Dan Jones

John Nettles with City Light Studios loves to do cosplay photo shoots with his son, Parker. In the past, he’s done a Ocarina of Time-themed shoot with his son, and for their latest cosplay project, the father-son duo partnered up with Ariane of Craft Cat Cosplay to do a Skyward Sword-themed photoshoot. The set turned out to be pretty darn cute.

Check out some more pics after the break…

Thanks for the pics, John! Send your pics to tips@fashionablygeek.com.

If you take the vocals from The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails and match them to the beats from Taylor Swift's Shake It Off, you get this little bit of magic:

Update: I totally forgot I'd previously featured this awesomeness: NIN's Head Like a Hole vs. Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe. Also of note: Mark Romanek directed the videos for Shake It Off and The Perfect Drug. (via ★interesting, @sarahmakespics, and mark)

I like Dan Na's introduction here:

Naively, CSS appears easy to comprehend — it doesn't have many programming constructs, and it's a declarative syntax that describes the appearance of the DOM rather than an executable language. Ironically it's this lack of functionality that can make CSS difficult to reason about.

I've tried to make the pitch the preprocessing makes CSS easier (not harder) myself.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Transitioning to SCSS at Scale is a post from CSS-Tricks

Comic Transcript: 

weloveblackgirls:

chocolate-xstasy:

homet0wn:

J. Cole on ‘good cops’ x The Combat Jack Show

He explained it so perfect

I’ve never even thought about it this way

From the Physics arXiv Blog, a list of paradoxes in modern cosmological physics, i.e. areas where theory and observation disagree, sometimes by a whopping 120 orders of magnitude.

Perhaps the most dramatic, and potentially most important, of these paradoxes comes from the idea that the universe is expanding, one of the great successes of modern cosmology. It is based on a number of different observations.

The first is that other galaxies are all moving away from us. The evidence for this is that light from these galaxies is red-shifted. And the greater the distance, the bigger this red-shift.

Astrophysicists interpret this as evidence that more distant galaxies are travelling away from us more quickly. Indeed, the most recent evidence is that the expansion is accelerating.

What's curious about this expansion is that space, and the vacuum associated with it, must somehow be created in this process. And yet how this can occur is not at all clear. "The creation of space is a new cosmological phenomenon, which has not been tested yet in physical laboratory," says Baryshev.

What's more, there is an energy associated with any given volume of the universe. If that volume increases, the inescapable conclusion is that this energy must increase as well. And yet physicists generally think that energy creation is forbidden.

Baryshev quotes the British cosmologist, Ted Harrison, on this topic: "The conclusion, whether we like it or not, is obvious: energy in the universe is not conserved," says Harrison.

This is a problem that cosmologists are well aware of. And yet ask them about it and they shuffle their feet and stare at the ground. Clearly, any theorist who can solve this paradox will have a bright future in cosmology.

Luckily, these paradoxes are an opportunity to do some great science.

Lady on the bus next to me: Tell me again- what are you not going to do in daycare today?
Little boy: I will not hit the teacher with a light saber.
Lady: And why are you not going to hit her with a light saber?
Boy: It is my toy, and my choice, but if I hit her with the light saber, I'm acting like a Sith.
Lady: Do you want to be a Sith?
Boy: No! I am Obi-Wan!

Today, LDS.org got a new look, the first in a series of improvements to make it more personalized and easy to use.

This update includes four improvements:

1. Visual Update

You will notice a change in the appearance. LDS.org now has crisp, new fonts and a white background. (If you still see some pages with the blue background, you may need to refresh your browser to see the new pages. Press F5.)

2. New Selector for My Account and Ward

In the upper right corner, a new My Account and Ward selector replaces the Sign-In/Tools link. It provides options in an easier-to-read, more mobile-friendly drop-down menu.

3. New Selectors for Country and Language

In the upper right corner, you can now more easily select a different language or find local content for your area on the country communication pages (country websites). The country communication pages will now include the same navigation menus found on LDS.org.

4. New Search Options on Country Pages

On the country communication pages, you can now choose whether to search local content only or all of LDS.org.

Upcoming Improvements

Future improvements will include a completely new menu and navigation, to be similar to that found in the Gospel Library mobile app.

Feedback

Ever-changing technology and Church needs mean that LDS.org will continue to evolve over time. But we want to be sure that LDS.org meets your needs, so we invite your feedback. Simply scroll to the bottom of any page on LDS.org and select Feedback.

Learn more in the article “LDS.org Appearance, Menus to Evolve Over Time.”

I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. Not these ghosts anyway. This “Ghosts, Busted” design depicts all of the best pop culture ghosts getting caught in a Ghostbuster trap.

You can pick either a tote bag or a t-shirt with the image. On a side note, poor Space Ghost–first he loses his talk show, and then he gets captured by the Ghostbusters. Hollywood can be rough, huh?

Check out some more pics after the break…

Product Page: ($15.00)

The following is a post by Lucas Bebber. Lucas the originator of some of the most creative effects I've ever seen on the web. So much so I couldn't resist blogging about them myself several times. Much better this time: we got the man himself to explain how SVG filters work and how you can use them to create a very cool gooey effect.

A while ago, Chris wrote about Shape Blobbing in CSS. The effect is cool and the technique behind it is clever, but the approach, through regular CSS filters, has several drawbacks: no transparency, no content inside the blobs, hard to make it in any color besides black and white, etc.

However, these days, playing around with SVG filters, I figured I could use them to get around most of the problems of a pure CSS approach. Here you can see a gooey menu I made to demonstrate the effect:

See the Pen CSS Gooey Menu (Version 1) by Lucas Bebber (@lbebber) on CodePen.

SVG Filters 101

SVG filters are quite powerful. It is a pretty extensive topic. Here we will only cover the basics necessary to understand how this effect works.

Despite the name, we can apply SVG filters on regular DOM elements through CSS, in most browsers.

This is the basic syntax to define a filter:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
  <defs>
    <filter id="name-your-filter-here">
      ...          
      <!-- insert filters here -->
      ...
    </filter>
    ...
  </defs>
</svg>

To apply a SVG filter to a DOM element:

.selector {
  filter: url('#name-of-your-filter-here');

  /* you can also load filters from external SVGs this way: */
  filter: url('filters.svg#name-of-your-other-filter-here');
}

You may need vendor prefixes to use the filter property.

A <filter> element contains one or more filter primitives, which are the operations done by the filter, e.g. blur, color transform, shading. A complete list of filter primitives can be found here.

Let's see a couple of examples:

See the Pen svg blur demonstration by Lucas Bebber (@lbebber) on CodePen.

<filter id="blur">
  <feGaussianBlur in="SourceGraphic" stdDeviation="3" />
</filter>

This filter will do a single simple 3px blur on the object. Notice the in="SourceGraphic" attribute. The in attribute defines the input of a filter primitive. SourceGraphic is a keyword that returns the original, pre-filter graphic of the element. So what this means is that the input of the blur filter will be the original graphic of the object. Pretty straightforward.

Now let's see a common but more complex effect: a drop shadow filter. This will be useful in demonstrating how to chain filter primitives together:

See the Pen svg drop shadow demonstration by Lucas Bebber (@lbebber) on CodePen.

<filter id="drop-shadow">
  <feGaussianBlur in="SourceGraphic" stdDeviation="7" result="shadow" />
  <feOffset in="shadow" dx="3" dy="4" result="shadow" />
  <feColorMatrix in="shadow" mode="matrix" values="0 0 0 0 0  0 0 0 0 0  0 0 0 0 0  0 0 0 0.6 0" result="shadow" />
  <feBlend in="SourceGraphic" in2="shadow" />
</filter>

Take a look at the result attribute of the first filter and the subsequent in attributes. With the result attribute you can name the result of a filter and then apply a filter to that result instead of the source graphic. This allows you to, in this example, blur an object, darken the blurred object, and then shift the position of the blurred and darkened object.

Pay attention to the last element there, the <feBlend> primitive. It demonstrates that some filter primitives take multiple inputs (the in2 parameter), and that you can call the SourceGraphic keyword multiple times and at any point of the filter. That last filter, in this example, is taking both the SourceGraphic keyword and the shadow result to put back the original image over the shadow we made.

Now that the basics of SVG filters are covered, let's take a look at how to make that gooey effect.

Making Things Stick

The basic technique has been already covered here. To recap, the idea is to blur two or more objects together and increase the contrast. Pretty simple and works like a charm:

See the Pen metaballs demonstration by Lucas Bebber (@lbebber) on CodePen.

However, as we've seen before, this also

1. Messes the colors up, making it hard to do anything other than black and white.
2. Blurs the content together, making it unusable.
3. The container requires a background, so no transparency.

All in all, this makes this effect usually unpractical.

With SVG filters, though, we can do some things that were not possible with CSS filters alone: we can increase the contrast of only the alpha channel, not changing the colors; and we can, with the SourceGraphic keyword we've seen before, make the content visible as well. Also, since we're dealing with the alpha channel, not only it will be transparent, a transparent background is *required*, so be careful with that.

So this is the basic code:

<filter id="goo">
  <feGaussianBlur in="SourceGraphic" stdDeviation="10" result="blur" />
  <feColorMatrix in="blur" mode="matrix" values="1 0 0 0 0  0 1 0 0 0  0 0 1 0 0  0 0 0 18 -7" result="goo" />
  <feBlend in="SourceGraphic" in2="goo" />
</filter>

It's quite short, let's break it down:

1. First, we apply a 10px blur to the SourceGraphic and name that result.
2. Then, to the previous result, we apply a color matrix filter in order to increase the contrast of the alpha channel.
3. Finally, we insert the original graphics over the effect we made.

About Color Matrices

If you haven't used a color matrix filter before, it might need some explanation. You can think of it as a table of four rows and five columns. It looks like this:

   | R | G | B | A | +
---|-------------------
 R | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
---|-------------------
 G | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0
---|-------------------
 B | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0
---|-------------------
 A | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0
---|-------------------

Each row represents a channel (red, green, blue and alpha) and is used to set the channel's value. Each of the first four columns represents a channel as well, and they return the current value of their respective channels. A number in a cell, then, adds to its row channel the result of the multiplication of that number by the current value of the channel represented by its column. For example, a 0.5 on the row R, column G, will, for each pixel, add to the red channel the current value of green*0.5. The last column doesn't represent any channel and is used for addition/subtraction, meaning that a number there will add to its channel its value multiplied by 255.

That's a lengthy explanation, but using the filter is quite simple. In our case, since we are only increasing the contrast of the alpha channel, our matrix will look like this:

   | R | G | B | A | +
---|-------------------
 R | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
---|-------------------
 G | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0
---|-------------------
 B | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0
---|-------------------
 A | 0 | 0 | 0 |18 |-7
---|-------------------

This leaves the RGB channels unmodified, multiplies the value of the alpha channel by 18, and then subtracts 7*255 from that value, effectively increasing the contrast of the transparency alone. These values can be tweaked to your needs.

To apply this matrix to our feColorMatrix filter, all we have to do is write these numbers sequentially, like this:

values="1 0 0 0 0  0 1 0 0 0  0 0 1 0 0  0 0 0 18 -7"

Demo

And with that we have our basic effect ready! Here is it:

See the Pen svg goo effect demonstration by Lucas Bebber (@lbebber) on CodePen.

You can then customize it to your needs, like adding a drop shadow, using different colors for each element, or whatever have you!

Considerations

• The filter should be applied to the *container* of the elements, not to the elements themselves.
• The container should have some bleeding area, i.e., it should be a bit larger than its contents, otherwise you might get artifacts on the edges:
  

  

• To be able to apply this filter to pointy objects like rectangles, we have to take a slightly more sophisticated approach. Instead of just drawing the original image over the goo effect, we could use the feComposite filter with the atop operator to mask out anything outside the goo:

  <filter id="fancy-goo">
    <feGaussianBlur in="SourceGraphic" stdDeviation="10" result="blur" />
    <feColorMatrix in="blur" mode="matrix" values="1 0 0 0 0  0 1 0 0 0  0 0 1 0 0  0 0 0 19 -9" result="goo" />
    <feComposite in="SourceGraphic" in2="goo" operator="atop"/>
  </filter>

  See the Pen comparison between methods of applying the goo filter by Lucas Bebber (@lbebber) on CodePen.

  This way, we can use the filter not only to make that fancy goo effect, but also for simpler applications like, for example, rounding the corners of shapes that take multiple rectangles.

• This filter, although light in size, can be resource intensive if applied to large areas, so beware of that.

Support

SVG filters have good support, but not all browsers support them being applied to regular DOM elements, notably Safari. However, they do work at least on Firefox and Chrome, even the Android version, and the filter degrades nicely if it doesn't work. If you absolutely need the effect to work, consider using SVG elements instead of DOM elements.

The Gooey Effect is a post from CSS-Tricks

Russell Brandom, writing for The Verge:

Some of the web’s biggest companies have been paying to get around Adblock Plus, according to a new report from Financial Times. Microsoft’s Bing search ads and Taboola’s “recommended links” box are among the ads that are currently slipping through Adblock Plus’s filter, and FT confirms that it’s the intentional result of a paid deal between the makers of Adblock and the owners of the ads. According to FT sources, the companies have paid Eyeo (the maker of Adblock Plus) to be added to an official whitelist, which allows them to bypass the plug-in. Google has a similar deal, as has been previously reported.

How is this different from an extortion racket?

My Maps Pro is available for free and now Google Earth Pro is also free. Google Earth's business version can be downloaded from this page and you need a free license key, which is sent by email. It's worth pointing out that a Google Earth Pro license used to cost about $400 per year.

Google Earth Pro has a lot of advanced features that aren't available in the regular Google Earth:

* premium data layers for the US: demographic, parcel and traffic
* advanced GIS data importing features
* measure area, radius and circumference on the ground
* print high-resolution screenshot
* movie maker: record and save 3D imagery
* no more ads

This is an awesome story.

Girls Selfies by Lutfiyah Lutfi ( lutfiyahlutfi7 )

Get the best selfie app for girls……… Girls selfies!! You can get various accessories like lipsticks, hats, goggles, etc to look like an actress. You can get this awesome app from Google play store on your Android phone for free. You can easily upload your edited selfies to Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.

People are so stupid.

Hayley Tsukayama, reporting for The Washington Post back in August:

AOL considers itself an advertising and media company. But it still relies on 2.3 million dial-up subscription customers for the bulk of its profits.

The company’s latest earnings report on Wednesday showed that while the firm pulls in most of its revenue from advertising, it still makes the most money off the division that includes those old-fashioned dial-up subscribers.

They should have kept TUAW and shut down AOL. Jiminy. (Via Jim Lipsey.)

WASHINGTON – Pretending to be a police officer isn’t a great idea in the first place. Pulling over an actual police officer only makes matters worse.

According to Prince William County Police, a man driving a white Crown Victoria used a spotlight to get a car in front of him to pull over.

“The driver believed that he was being pulled over, so he lawfully stopped,” says officer Jonathan Perok, a spokesman for the department.

This happened early Thursday morning in the Dumfries area.

But instead of parking behind the vehicle and walking up like a typical traffic stop, the alleged phony cop drove right up next to the stopped car.

The other driver — an actual police officer — sensed something amiss.

“At that point, [he] identified himself as a police officer and actually showed his badge, which caused our suspect to flee the area,” Perok says.

Police were able to catch the alleged phony cop. He’s been charged with one count of impersonating an officer.

The post Fake cop attempts to pull over real cop in Virginia appeared first on WTOP.