The Lego Steampunk Group Pool on Flickr features some amazing Lego Steampunk creations.
Month: May 2009
Z.O.M.B.I.E.S. from October Toys
October Toys sells its Z.O.M.B.I.E.’s (Zillions of Mutated Bodies Infecting Everyone) in green, blue, white and glow-in-the dark for $5/set. It even has a game built around the plastic undead critters.
Long Term Browser Usage Trends
Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler made some waves when he posted this graph based on data from Net Applications Browser Market Share report.
The most obvious feature is the steady decline of Internet Explorer’s market share from 90 percent in 2004, to just around 66 percent today. Firefox and Safari are the two browsers that have gained most from Microsoft’s losses.
One way to look at this is the glass is 2/3rds empty — the vast majority of Internet users still use crappy Internet Explorer despite all of its problems, security issues, etc. On the other hand, the 1/3 glass full view is that this is a phenomenal achievement. As one of the commenters to Dotzler’s post notes,
It is [a bit depressing that IE’ share is still so high], but then you have to remember these are percentages of the whole web-using population. A few percent a year equates to millions of users switched. When you consider that it has happened without OS-bundling, without huge paid marketing campaigns, and without major web sites mandating particular browsers, then it’s actually an incredibly impressive rate of adoption. Even as it stands, the market share of non-IE browsers is enough to keep Microsoft honest, and force them into a more proactive and standards-friendly approach. IE8 may still be way behind the competition in many areas, but at least it pays far more attention to web standards than any previous IE release, and we have Firefox and Safari to thank for that.
Universal Edit Button Extension to Firefox
Andrea Gohr is trying trying to put some momentum behind the Universal Edit Button extension for Firefox. As Gohr puts it,
The idea is simple: whenever you are on an editable website (usually a wiki), your borwser should display an icon just like it does when you’re on a website with an RSS feed.
Gohr stepped in and took the existing FF addon for this and fixed some bugs and other issues and it is now in the experimental repository. Gohr is hoping enough people will check it out and review it to have it moved to the regular Firefox Extension area.
TinyURL Decoder Greasemonkey Script
TinyURL Decoder is a Greasemonkey script that will decode links from TinyURL, etc., and show where the link ultimately goes before you click on it.
Shockingly Simple Favicon WordPress Plugin
Shockingly Simple Favicon is a plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to add/update a favicon without having to edit template files, etc. It can also put a different icon for any admin pages, so when you’ve got 129 tabs open, like I currently do, you can tell which of the tabs of your site are the site itself and which ones are to admin area.