Crazy Croutons

“Y'all need to get your shit together! You hear me, humans? Your shit is all outta whack! You're all over the place like a bunch of crazy croutons and tomatoes in a crazy salad!” *



Patrick Renner's
public bookmarks on weird stories, beautiful products, loud music and stunning images.


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October 16
Comic book grammar and tradition

Should I ever write comics again, I will have to consult this website to maintain comic grammar standard conformity. Astonishing read - I agree to every line but never thought of this as actual rules.
October 10
“ Shake it, shake it like a Polaroid Song lyrics our children won’t understand any more
October 9
“Dream Product”

More fun with remote controls.
October 1
Monome goes mainstream

A clone of the open-source-grid-button-interface “Monome” is now commercially available as a controller for the live performance software Ableton Live. Train your fingers, the grid of buttons becomes a real instrument! (watch the video for a live demo)

 
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“Ogori cafe”

Little story about a fun cafe concept from Japan and the surprised guys from Panic.com running into it.
September 28

Silence on port 22

We are running some Linux-based root servers for our development infrastructure for quite a while and have been constantly annoyed by dictionary- and brute-force-attacks via ssh (up to thousands per day on weekends).

The most important rules to not getting hacked are:

  • Use good passwords, for every user (login: “test”, password “test”, you know what I mean…).
  • Don’t allow “technical” users (such as apache, daemon, mail, etc.) to login with a shell (configured in /etc/passwd).
Then you don’t get hacked with the first few dictionary attacks.

Some passive solutions that might not work for everyone:

  • No ssh login with passwords, only via key authentication (secure but not practical, if you have to login from lots of (public) machines) and/or
  • don’t allow root to login directly via ssh anyway (hides at least the root login from login attacks) and/or
  • change port for ssh from 22 to something weird (which reduces the number of attacks but counts as security by obscurity).
We finally chose one of the semi-active solutions: These tools will analyze the system logs and block traffic from addresses with too many failed login attempts. This prevents attackers trying too often, saves traffic and load and is much easier to configure than a laborious ruleset for a firewall.
September 25
Igudesman & Joo: “Mozart Bond” from “A Little Nightmare Music”

Also great:

September 24
The Ultimate Productivity Blog

Go, read it!
September 23
OK Computer goes dub


“It may be a sacrilege to even think so, but it’s possible that some listeners unable to warm up to Radiohead may even come to prefer this OK Computer from an alternative universe.”
Easy Star All-Stars: “Radiodread”
Liked best: “Karma Police”, “Paranoid Android”


 
September 17

Search and interest

Andreas Wacker posted a few interesting numbers of his recordings of Google’s result counts for search terms.

Apple: was: 5,920,000 today: 342,000,000 57x
Microsoft: was: 15,000,000 today: 503,000,000 33x
Linux: was: 27,500,000 today: 301,000,000 11x

was: September 2000, today: September 2009

September 6
“World peace? You are searching for world peace?” - The German “Zeit” newspaper relaunched their website. Modern layout, but the adwords campaign needs improvement.

“World peace? You are searching for world peace?” - The German “Zeit” newspaper relaunched their website. Modern layout, but the adwords campaign needs improvement.

August 30
Less features, DIY. Some companies think about such stuff first. [via swissmiss]

Less features, DIY. Some companies think about such stuff first. [via swissmiss]

August 29
Design by Iteration

A few months ago I mentioned the design of ConvertBot, a unit converter App for the iPhone. The first impression of the design was great, but using it became a pain. Lots of units are missing and I never really got used to the circled main widget for choosing units.

Today I found a blog entry “Convert design evolution” of the making of a new Converter App (iTunes Link) by TapTapTap. No question, you now have the second (and much more important) ingredient for great design: iteration.
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“How many minutes to earn the price of a Big Mac?”
The Economist adds a new metric to the over 20 years old Big Mac Index. The old BMI compares the value of different currencies (with some limitations), the new RBMI now compares the value of work in different countries.

Don’t expect any surprises.
 

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flxldn:

Japanese Laughingbot. Good enough for my daily dose of wtf. [via BoingBoing]
In Germany you can say “for laughing he’s going into the basement”, if someone’s lacking humor. The engineer at the end of the video found a technical solution for that.