Not to bury my point: contextual is the normal, good, fair, effective type of advertising. Targeted is the creepy, resource intensive, privacy invading, and, (?!?!?!!) not particularly effective type of advertising. We’ll get there. A billboard is contextual advertising. You’re driving on the highway and are told there is a McDonalds in 7 miles. The […]

A week from today is Frostapalooza, Brad’s big show he’s throwing incorporating a ton of friends and family. In addition to the 40 musicians rotating on stage, now there will be visual artists showing off their work as well. Brad writes: Jeff Robbins makes some really amazing music software called Visibox that helps bands easily create, manage, and […]

Over the last few months I watched… They were all kinda dark. I’m starting the Bear Season 3 now and we’ll see if I can take it. I might need something a little funnier or lighter or something for a while.

Back in 2016 I wrote a book called Practical SVG. Recently, the publisher, A Book Apart, closed shop. Now you can Read Practical SVG on the web, here on this site, for free. I always like how Mat’s book was online so now mine can join that cool club. I’ll echo what I say on […]

Let’s say you’re on a big mission in the world. You think websites should be more accessible. Websites should work for anyone regardless of their disabilities. You also think the web right now is failing in this regard. There are far too many inaccessible websites existing and being created. You think that educating developers is […]

I’ve got an eMountain Bike, but I can’t actually ride it on most of the mountain biking trails around here unless I flagrantly flaunt the “law”. I do that, sometimes. I’m not obnoxious about it. It just seems like history hasn’t caught up yet and it’s silly. It’s like if there was some law about […]

Right here!

Super cool zine from Mat. Me, I like HTML, and I wanted to do something with a little texture to it. So I asked a bunch of people way more talented than I am if they were down to contribute to a zine about heading elements—`h1` and company, here with us for as long as […]

Another kid’s device we have that we’ve gotten tons and tons of use out of is the Toniebox. It’s this soft padded box with a speaker on it (or plug in headphones). You place a character on it (a “Tonie”) and it plays the audio associated with that Tonie. It basically tells stories. We heard […]

Our little family took a quick trip down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico — meeting my inlaws there for some fun in the sun. We stayed at the Hyatt Ziva. We actually “won” the trip a few years back at a live auction/benefit for the Boys & Girls Club of Bend, so it felt nice to […]

Quick note that I’m totally going to Frostapalooza (and you can too!) Frostapalooza is a giant one-night-only benefit concert-slash-party-slash-happening featuring an amorphous super group of talented musicians from bands like: Brad Frost is turning 40 and throwing this as a massive party/concert. I’ll be playing banjo in the show for a couple of tunes. You’ll […]

I think it was during the ShopTalk with Blake Watson where “tower defense” games briefly came up and someone recommended Kingdom Rush. It’s not exactly new, coming out in 2011, but it was new to me. I played on iOS. It feels like the total classic of tower defense games. Monsters come at you, you […]

At one time I got interested in the “eye contact”, or lack of it, on video calls. I was going to present at an online conference, and I wanted people watching to have it look like I was looking right at them. Plus, possibly even more importantly, one-on-one calls with people. I ended up buying […]

If you long for a web of yore were things were better, somehow: The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating […]

I mostly play old time and bluegrass music. Particularly in old time and fiddle songs, the songs have a fairly rigid and repetitious structure. That’s not to say players don’t do interesting things with it, but unless a song is intentionally crooked, the structure of the song remains the same throughout. A typical structure is […]