Today I received the two copies of Paul Screeton's 'Tales of the Hexham Heads' I had ordered a few weeks ago from the printers. These are the only two copies of this edition in existence - it was a private project to convert the original, typewritten manuscript - with the author's permission - into a lovely, properly-typeset hardback book.
The project grew out of my interest in the tale of the Hexham Heads, two odd, carved heads discovered in a back garden in the Northern English town of Hexham. Wherever the heads went, strange phenomena followed - including sightings of a half-wolf, half-human entity.
Read on... »
I have been having a lot of fun with an app called LetterMpress, which is a virtual letterpress.
There aren't really any shortcuts; you have to arrange all the letters and secure them in place, just like the real thing. Then you pull the ink roller thing - okay, I haven't got all the terminology down yet - and, with a very satisfying sound, it prints your creation to an image file.
Here's my magnificent first creation. I'm not sure who I'd send it to.
CSS (cascading style sheets) is the means by which the web looks prettier now than it did in 1998. It's a language that makes it much easier to make webpages look good. The newest version, CSS3, isn't officially released yet, but basically works in the newest browsers. It's behind much of the cool stuff that snazzy webpages do.
Maybe it's just because of the shiny things it does, but CSS is pretty much the only computer language that continues to make me go 'wow'.
Anyway, here is my latest CSS discovery. I had a huge HTML table, generated by Excel, which I needed to quickly format with alternately-coloured rows for readability. I discovered there's a fantastic new pseudo-class called nth-child which will do this with just one line of code:
tr:nth-child(odd) { background-color: #eee; }
Thanks to Ash Mann for then pointing me to this monster article about all the new pseudo-classes in CSS3.
