Louis Rossetto, Wired co-founder, responds to a brilliant article about the history of the magazine. Reading Wired in the early 90s was like reading about the future, it was inspiring–in both its written form and how it looked (it was beautiful).

Make your Wordpress panel suck less. A lot less.

Mark Richard’s Core Memory project, a coffee table book on vintage computers (Thanks John).

A few¹ people² inspired³ me to refresh my site this week, after a few months of poorly focused layout changes. I had been trying to add icons and style to each type of post in my tumblelog, but it wasn’t working⁴. So I’ve nixed most of different tumble styles, waxed on the contrast, inserted more whitespace, and added Gruber-licious-styled wp-footnotes⁵⁶.

There’s one outstanding bug, though: the hover opacity isn’t working in Safari⁷. Anyone have any ideas?

1. I can never remember Steve’s new site name ↩
2. PK should post again ↩
3. Allen also reminded me of the footnote plugin ↩
4. Thanks Newb ↩
5. Again, thanks Allen ↩
6. And yes, I’m over using footnotes in this post ↩
7. But fine in IE/Firefox ↩

[stars: 5] Touching the Void. Do you think that your problems are difficult? Get a grip. This film will tear a strip off your back, and show you what the impossible looks like. And the impossible is possible, if you really want it. The story is a tale of unimaginable pain, facing death, and inspiration.

It’s funny how it goes. You use stuff, you find it useful, and you consider it pretty good. Then you use something else and a gap appears — what was pretty good now looks like crap, and you realize that your perception was warped. It happens to me all the time, and the resets are really cool. When I get a glimpse at something I really like, it refreshes my spidey senses and kicks my ass. And that’s a good thing.

So I spend most of my time in Windows Land. It’s ok. I’ve even pimped out my development machines with every tool I need. Then I boot my Ubuntu system at home and it kicks my ass. This is what real tools look like. I browse AmieStreet for some new tunes, and it kicks my ass again. It’s what browsing music should be like. Suddenly I’m inspired again. I queue up some tunes in Rhythembox, and it’s what iTunes should be like. Simple, solid, and does what I want. There’s inspiration everywhere, I just have to remember not to get stuck in the crap.

I’m tempted to buy a license of VMWare so I can boot my Windows development partition from a productive environment.

Here’s a strange, somehow inspiring French artist. You may also want to check out the interesting site and photoblog navigation style, it’s useful in an artsy sort of way. (Found on one of my favorite hip illustration sites, Drawn!.)

Tastespotting, a slick photo-food blog. Inspiration is difficult to do, but these guys do it well.

[stars: 5] Travels (Michael Crichton). A brilliant autobiography cast in short story form. I am motivated to think about life every time I read this, even though I find many of Crichton novels shallow and trite.  Each story is inspirational and provoking in a way that’s unexpected from this pop author.  Maybe his novels aren’t as trite as I thought.

[stars: 5] On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King). A motivating writing HOWTO wrapped in a downright interesting autobiography. The life story is worth the price of the book, as it’s both an insight into a great novelist and an inspirational tale of addiction and healing.