Month: November 2013

Snowflakes, close-up

A few years ago I posted the link to SnowCrystals.com, which had a whole lot of photographs of snowflakes.  It’s time to have a fresher look at the beauty of those ice crystals up-close.  Via kottke.org, I came across this Flickr collection of close-up images of snowflakes done by photographer Alexey Kljatov.

snowflakes

Some are extremely simplistic in structure.  The others are the opposite – incredibly complicated.  Some are by alone, all by themselves.  Yet others are in groups.  But all of them amazingly unique and beautiful.  And available in larger image sizes too.

Space technologies on Earth

A few days ago I had one of those drunk conversations on the importance of space exploration.  A chunk of it was spent on trying to remember and figure out which technologies do we enjoy now that were initially develop for or during space missions.  Today, on this slow Saturday afternoon, I remembered the conversation and had a brief look around.  There are plenty of websites that show the top 10 or just a random collection of technologies that improved live on Earth, after being used in space.  But I think the better, all around, one is the Wikipedia page on NASA spin-off technologies.

There are quite a few things listed there, grouped and categorized under health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer, home, and recreation, environment and agriculture, computer technology, and industrial productivity.

WordPress 3.8 plans responsive redesign of admin area

WordPress 3.8 beta 1 has been announced a couple of days ago.  As always, lots of fixes and improvements are making their way to the new version.  But for me personally, the major change is the planned redesign of the admin area with responsive layout and support for mobile:

The new admin design, especially the responsive aspect of it. Try it out on different devices and browsers, see how it goes, especially the more complex pages like widgets or seldom-looked-at-places like Press This. Color schemes, which you can change on your profile, have also been spruced up.

Why is this so important? – you might wonder.  After all, there are native WordPress apps for both iOS and Android.  The thing here is that some WordPress themes and plugins modify the admin interface, and these changes aren’t supported by the mobile apps.  For example, when writing a new post, post formats might be different between what’s supported by the web admin interface and mobile interface.  With a responsive web design of admin interface, I’ll be able to use the web interface on my mobile and thus have the same options.  It’s possible to do it now with a table – where the screen is slightly larger, but using it on the mobile currently is the pain in the back.  So, that’s why I’m looking forward to WordPress 3.8.