Kimler Adventure Pages (http://randsco.com)

For years, web designers and bloggers have been limited to a select number of "web-safe" fonts. With the Jun 30th release of FireFox 3.5, it's now possible for cross-browser font embedding using the CSS3 @font-face selector. Here's a tutorial to show you how

@Font-Face: Typography can be art! Web designers have been limited to only 13 or so "web-safe" fonts for years. Now, cross-browser use of the CSS3 @font-face selector may change all that.

Expand Your Font Palette Using CSS3

In a tale involving proprietary font formats and a week-old release of FireFox, I'm here to say that using the CSS @font-face selector to spice up your website typography is an easy, light-weight, valid and cross-browser solution. Finally, fancy fonts for the masses!

Can this be true? You bet your sweet bippy! Read on.

Fancy Fonts For All

We have a "new" twitter update status tool for our blog. See how it works (will be followed-up with a detailed discussion of how we made it, modified the JavaScript that comes with the Twitter API and some other nifty tricks we added). Some assembly required.

Twitter This, Twitter That

When the blue bird chirps, we've Tweet'd w/in the past hour.

It seems that the whole world is a-flutter, over little blue birds (which are the universal symbol for "Twitter", a increasingly popular "micro-blogging" service). Twitter is used to make 140-character comments about what you're doing. You can even embed photos, videos and links - to be rendered in-place, by browser add-on applications. Use it to keep in touch with "friends", for time-delayed "conversations", social networking, staying on top of important (and not-so important) breaking news, popular topics, wasting your employers time or digging deeper into research: trends, keywords, news and other things.

We started tweeting early this year and I finally got around to customizing a "twitter status update", which you'll find in our "Site Tools" section of our blog sidebar. It's a bit different than most Twitter status updates I've seen and here's how it works:

Twitter Status Message: When you hover over the twitter status "bird", you'll see our latest "tweet". Here's an example. When you click, our last 5 "tweets" will pop-up in a list and include a link to "follow Randsco" on Twitter.

IF you see the blue-bird a-singing (animated musical notes), it means that we've "tweeted" within the last hour or so. Hovering over this little blue twitter bird will reveal a stylish pop-up containing our latest "tweet" (140-char story-line of "what we're doing right now"). It's a great way to see what we're up to, see how witty we can be and we think it's a nice add-on (a mini-blog, if you will).

If you CLICK the blue-bird, whether he's singing or not, you'll get a pop-up list of our last 5 tweets. Each tweet may - or may not - contain links to web-pages or our fellow twitter friends, with whom we're "conversing". Follow the links to learn more. At the bottom of the 5-tweet list is a CSS-rollover link that invites you to "follow us" on twitter. It even degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled. We think it's pretty cool.

Coming Soon: A Twitter-torial covering "How to add a Twitter status update to your own blog", which will include detail about using the Twitter API, modifying the JavaScript, make a Twitter status list pop-up and some of the other cool stuff involved in making our own twitter status update tool.

I have John of wow-factor.com to thank for turning me on to an amazing mashup of music by an Israeli named "Kutiman". Kutiman has mixed a variety of disparate YouTube videos, creating amazing new music. Rarely does something cross my desk that astounds me. This did.

Israeli Musician "Kutiman" Mixes YouTube Videos to Make a New Vibe

Kutiman: Israeli Ophir Kutiel (AKA Kutiman) has created a mash-up of YouTube videos, into new music videos. His labor of musical love is challenging copyright laws and is simply amazing. Give it a listen.

Every once in a while, you run across something on the Internet that blows your socks off and redefines your very understanding of the world. So it was for me, when my Australian mate turned me onto Thru-You, an online album of recycled YouTube music.

"Wow," Scott said, replaying the music again and again, in an effort to digest and fully comprehend the creative genius at work.

"The vision, patience, technical and musical knowledge that's required [to pull together unrelated YouTube videos and mix them into a completely new sound] is just astounding," Scott claimed, upon watching (and hearing) "The Mother of All Funk Chords", which is the first of seven songs contained in this online album.

See if you agree. Watch Kutiman's YouTube mix and learn more about the controversy that it created!

Listen & Watch in Amazement

For the second time in five years, my computer bit the dust. This time, however, armed with a "Ghosted" image of my operating system, it was a snap to start over with a clean install of Win XP Home Edition. Learn how Norton Ghost can allow you to laugh at viruses, corrupted system files, driver problems, malware and software conflict. Reimage your system drive in 10 minutes flat.

Norton Ghost: Reimage your whole C: drive using Norton Ghost. It makes "starting over" a whole lot easier!

 

A new computer is a bit like the attic in a new home - shiny, clean and empty. You are happy. You begin to fill it with your belongings and life is good.

As time passes, you store more items into your now, not-as-new attic. Finding things becomes more difficult. The attic is filling up and you're running out of storage space. Bugs, water leaks, the kids and other things are randomly damaging some of the items you've stored. Tools and appliances no longer function properly when you pull them from storage and try to use them.

"It worked last time," you think, "What happened?" Frustrated, you throw the item away, go down to the store and buy a newer version, perhaps by a different manufacturer. At least this new one works.

More time goes by. You take a Saturday and instead of having fun playing with your family, or going golfing, you spend the entire day cleaning the attic and organizing it. You throw away some items, reorganize contents of boxes, re-label others and generally shuffle things about. You feel good about it, in the end, and the result is that the attic functions better.

More time trickles by and you now realize that the attic is getting cluttered again. You think, "Didn't I give up a weekend to organize it, not so long ago?" Discouraged, you devote another weekend. Soon, "organizing the attic" becomes a regular, unwanted and unrewarding chore.

"Couldn't I just throw this out?" you ask yourself, looking at some loose parts to the dim light. "Better not, they might be an important part of a favorite game, useful tool or something. I might need it later."

Bugs, dust, mildew and chaos creep into your, now old, attic. You pull out your hair. The attic isn't even much good for storage anymore. It's messy, you can't find stuff and you can barely walk around. Most of what you pull out, no longer functions properly. Aaargh!

You realize you need to start over and you fantasize about a new, clean storage space. "Wouldn't a clean, new attic, filled with things like my (now old, moth-eaten) vinyl record collection, be great? (Since it's your fantasy, the record albums aren't old any more, they're in the same condition they were when you first stored them).

This scenario may be a fantasy for your attic, but it can be reality for your - similarly afflicted - computer.

Unlike your attic, you can start over with your computer's operating system. Just like it was 'brand new'. Remember? Bug-free, clean and functioning? Better still, you can also have spanking new copies of the programs you use, the settings you've tweaked, your bookmarked favorites, special fonts, treasured pictures, important documents and other precious data.

Best of all ... you don't have to spend days laboring to reinstall Windows (and the billion updates that came after). Nor do you have to reinstall every program, re-tweak the settings (if you can even remember where they are), or installing hardware and their pesky drivers. In less than an half an hour, in most cases, you can 'start over' with a 'brand new' computer!

Sound too good to be true? I'm here to say it's possible. All you have to do is purchase and use a disk imaging back-up program by Symantec called "Norton Ghost".

Reimage using Norton Ghost

Randsco is "published" in a French textbook, a Florida reader sent Scott a Penn State baseball hat and Oklahoma's Red Dirt Emporium donated generously to Randsco. (Hmmm ... maybe it's time I find a way to say "thanks" to everyone that's helped Randsco ... here's a start)

Some Recent Kudos

October has been another milestone month for Randsco.com. In addition to setting new records for visitation and Google AdSense revenue, there have been a number of other, off-site developments.

Two of those arrived by mail. First, we received a hard-back book. Randsco.com is now "published"! (One of our online photos was used in the book). Second, just yesterday, Scott received a surprise package. (No, it wasn't a bomb ... it was a Penn State baseball cap! We surmise that it's a "thank you" for the Geographically Challenged article, since it arrived without a note).

The other recent event was an generous, unsolicited donation - (donations of any kind, are a rare event) - by a company in Oklahoma, for the use of the Photo-caption Zoom technique.

Over the years, we've received a variety of unsolicited, creative "thank you's" for helping with HTML code, PHP scripts and/or our CSS techniques. Two that come to mind are a hand-made Afghan rug, which we received from a U.S. Army helicopter pilot stationed in Afghanistan and the other, an Opera CD sent by a Dane, living in Spain, who's wife is a singer.

We've had it on our "to-do" list to add a section that says "thanks" for all the people that have donated, contributed or helped Randsco.com in a meaningful way. This post is a way of biting the bullet and just "starting", though it will take some time to construct something more finalized and formal.

To find out more about our plans for "thank you's" and the story behind the book, the hat and the Oklahoma PZ3 donation ... carry on

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