I’ve been working on getting together a useful style sheet template that I can use for my entire site, including blogs and other extensions in the future. To ensure that the site is compatible with a large number of different browsers and platforms, I’d like to keep it very simple and clean. Therefore, I’ve tried to use just text and backgrounds which are loosely associated, and still look nice even if the layout or fonts that the user or user’s browser chooses are different. To get the greatest information density on a single page, I’ve opted for a flat information structure, where most parts of the site are directly accessible from the home page. An external style sheet should help make it easy to change the site in the future, so that improvements to the layout will automatically propagate down to other pages.
There’s still quite a bit of work to do. I’d like my blog pages to use the main style sheets, but right now I’m still dependent on the templates that Moveable Type uses. While these are easy to change and make similar, it would be nicer to really have them looking to the master style sheet at the top level so that changes would only need to be made one time.
LED is on when switch (bare wires at top) is open. Closing the switch causes the light to go out. Boring on the outside, rich with possibilities on the inside.
Flashes the LEDs in sequence. Very pretty.
Step 4. A blinking light, with a physical source for the oscillation. A photocell under the fan acts as a variable resistor. The potentiometer varies the speed of the fan. As the blades turn, the photocell receives more or less ambient light, causing the LED to flicker. It was hard to get the fan to turn slowly enough for this effect to be apparent, so I removed many of the blades on one side. This helped quite a bit.
Step 3. Variable resistance made the LED vary in brightness. Careful not to turn the pot too far down, ’cause the LEDs blow up. Maybe it would be safer to have a little resistor in this circuit. But in this photo, we’re living on the edge….
Step 2. It was almost impossible to see three lights in this circuit, so I went back to two for this photo.
Step 1. The circuit in action with momentary switch.
It’s always informative to read the news two years later. Andrew Boyd’s depiction of a brave new wired world empowering grassroots activism must have read as a hopeful herald of more democratic times. Today, alas, is reads more like a casualty list for the political left. The Iraq war (which he depicts prematurely as “over”) hardly seemed to notice the two massive marches that he describes. Howard Dean’s campaign foundered as soon as Iowans began to vote. Even the huge protest turnout at the 2004 Republican National Convention resulted in yet another term for George W. Bush, along with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress. So if online electronic organizing is so effective, where’s the beef?
Continue reading ‘Discounting the Message’
Ventured up to 59th and 6th at 9:30 this morning to experience Janet Cardiff’s “Her Long Black Hair” with my wife and her friend. There was a huge crowd even though the audio kiosk had not yet arrived. Apparently the principle of scarcity was in action here. It was the last weekend to check out a headset for free and follow Cariff’s journey through south-east Central Park. The experience took about 30 minutes and lead from CPS up to the Bethesda Fountain. Along the way, we heard audio from a CD player and were occasionally instructed to look at one of five location photographs.
Continue reading ‘Her Long Black Hair’
