dynagirl

Hawk!! http://twitpic.com/tyxl2

Now that all our landline phones are old school and corded, we’re tethered to exactly two working jacks. Incentive to wire up the kitchen is on its way, thanks to Richard at ericofon.com:

One of the many neat things about this phone is that I’ll have somewhere to stash the phonebook besides under the couch. The chalkboard is reversible to cork, which is nice, since even thinking about chalk sends me screaming into the other room.

Looks like the Disney Vault has a purpose after all – to keep us from realizing how similar our favorite classic Disney movies truly are. According to this video, Disney only ever made one movie, and they’ve been tracing it ever since.

Congress passed a consumer-protection law in August, to try to stop the flow of poisoned toys from China — but with no exemptions for small businesses, every single toy sold needs an expensive test to prove that it doesn’t kill you.

Read these, and go call your congresspeople.

open letter from Etsy.com

Endangered Whimsy
Gallery of soon-to-be illegal toys from Etsy crafters

Fashion Incubator

http://www.handmadetoyalliance.org/:

• A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
• A work-at-home mom in Minnesota who makes dolls to sell at craft fairs must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
• A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.

If I were the button-wearing type, I’d wear these. There’s lots more. And the dude! Too bad there’s not a similar Achievers edition.

…are two things things younger than John McCain.

Derivative as hell. Also? Penis.
thanks Hon!

I bought my first furniture that isn’t used and didn’t come from Target! A few weeks ago we saw these funny-looking chairs (in way uglier colors), and I sat down. I thought, “hunh, that’s really comfortable,” and moved on… then slowly got obsessed. Yesterday we found them again at Century House Leather Gallery, and in the car on the way over to the other location that had the colors I wanted (OMG xanadu), I thought, “Wow. My ass actually misses that chair.” The guy at the store said they call it “the buttbucket,” which is probably easier to pronounce than “Hjellegjerde Luna.” I like its OMNOMNOM face.

I like Leopard’s 3D dock, but those glowing blue dots are gonna annoy the crap out of me; here’s how to change them back to triangles.

The Leopard intro movie’s music is totally wrong, it really needs to be this.

Unconfirmed, since I can’t upgrade yet (I’ll be doing a double happy dance at that point, because it will mean finally being done with that Perl/Catalyst/TemplateToolKit nightmare), but this is awesome.

Make your own Atari 2600 labels.

Hollow out a boom box, make it a backpack.

13 legends of color

The Muffler Man wants to say hello to you.

I found a nicely decaying Muffler Man outside of Oshkosh. Terrifying, and awesome.

Nifty! Not only is IE7’s File/Edit/View/Etc. menu in a really stupid place below the toolbar*, the Edit menu doesn’t work. If you select a URL from the address bar and then try to copy it from the Edit menu, it loses focus on the address and you can’t copy it. Paste is similarly fucked up. The right-click contextual menu works, so why not this? Click to watch:

You’ll notice that I took this movie on my Mac through Remote Desktop. I tried the copy/paste maneuvering directly on the Windows (XP) box, with the same results. I also tried it in Internet Explorers 5-6 and it worked just fine.

Geeks Are Sexy posted a registry hack to move the File/Edit/View/Etc. menu back to the top. I did this and it worked, in terms of moving the menu bar back to where it belongs, but it didn’t fix the copy/paste issue. Swell!

*”Reload” and “stop” are in the extra-stupid place of after the address bar, and no, they can’t be rearranged.

Fabric patterns from public transit.

When the mere presence of the bell is not enough.

Looking through all of these, I had a nasty flashback to usability testing. It’s easy to imagine the four-hour, five+ people meeting that would ensue–mostly entirely a discussion of why the labels should read “push button” instead of “ring bell,” since really, there is no bell present and the user is not directly ringing anything. At the two-hour mark, the group would seem to be in agreement that the labels should read “push button to ring bell” because “push button” would be too ambiguous to the user as to the results of such pushing, and would therefore cause the user discomfort, possibly resulting in the user never pushing the button because they were afraid of what might happen. After four hours, everyone would be in agreement–until, inevitably, someone points out that the bell is neither now nor ever visible to the user, so that “push button to ring bell” would be equally distressing to the user because they would never know exactly what bell they were ringing if they pushed the button. At that point, the web designer rips the bubbler off of the wall, heaves it through the window, and runs. [Scene.]

I finally bothered finding some silverware that goes better with our dishes than more trad-looking set that I had gotten as a random Christmas present one year. This is Ecko’s “La Joya” along with the Pfalzgraff “Gourmet Green.” I’m also really digging their old “Canoe Muffin” (despite the name) and “Montalo.” Hooray again, eBay!

Mod your own Pez Drive.
via Make

I, um, think I really need these Ultimate 3D Glasses. For the costume box. Yeah.

TupperDiva, a nice collection of all things Tuppery. Lots of gorgeous scans. I recognize some of the products and hadn’t realized they were Tupperware. We didn’t have much of it (expensive!!), but they still make the best (only?) cake carrier on the market. If only I could find the legendary kimchee keeper in the US, that would be nice.
Via Scrubbles

I found this while looking at the credits of Remington Steele (For work! I swear!). Between her great taste in telephony and her nice performance in Gramma’s Boy,* I’ve just gotten over my reflexive dislike of Doris Roberts.

Shirley Jones stole the show, though!

Check out this very cool little DIY fountain with flourescent dye, a calibrated strobe and blacklight that lets you see –and play with– individual drops of liquid. Triptastic science!

The Milwaukee Admirals got a hideous new logo which, given this article, not a rebranding of the team on their own but merely as a brand extension of the agency and it’s dick-tastic sounding owner and his obsession with skeletons. Great jorb.
Via number-one hockey fan CzelticGirl

Meanwhile, Jen’s friend cooked up this Most Exceelent On-Notice Board Generator. Hours of fun.

Jazz and design innovation.

I got this Dorothee Becker Uten.Silo for TWO BUCKS. A little elbow-grease and the stickers, sand and paint drops are gone, and it’s perfect. I’m guessing original, too; if it were a re-issue, it would have had a very different price tag.

Actually, I didn’t know what it was either, other than something I’d seen crop up a lot in the backgrounds of gorgeous spaces in the Terence Conran house design books from the 70s.

My friend Pete just moved to Hawaii and he swears up and down that EVERYONE has one of these in their house. I think he’s lying, but wouldn’t that be rad? If you don’t live in Hawaii where these apparently come FREE with your rent, you can make a home-made Tiki Fireplace with smoking nose, like this dude did.

A nice Photoshop tutorial on cleaning up a face so it’s pretty / normal-looking. (Mouse over the “final result” image.) This is hardly Photoshop plastic surgery stuff, but it’s what I have to go through pretty much EVERY DAMNED TIME I’m given a person’s photograph for a site or brochure. Please! Look in the mirror. Comb your hair, powder your nose (men, too… and you might want do your shiny head while you’re at it), and do something about those eye bags — the five minutes you take will save a very expensive hour, and god forbid your company doesn’t have the budget for those hours and THEN THE INTERNETS WILL THINK YOU’RE UGLY.

Oh, and if you’re a smoker or drink a pot of coffee every day? Two words: whitening strips. You don’t have to go Ross-Nuclear-White, but it’ll take five years off of you.

How to Feel Miserable as an Artist.