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See, the whole point of this exercise was to finally get to use a picture I took of some millstones, about fifteen years ago. They’re a little large for quernstones, but they’re the only grindstone images I have to hand, so they’ll have to do.

Quite why Photoshop is bending colours on me, I don’t know. And quite why I can’t composite a transparent PNG against a solid background colour, I don’t know. Frankly, right now, I don’t much care. I have quernstones, and fairly nice line demarkation things, and proper curly quotes, and as of this precise moment the bally thing even validates, for heaven’s sake. So, I’m content. The orange is… wrong, frankly, but that will have to wait for another day. Which, on the evidence of my last redesign interlude, will be about two years hence.

For the moment – enjoy. MynameisJonathanSandersongoodnight.

Listening to: Awake The Unkind from the album “Never Never Land” by Unkle

Well, John Gruber’s Smarty-pants, despite not advertising itself as being tested with MT3, does the job rather nicely, converting quotes and dashes into real quotes and dashes. Most pleasing.

Less successful is the MT pluginpack’s ‘DropCap‘ module, which is terribly clever but, out of the box, shoves the first character in rather precisely the wrong place for a drop cap. Shame. So I diddled with it, changing the setup from good old table-hackery to nice clean never-going-to-work CSS… there followed 40 minutes of futzing with the stylesheet to produce something that looked good on my Macs, and still vaguely works in IE6.

The result, on a Mac, is quite nice. On IE6… it’s pretty ghastly, actually. But I’m stuffed if I can find a better compromise, and I’m not about to get into conditional stylesheet madness. If you dislike the way it looks on your system, use FireFox, for heaven’s sake! But I might ditch the dropcap anyway. I’ll sleep on it. Justified text, however, is the very beagle’s По-русски.

Just one more thing I’m going to try tonight… and that’s never going to work in IE. 🙁

Listening to: Very Yeah from the album “Quattro” by Corduroy

I’ve been playing around with the stylesheet here, before iMark gets his grubby mitts on the thing. Several changes still to come, possibly including the orange, which is currently in place more as a convenience than anything else. Don’t be alarmed if it turns deep green on you.

Serifs are, of course, the new slate grey. The font, if you’ve got it, is Baskerville, which in the default Mac OS X install has much more pleasing italics than Garamond. Those watching on Windows will likely get Palatino Linotype; if not, everybody should have Georgia. I could have just picked Times and been done with it, but dahling, everybody’s doing that these days.

Looking at it again, I think the leading needs increasing a gnat’s. I also need to figure out how to educate quotes, since that’s suddenly annoying me. Did I mention I was a type snob?

Listening to: Beyond Skin from the album “Beyond Skin” by Nitin Sawhney

Test post from Ecto. Which didn’t work yesterday, but looks like it does this afternoon. [shrug]

Listening to: Desolation Row from the album “Highway 61 Revisited” by Bob Dylan

Richard, silly boy, has managed to get a loop going in VNC. Twit.

And hey, if the machines are side-by-side, it’s much more convenient to run Teleport, which comes close to extending your desktop onto another Mac. Scoot your mouse off one Mac’s screen and onto another – very neat. All that’s missing is being able to drag windows between systems, but that’s asking a bit much. [coughNSHostingcough]

Unfortunately, Abyssoft’s webserver seems to have gone into casters-up mode, so here’s a local mirror of the current test release (160Kb zip file). Clipboard sync doesn’t work for me in this release, so I’m still using Clipboard Sharing for that.

I’m over three million pixels, by the way. Nuts. Perhaps Apple’s 30″ screen isn’t so bonkers after all.

Anybody still reading this through a web-browser – rather than having it read for them by an aggregator – will notice a subtle change. The page is no longer mud-brown, it’s white. With an orange masthead. It’s… fairly unpleasant.

I’ve finally got around to updating all my teamplates to the new MT3 ones, so things like Trackback should be working again. This, of course, broke my stylesheet, so I’ve had to use one of the defaults – and the one with the nicest type settings also has this ghastly orange heading.

Perhaps, this time, I might actually get around to customising the thing. There’s a considerable incentive to do so, after all.

From Richard Grant’s blog: the Cross-Party Cycling Group of The Scottish Parliament discussed bicycle helmets (pdf) back in May, and published a presentation (slides, notes (PDFs)) about risk factors by Malcolm Wardlow. So far as Google can tell, Wardlow is ‘just an enthusiast,’ but I’ll take an amateur who’s published in the BMJ over most analysts, thanks.

I’ve known for a while that the upshot of Australia’s dalliance with compulsory cycle helmet wearing was not as clear-cut as one might expect; Wardlow fills in the story with a decade’s dose of perspective also. The bottom line? Helmets do little to prevent serious injury to cyclists, and even appear to contribute to increased fatality rates. Nevertheless, cycling is getting safer – apparently because there are more cyclists. The more of us there are, the safer it gets for us all.

Thus, making helmets compulsory is counterproductive not only because they might not actually be of any use, but also because the perception of danger puts people off cycling. And that has a very measurable effect on all the remaining cyclists.

The paper’s an excellent read, and at the policy level is fascinating and fairly clear. What’s unclear are the implications for individuals: does my wearing a helmet actually do me any good? Also: whenever I show presenters cycling on TV, I always ensure they’re wearing a helmet. I’m no longer as convinced that I should do that, despite the deluge of complaints I’d receive if I didn’t.

On the BIG-Chat list, we’ve been discussing what to do with the hazard represented by an unexploded pop bottle. They’ll take (apparently) up to about 150psi before they burst, which they do with a hell of a bang, spinning shards of plastic, blood, gore, the usual. So: what happens if you have one sitting at, say, 130 psi, resolutely failing to explode but still, potentially, a bomb?

My suggestion is to equip a heavy radio-control car with a gas-powered soldering iron to melt the bottle side-wall. A comedy analogue of those army bomb-disposal robots.

Can I do this? Please?

My PowerBook is on the sofa in my lounge. I, however, am sitting in my office, working on the old battleaxe of a desktop Mac. At some point, I realise that I want to send a text message to a friend. While my phone is to hand, I find it simpler to:

1. VNC screen-share to my PowerBook next door, over WiFi.
2. Bluetooth-pair back through the wall to my mobile phone.
3. Type the message on the PowerBook, via Address Book and the screen sharing thing.

Is it possible for wireless networks to become tangled? Should I even worry, given that this felt like a perfectly natural chain of events? Or am I just a l33t M4cus3r?

Or maybe I should simply redouble my efforts to find the USB Bluetooth dongle for the Power Mac. Or call someone with, you know, voice.

Somewhere, in one of William Gibson’s genre-defining, bafflingly seminal cyberpunk books – possibly Neuromancer, which was written on a typewriter, for heaven’s sake – there’s mention of a woman with fabulously beautiful eyes. They’re blessed with a remarkable clarity and depth of colour… and tiny ‘Nikon’ logos on the edge of the iris.

I mention this because it’s actually happening, only with Dior rather than Nikon. Well, kinda. Dior are apparently jumping on the special effects contact lens trail, making lenses that outline the iris in black or gold ‘for a more dramatic effect,’ but according to today’s Guardian they also feature a Dior logo. In Gibson’s world, as I recall, Nikon were engineering entire eyes. But the visual effect is the same.

Tick another prediction off the list.