Photo Credit: “No. 2,000” by erin m

Last night I stumbled across Dan Cederholm’s article, Use the Best Available Ampersand and, for whatever reason, it struck a chord with me. I knew immediately that I would have to follow Cederholm’s lead and add some ampersand loving to the Urban Mainframe.

In his article, Cederholm describes applying a CSS class to ampersands to apply a more attractive typeface to them. Great, but that means that I’d have to remember to use that class everytime I used the ampersand character and that’s more effort than I want to expend. So I decided to write a WordPress plugin to automate the process.

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Photo Credit: “Slide - Web Typography Panel” by quasarkitten

Well you learn something new every day don’t you? Until today, I’ve freely interchanged hyphens, en and em-dashes on a whim, without really giving any thought or consideration to the fact that there might be grammatical rules attached to their use — which, of course, there are. Fortunately they are simple rules too.

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Photo Credit: “Derelict Truck” by haglundc

I received an email yesterday that had me momentarily confused:

ya know its really bad form to claim copyright on photos that you haven’t taken. I noticed this on a few photos on your site recently and then on http://blog.urbanmainframe.com/2009/05/mac-finder-icon-canvas/ you put your copyright on the picture even though it clearly says underneath that the photo is by purplelime. That sucks man. You really should rethink this coz it makes you look bad and I also think it illegal.

I realised that what I was actually being chastised for is the recent addition of the urbanmainframe.com digital watermark to some of the images on the site (rendered with the Scissors WordPress plug-in).

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Flickr user purplelime has painted a smiley Mac Finder icon on canvas and, as you can see above, it’s simply awesome. I want one.

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It looks like I’m going to be working away from home for a while, possibly for several months, so I need to get a laptop to help me while away the evenings.

Money is really tight at the moment, as I guess it is for most people. Thus logic tells me that I should grab the cheapest machine I can get, perhaps even buying used from eBay. But I have a huge investment in Apple and there’s no way I could afford to buy the Windows equivalents of all the software that I use daily. So, despite the larger initial outlay, a MacBook is the only sensible choice.

But budget constraints still apply, thus I’m more inclined to go for the MacBook rather than the top-of-the-range MacBook Pro (which my heart is begging me to buy). The problem is that I consider myself to be a pro-user and I’m wondering if the MacBook can keep up.

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As pretty as it is, the default login image of your Macintosh can get boring after a while. While it has always been possible to change the login wallpaper, it’s a convoluted process and a little intimidating for the non-technical user.

Well not any more! I’ve just found a program called Loginox that reduces this task to a simple drag-and-drop operation (that’s much more Mac-like!)

Note to Apple: get this software licensed and integrated into OS X. We want this feature.

Is it just me, or is the entry page for the 26000 Vodka website (screen capture above) totally redundant? I mean, really, what is the point of these screens on booze websites? It’s not like there’s any kind of serious validation going on here. My thirteen year old daughter could defeat this system without breaking a sweat.

But what really gets me is that this is only a website - I can’t drink here. I can’t buy vodka here. So why the age check? This is nannying gone too far.