smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Mr Hunt has re-launched cameron i/o.

“I’ve run this website on Tumblr since May 2007. But starting today I’m switching to Chyrp, a new lightweight blogging engine. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, or browse my photos on Flickr, you probably have no idea I’ve been planning this.”

Grey hues never looked so good — the refresh brings subtle improvements to imagery and typography alike — resulting in a more polished presentation.

It’s also great to see that chyrp is still quietly achieving very cool things in the self-hosted tumble log space, boasting features and functionality similar to that of tumblr and like services.

Looks great Cameron - props on the change and design!

Richard has updated his typographic tumblr theme to version 2.

“I’ve made all the changes outlined in the previous post now. I’ve also moved a few things around — I’ve applied the theme here, if you want to see the changes.”

A typographically focused tumblr theme, made finer still, with exceptional font choices — it’s great seeing bold use of larger font sizes.

Jesper provides a translation of the highly-spun SQL Server 2008 Launch and Release Dates.

“Where by “goal”, we mean the new goal, not the old goal. Not that the new goal wasn’t the old goal all along.”

The original public relations masterpiece in double-talk and nothingness spun into 400+ words is right here.

I must confess, by the second-to-last paragraph I actually believed stabbing my eyes out with a plastic spork, repeatedly, would provide relief.

Alas, I can still see and the original article is still just as full of nondescript horse-shit — at least the Waffle was an entertaining read.

Shawn Blanc writes one of the best review pieces I’ve had the pleasure to read in a long time:

For the past several weeks as I’ve been writing this article I have used nothing but Coda for web designing, and it has broken my age-old habits of CMD TABbing between multiple apps.

It’s an absolute epic. It will take you some time to read through the entire article — indeed i read it thrice — but the result is an intimate understanding of why Coda is stealing hearts everywhere. And yet to call it a review somehow still lands short of the mark.

The best insight into Coda you will read, ever.

Mr Hunt, with help from Mr Blanc, has been busy minting an icon for your iPhone:

Most people have Mint in a subdirectory like /mint. This is a problem if you want to set an iPhone favicon for your root domain but change the favicon in subdirectories. This is because the iPhone looks in the root directory for the icon. That is, unless you tell it different.

I watched the idea bounce back-and-forth over twitter and then realised how a) twitter allows for such free form conversations and b) how the iPhone has become such an integral, every-day part of peoples lives.

Sometimes I wish I had an editor, perhaps Jason could do with one too:

“After all, Matt Drudge is teasing the story with an invented quote: “STRAIN OF SUPERBUG ‘MAY BE NEW HIV’…” But that language doesn’t actually appear anywhere, much less in the Reuters summary to which he links..”

Says Kottke who prefaces the exposé on Drudge’s take on the Reuters story (queue editor) with the headline “The Mania Over Gay Flesh-Eating Super-Staph” — which doesn’t appear in his own commentary either.

Indeed the original source article does suggest possible bias and the need for further study and investigation as part of it’s preface.

No offence Jason, or more correctly, Choire — if you’re going to call-to-task inflammatory headlining and inventive story-telling, using such a title yourself calls into question your supposed indignation of the same.

Mr Drudge may well be inventing quotes, but I call pot-kettle-black on your headline in return — it’s no less “sensationalised”.

Update: .. and I’ll call mea-culpa on this — thanks brett — apologies to Jason Kottke, this was a piece written by Choire Sicha. The comment still stands, but I didn’t notice it was a guest writer opinion piece.

Dougal notes that he has ditched the daily Twitter posts:

“Just as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary.”

By all that is precious in this world, thank-you. If I want to read your tweets, I’ll follow you. If I want to see your daily del.icio.us hoarding, I’ll subscribe to that feed too.

Blogs that I once read every day — often with quite some anticipation — have become at best a catch-all for random comment, pointless new-media fads and scraped mindless regurgitation, all of which have their own place and time.

I cannot help but echo Shawn Blanc, who perhaps said it best — “I want to read what you have to say.”

Bill Israel on learning better RSS management:

“I treat RSS with undeserving priority, and this causes two big problems: 1) I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to read, flag, or ‘mark as read’ all new RSS items as they come in, and 2) I’ll go to absurd lengths to ensure I have zero unread items whenever I walk away from a computer.”

“This compulsion has reached the point of being a real problem, and I’m finally taking steps to rectify it.”

So begins Bill’s quest to tame the inbox and regain some control. Whilst I have cut down a lot of redundant technology related feeds, I’m still in the denial stage.

I can stop when ever I want. Honestly.. I can. Oooh, Google Reader you’ve got more stuff for me to read? Marvellous.

— d’oh.

Yet another reminder that Gizmodo is little more than a haven for jackasses:

“CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop.”

Powering off a few static-display panels? Mildly amusing. Lets be honest.

Repeatedly killing off actual presentations, interrupting interactive sessions and generally wasting everyone else’s time, to then brag about not really being sorry at all? Just plain stupid.

It’s always funny until you’re the one at the receiving end. I doubt the Gizmodo team would have found it quite as comical if one of their party was ejected from CES, then another, then another.. the organisers just not able to stop.

Seth on dumbing down products:

The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?
Dumb customers.

This is very true — to a point. Sure, one person can be smart, forward thinking, adventurous and a potential zealot for the cause. One person can cope with far more than we might naturally expect.

But a group of people can be dumb, staunchly conservative, quick to assume, easily scared and in some cases, downright dangerous. That may sound like a harsh critique, but I assure you that isn’t the case. It’s part of a group instinct, something that ensures longevity and safety.

And no matter what business or service you provide, some won’t care about the mechanics, or features. They just want product A to fit need B. How that happens is entirely irrelevant.

“Dumbing down” a product or service doesn’t work, Seth is bang on there. However, neither is pitching it with an Einstein-like intellect. Balance the delivery and temper it with an understanding of your target market, or audience.

When you know what customers want and how they think or react as a group, you’ll know how best to deliver.

MacHeist have released this year’s bundle:

“Last year’s bundle caused a frenzy in the Mac community, selling over 16,000 copies in a week. This year, we’re setting our sights a little higher, with a larger bundle, a two week sale, and what we believe to be a stronger collection of apps. Simply put, this is the best Mac software deal in history.”

I see some neat stuff here, even as a newly minted part-time Mac user I can recognise a few sweet deals in the mix that make it a tempting offer. Then there are the claims that a percentage will go to charity — always a crowd pleaser.

However, interest is tainted by previous antics in which much tom-foolery, claim, counter-claim and questions of ethics occurred, leading one to wonder just how much of a ‘deal’ this really is.