannikin/sets/72157633054583812/

Hearing is supposed to be the “least rememberable” of the senses so I can’t really say if they sound better/worse than the original cabinets. You’d really need to hook both up and switch between them on the fly. But they sure look better!

A commenter the other day mentioned that they couldn’t find Rubyweaver (Ruby code syntax highlighting for Dreamweaver) online ANYWHERE. I went through an old harddrive and found it so I put it up at GitHub. Is it really possible that Adobe hasn’t added Ruby support to Dreamweaver??

Rubyweaver