“Old maps are filled with inaccuraciesórivers running a wrong course, cities placed incorrectly, coastlines lacking bays, and mountains, lakes and islands missing completely. The mistakes in old maps are one of the primary aspects which makes them interesting to us, and much of the history of cartography is the history of the correction of these errors. One category of cartographic error consists of what are called ëgeographic myths.í These are geographic features that appear on the map but not on the earth…” (Thanks The Map Room!)

“Make brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. Make is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. This is a magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.”

“he law firm of Leventhal Senter & Lerman provides a PDF file that describes the marketing rules for the big game in Houston: Broadcasts and Promotions Related to Super Bowl XXXVIII.”

“Foreword is a community in the service of books and book design, with authors in the US and UK.”

“Whenever anyone publishes one of these lists, there’s always a wave of griping about how worthless lists are. Then everyone makes a list of what’s wrong with this particular list. Personally, I like lists. I figure that having a list in hand of the century’s greatest books gives me something to look for at the book store. If I fancy myself a film critic and I haven’t seen #14 on the list of greatest films, then maybe I had better hike to the video store.”

“At first, David Coursey wasn’t quite sure what to make of a visual planning tool called MindManager. But he found that its “mind mapping” technique helps bring clarity to people with lots of ideas and a desire to sort them out.”

“Those who were at Digital Design World in Seattle this year saw me present a session titled, ‘No More Tables, CSS Layout Techniques’. In that session, we reviewed proper use of tables, and a few pointers for styling them with CSS. Then we turned to tableless layout, reviewing examples and an overview of the two basic approaches (positioning and floats). Half way through the presentation, I switched gears and announced weíd be converting a real-world example from tables and spacer gifs to a pure CSS layout. I could have created a fictitious example to work with in the presentation. But that idea would have seemed too contrived. If I created my own example, it would have been nice and tidy. Everything would have rendered exactly as I wanted it to, staying free and clear of any ìtrouble spotsî I already knew to avoid. Fictitious wasnít good enough. I wanted a real challenge. So I chose the site of a small, local-to-the-Seattle-area company I thought a few of the attendees in the audience might be familiar with: Microsoft.”

“The Wall Street Journal’s venerable Walt Mossberg spends some time with the unattractively-named Network Walkman NW-HD1 from Sony, and compares it to Apple’s fourth generation iPod. And he finds that the product’s name is the least of its problems.”

“Along with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other good hackers. Great hackers tend to clump together ó sometimes spectacularly so, as at Xerox Parc. So you won’t attract good hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create for them. The tendency to clump means it’s more like the square of the environment. So it’s winner take all. At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren’t one of them, you won’t just have fewer great hackers, you’ll have zero.”

“Integrity? Screw it, integrity is history. The image is no longer the capture of a instantís light and colour, itís, well… whatever you and Photoshop make of it.”

“The most important thing about a brainstorming session is what happens after it ends. No matter how poorly you run a brainstorming meeting, some decent ideas will surface. But depending on what happens after the session, those ideas may or may not impact anything. So while you can read books and take courses on better brainstorming techniques, the most important thing is figuring out how the brainstorming session fits into the larger decision making process you or your team has. Even if you fix how you run the meeting itself, and get better ideas, if you canít migrate them into the decision making process for the project, whatís the point? With this central point in mind, the following essay covers how to run brainstorming sessions in a way that is most likely to be effective afterwards.”

“Over the last three years, Professor Farid and his students have become experts at forgery, making hundreds of images that look authentic but have in fact been digitally tweaked. License plate numbers are changed. A single stool standing on a checkerboard floor is suddenly a pair of stools. Dents on a car are wiped away with a few mouse clicks. The skillful tampering disturbed the images in ways that the human eye could not detect. But Professor Farid says his algorithms can spot them and sound the alarm.”

“Those irritating ringmarks that mugs and cups leave… well, you can turn them into a nice floral pattern now with a set of Stamp Cups. The pattern on the base of the cup match up so you can join as many marks as you want.”

“The biggest Free Shell list on the net. They are a non-profit organizations. They provide all kind of free services for the Internet Community, so don’t hack them!”

“When something stands between your users and their goals, one of two things typically happens. If they truly wish to accomplish their goal with your site, they will perceive a new feature on your site as damage, they will find a way to route around that damage. If they are ambivalent about you or know of an alternative, they will just leave.”