What I've Learned

Ford, Cintiq, and Tryptophan

First and foremost, the Discovery Channel runs some crazy shit after dark.

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As an early Christmas gift to myself, I stopped in at Best Buy today and ordered a Cintiq 12WX. It should be here on Friday, and I'm giddy. I've been drooling over this thing since August, and I cannot wait to take it for a test drive.

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Ford managed to impress me with their new ad campaign for the Ford F150.



I always enjoy video with a heavy emphasis on typography, and it's nice to see a mainstream ad featuring wordplay.

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The count() feature in CSS is frustrating unless you get a handle on its scope (which is extremely limited). Pretty much, if you don't have everything you're counting in the same container, you're out of luck and you'll need to use an alternative method of numbering.

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PDF format is a pain in the ass if you don't want browsers to try and open the file inside the browser instead of downloading it. The trick is to set a header to handle PDFs as application/octet-stream instead of the default application/pdf. If you're able to use .htaccess files on your server, the easiest way to do this is to include the following code inside:

<Files *.pdf>
  ForceType application/octet-stream
   Header set Content-Disposition attachment
   Header set Content-Transfer-Encoding binary
 </Files>

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My father, left unattended, is susceptible to bouts of mad scientist-ism. Recent evidence includes his experiments with a miniature bio-mass furnace.

I arrived home for Thanksgiving to find him, covered in ash and looking disheveled, holding tin-snips and a charred, soup-can-looking hunk of metal, yelling something about going off the grid.

I was invited to help him solve some engineering issues with his "burn can" design (it turns out my design for a self-stirring burn doesn't work).

Posted Dec 01, 2008 by Jason Lengstorf.
This entry is filed under learning, tips, css, htaccess, typography, and gadgets.