The beautiful leaves of canada is, well, beautiful. From the people who brought you little bits.

One of the problems with knowing a little about a lot of things is that you end up missing out on the subtle details of a lot of things.

And so it was with adjacent sibling selectors.

While I have received expert-level flack for my indentation of paragraphs here on the blog — I believe the criticism was along the lines of “that’s so print” — I simply cannot reconcile myself to using vertical space to separate paragraphs.

This style is not without its challenges. For the longest time I opened every blog post with:

just so the first paragraph wouldn’t include the standard 2em indent. Eventually I eliminated the need for this with better CSS:

That automagically removes the indenting from the first paragraph of a post. But I was still left with the issue of not wanting to indent the first paragraph following an image:

It turns out there was a really, really easy way to achieve this that I had absolutely no knowledge of: using an adjacent sibling selector:

In other words, “if a paragraph follows an image, then don’t indent it.” Neato. I’ve added similar logic for paragraphs following code blocks (like this paragraph), blockquotes, and lists.

Consider ruk.ca to be in flux this morning as I tinker. If all the text appears in yellow, or upside down, or in Arabic, have patience, as the change isn’t (likely) a permanent one. Normal people would make changes like this on a development server.

Just in case everyone in the world doesn’t know this already: if you are a member of a coop or credit union, and you buy your home heating oil from Coop Fuels, you qualify for their Member Rebate Program:

As a member of a co-op or credit union on PEI you will receive a rebate of 3.0 cents per litre. You will also receive a GST refund (on the amount of the rebate) on all your heating fuel purchased from Co-op Fuels Ltd.

We’ve been benefiting from this program for 15 heating seasons, and it’s not an insubstantial windfall: our last bill of the winter season, in May, is usually half of what it would have been otherwise.

Remember the crazy wheelchair symbol from the Fitzroy Parkade from a few weeks ago? Well an eagle-eyed reader pointed out that it’s been painted out of existence:

If I can make bad design go away simply by blogging about it, what should I set my sights on next?

At the Robertson Library at UPEI you can borrow an iPod and take a guided tour of the library. Unfortunately it’s not a service offered to civilians — you gotta be “faculty, staff, [or] students.”

Inspired by Ton and Robert, I’ve been playing with Qik, an application that runs on my Nokia N95 mobile phone that can stream live video from phone to the Internet. Here’s a video of Qik in operation:

Here’s the video I streamed live on Qik and here’s an RSS feed of all my Qik videos.

While it’s been possible to shoot video on mobile phones for a while, and it’s been possible to upload that video to places like YouTube and Google Video, using Qik takes the process to a whole other level: there’s literally nothing you need to do to make it work: you just turn it on and stream. So no transferring from phone to computer, worrying about format conversion, waiting for the video to upload: you just hit “Stream” on the phone, and you’re broadcasting.

Which means that the 4 ounce device in my pocket can now reflect my immediate surroundings to the world at large more quickly than almost any other technology.

While my Nokia N95 has a capable web browser, it’s screen is small enough that using the regular Plazes website to update my geopresence is cumbersome. And so I’ve created TinyPlazer.com:

The first time you visit the site, you enter you Plazes username and password; these are then saved in a cookie, and you don’t have to enter them again. From then on you simply type the name of a Plaze (or part of the name) and your status message. If the Plaze name you enter matches only one location then your presence is updated automatically; if it matches more than one, then you’re shown a list of matching Plazes and can select one.

I’ve created a Plazes Group for TinyPlazer adherents.

Photo by pterjan - some rights reserved.