I guess the hint wasn’t good enough.

I’m sure this will be fixed in an hour or two, which may or may not break the link, but here it is anyway :)

Edit: They pulled the article about half an hour later.

That’s a Sound System.

Image: lucyfrench123.

If you haven’t noticed it already (by the badge sitting atop the sidebar to the right), EndofWeb is now on Alltop. If you’re ever cruising through the Tech section over there, look me up — I’ll likely be somewhere at the very bottom, but a listing’s a listing, right?

I’ve been listed on Technorati for quite some time now, though I’ve never actually cared for the place much. They’ve got a very… Well, let’s just say that if we were in the world of Dr. Zhivago, they’d probably be fleeing Russia right about now. That’s how I view the folks at Technorati — but that’s neither here nor there. Alltop is growing at a pretty steady pace, and I think it’s a better place for readers (and potential readers) to seek out and find new blogs.

Technorati code: N6DR5W8YN75Y

This is how it’s done in Japan.

Image: Pixiv.

It’s something like that.

Image: My Apokalips.

A while ago (sometime last year that I don’t remember anymore) I came across a quick blurb in a now long-forgotten Google blog entry telling users exactly how to get their names verified for their Google Profile pages.

It’s really simple, and free — the whole thing’s furnished by Knol, which has itself become somewhat forgotten when compared to Google’s many other ventures. I hadn’t given it much thought since, but with the recent advent of Google Buzz, our Google Profiles have taken on a whole new responsibility.

I also feel like I should have told more people about it when I got my own name verified, but that’s neither here nor there.

As I said before, it’s pretty easy to do, and should only take a couple of minutes to complete if you’ve got the right information on hand.

Disclaimer: This only works for Americans. Sorry (whole rest of the world), but the company is based here and the data they need to reference for verification is the kind that they can’t go looking for elsewhere.

Step 1: Go to Knol.

Google used their Knol service as the one-stop shop for name verification due to its extant system based on reputation, credibility, true name usage and basically the fact that it’s existence is contingent upon its users not being trolls.

Once at Knol, look up to the top right corner of the page and sign in. Even if you’re already logged into other Google services, it’s likely that when you load Knol you won’t be signed in yet. It uses your regular Google account so this won’t be a problem for anybody already using Buzz or Gmail.

Once you’re signed in, look back to the same top right corner and see that the options have changed to include a link to your Knol preferences. Click the link.

Step 2: Choose the tab for Name Verification.

Seriously, I wasn’t kidding when I said it was easy. Once you’re in Knol Preferences, choose the tab that says Name Verification. You’re almost done.

Once you’ve clicked the tab for Name Verification, you’re presented with two options:

Step 3: Verify.

Now you’ve got an easy decision to make. You can either verify your identity by using a credit card, or by using your Social Security Number. Either works just as well as the other, but since there are still masses of people who seem to think their SSN is somehow both secret and special in some way, the credit option is a safe bet.

Once you submit your info, the system processes it rather quickly. In fact, you may have a note in your inbox telling you it’s done before you close the tab. Now simply go to your Google Profile page, et voila! You’re verified.

"Left5" – A new Wordpress theme geared towards images.

I’ve been working for quite a while now to piece together an imageblog Wordpress theme that I like, and it hasn’t been easy. A while back, I lucked my way across a theme built entirely in simplified HTML 5, called H5. H5 is an extremely minimalistic theme, partly because the author’s goal was to keep it clean. Nothing extra, nothing frivolous. That’s exactly the way I like things, and H5 provided a wonderful platform for the themes I’ve used up until now on both EndofWeb and Loupe. Now Loupe has a new face — Left5.

H5 was a great starting point, but it really wasn’t much more than that. In fact, by the time I was finished with it, it didn’t resemble the original theme in any way — except that it still kept to the confines of the generic-standard Wordpress layout. I was quite happy with the designs I came up with using nothing but clean CSS and HTML 5’s core tags of <header>, <section>, <article>, <aside> and <nav> — but I still wanted something different. Namely, I wanted to get out from under the Wordpress layout that just seems to stick, and move toward an even more minimalistic design that better lent toward large images.

That meant that what I had to do was to find a way to keep the exceptionally clean code that HTML 5 allows for, and manage to outfit a Wordpress-driven site to look more like Core CMS than Wordpress. As much as I’d love to say that it’s awful — if for no other reason than its rampant popularity — Wordpress is a very good CMS. It’s surprisingly sturdy, portable, extendable, configurable, and above all; elastic.

And by elastic, I mean that I can install it, build a blog, post daily for three years, and still have it perfectly organized, catalogued, and presentable. Content management systems like Core CMS or even Cargo Collective are beautiful, but they’re meant to be portfolios, not blogs — so they’re severely limited on the amount of content that they can effectively display.

Places like Tumblr, Posterous, and Blogger all have severe drawbacks of their own, even for something as seemingly simple as an imageblog — which doesn’t stop the hundreds of fantastic imageblogs on their servers from doing what they do — but I still flat out despise all three of them.

High-profile sites like Ffffound! and Dropular are a different beast all together, not to mention that they use some heavier code to operate — which I wanted to avoid using. I wanted to keep my sites clean, almost austere in their code, to keep them as nimble as possible. As much as we all love the smooth workings of jQuery, java and flash, plain HTML is preferable when you’ve got a load of images clogging your already humiliatingly slow internet connection.

Enter Left5

Left5 is special in that it’s a left-anchored design with absolutely no limit to the size of images displayed. The idea of a left-aligned static wall isn’t overly special, but having it in a Wordpress theme, fully coded in clean, minimal, validated HTML 5 — that’s something else. I’m very happy with it, even if people using archaic CRT’s might get annoyed at the brazenly huge images it allows for. The screenshot above is a post on Loupe, and the image shown is 1029 pixels wide. The theme is gorgeous on average to large screen sizes with reasonably modern resolutions.

See it in action at Loupe.

I haven’t yet packaged a generic version of the theme, but I will soon and get it posted on a demo page. I’ll note here when that happens :)

I don’t generally have cause to praise LG for anything; they’re not a bad company, and they make some great stuff, they just don’t usually come through with anything I particularly need or want. That’s changed now, because they’ve put together a retro styled CRT television that makes all the snazzy flat-screens in the world look just plain drab.

Only Available in Korea :(

Unfortunately, as it stands right now, the set is only available in South Korea. It sells for 246,000 Korean Won which comes out to about $213 USD.

This thing’s definitely nice though; it’s got three picture settings that let the viewer choose color, black & white or sepia, and has (semi) modern A/V hookups in the rear that allow for the essentials like gaming consoles and camera hookups. We’re talking about standard yellow-plug here, but it works. There’s the antenna coaxial hookup there to allow for cable if you get the itch, but for the budget-minded retrophiles a nice antenna ought to do nicely.

See more of the LG Classic here.

I don’t have a TV anymore. I use things like Hulu (because it’s sadly the best option available for most things) and to a lesser extent, the tried and true method of the morally ambiguous crowd-source approach (torrents). Little sets like this, at 14″ viewable, would be great for having around on an antenna. I wouldn’t waste money on cable anymore, but I could see the use of something like this — especially when it would add such a huge aesthetic to the apartment.

The Snow Leopard Login Screen

Apple is good at designing things simply and beautifully enough that users generally make little to no changes to their UI — but let’s face it, that space background gets pretty old after the first thousand logins, and they really should have included the login screen aesthetics in the system prefs.

You do not need any of the dozens of trashy apps floating around to tweak this. The methods for tweaking the login screen change with every major inception of OS X, as do the apps for changing hidden system prefs, but those apps all work by changing the system’s instructions themselves, rather than simply going to the source image and leaving the system alone. I’ve always preferred the safer, cleaner way of doing things, which is simply replacing the default images.

–

Luckily, changing the login screen background is about as easy as opening the finder and swapping an image file. Just open the finder and hit shift+command+G, which brings up the Go To Folder dialogue, and enter this folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices

Once there, find the image file by the name of DefaultDesktop.jpg and make a copy of it somewhere safe. Now simply replace it with a .jpg of your choosing, so long as it’s 1920×1200 and renamed to DefaultDesktop.jpg — and don’t freak out when you’re asked to validate with an administrator password, since it’s a system folder.

The Apple Logo

As much as I appreciate how clean the OS X Apple logo is, I’ve always liked the vintage look. Just like the login screen’s background image, the Apple logo itself can be swapped out for an image of your choosing, so long as it matches the size and filetype of the original. You can also do the same with the “Mac OS X” underneath the logo.

The login window itself has a totally different folder full of goodies, here’s the path:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/loginwindow.bundle/Contents/Resources/

You’ll notice the veritable plethora of image files in there, all named quite nicely so there’s no confusion. You can swap any image ever involved in the workings of the login window, easy as copypasta, just make sure the sizes are always the same, and that you are sure to name them the same filename as the files they’re replacing — including the filetype. If the image you’re replacing is a .tif instead of a .tiff, then name your TIFF image as a .tif like it wants.

Happy tweaking :)

You’re doing it wrong.

Image: kiske.