A few things I spotted today:

• On Writing Short – “Users just won’t read the instructions”. They never do. Obvious but useful advice.
• Interactive Go tutorial – Learn how to play the game, Go. I’ve always wanted to know how to play this game. Now I at least know the basics. Via Laughing Meme.
• Distance Calculator – Type in two locations and it’ll tell you the distance between them. I’ve been looking for this sort of thing for a fair while.
• Movie Physics – Haven’t had a proper look around this site yet, but it does what it says on the tin; talks about movie physics. Could be dull as dishwater, or interesting. No idea.

There should be a big change tomorrow, just you wait.

This is one of the oddest things I’ve seen in a while. Dasher is a way to input text using nothing but a mouse (or other pointing device).

You “drive” the mouse towards oncoming letter blocks, which lead to more letters, and eventually spell out words. The predictive features and adjustable scroll speeds mean that once you get your head around it, you can write essays pretty fast.

Infact, I wrote this entire entry using this program; HTML and all (Dashblogging, if you will). Given a bit more time to get used to it (it really is a bizarre thing at first), I think it could be very handy for various applications, particularly mobile input.

With a title like Freddy Vs Jason, it was never going to be a classic. As should be expected, the acting is awful and the premise is weak at best. You can pretty much guess everything else about it.

To be honest, though, I’m not entirely sure how much I disliked this film (I did dislike it though). I had such low expectations of it that it easily managed to surpass them; being watchable even if mostly terrible. So, while it’s about as scary as a kitten in a cotton wool jacket, it’s not as bad as you might think. Go see it? Still no.

Lazy days abound: More random links.

• Interactive Bullet Time demo – A fun little flash demo, showing off panning around 3d models,
• The Real Underground – See just how warped the London Underground map is with this flash map from the transport museum website,
• The Creatures In My Head – Just plain weird. Odd little monster drawings.
• Snakoban – An odd mix of games, but quite addictive. Just don’t use the X key to cheat.

That’s enough for today. More to follow.

A long time ago, I joined the X-Philes. I promptly forgot about it, since everything was working well. Recently, I came across another website dicussing various matters about XHTML and markup: Anne van Kesteren.

Among other things, I learned that I could improve my content negotiation. Thanks to Ben for providing the correct user agents, I’m now one step closer to perfection.

Update: Because I never really bothered checking old entries before the mime type switch in May, there were a few broken archive pages. That won’t stand. I went through the entire archive and fixed the few entries that didn’t work. One step closer…

Next step: using an xml stylesheet processing instruction. (Yawn).