Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab brings us Million Dollar Blocks, a series of maps of American cities that show the cost of incarcerating residents of single city blocks. Shown above is Brooklyn, here’s New Orleans.
2009/08/24
“Making Policy Public”
The Center for Urban Pedagogy brings us a series of posters that “use graphic design to explore and explain public policy” in their Making Policy Public project. Their issues so far include one on predatory equity, a guide to street vending in New York (as seen above), a guide to the port system in the United States that helps longshoremen organize, and a guide to social security. They are good looking, and the idea is excellent. I haven’t read the posters (you can’t see the text online), so I don’t know what their politics are, or how well their topics are researched, so keep that in mind.
In a similar vein, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., executive counsel for the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times on August 19th about making health insurance policies easier for people to understand.
[via Candy Chang]
2009/08/08
The Lure of the Labyrinth
CJR and I have been playing a game that her dad worked on, Thinkport’s fantastic The Lure of the Labyrinth. I’d come across the game before and never got into it, but on the second go round, I can’t stop playing. It’s supposed to be for ~5th grade kids in math class, there’s a lot of pattern recognition and arithmetic. Games that are explicitly “educational” usually aren’t that interesting to kids, but remove that “educational” tag, and you’ve got kids at at least one Chicago Public Library absolutely loving Labyrinth (CJR, worried about the silly games that the kids in the branch she’s working at were playing on the library computers, introduced them to Labyrinth. It was, and still is, a hit). The game doesn’t need to be played in a classroom, you can just sign up with a Thinkport account and go. It’s also Flash, so no downloading files necessary (except for, ah, Flash). There are some tedious parts and I wish the user had keyboard control of the character, but these are small issues. I’d recommend checking it out yourself and telling the kids you know about it.
[Image is a screenshot from one of the first narrative sections of the game.]
Hot
It’s really hot in Chicago right now. 97 degrees on the heat index today, 102 – 107 on the heat index tomorrow. Puts a reënactment of last Sunday’s adventure that we were planning for tomorrow into question. [Forecast from Weather Underground, or closer to home from the top of Ryerson.]
Glass Trackpads
The glass trackpads on Macbook Pros make Photoshop and Illustrator almost unusable. Constant unintended rotation and zoom.
[Original image from Notebook Check]
2009/08/06
“Putin adjusts his hat”
2009/08/05
Brick
2009/07/22
Use The OS X DVD That Came With Your Mac To Install Boot Camp Drivers in XP.
We got a new MacBook Pro 15″ at work. I have been trying to install Windows XP SP3 on it with Boot Camp and was having some annoying problems with driver support. I’d do the Boot Camp Assistant stuff in Mac OS X (partitioning the hard drive), restart and install XP SP3 from its CD (taking care to format the Boot Camp partition in the Windows installer!), restart, put the Mac OS X Leopard retail DVD in the drive, run the Boot Camp Drivers Installer, restart, and nothing would happen. No hardware support for anything (not wireless, not the display, not sound, zip).
I reinstalled Windows once and reinstalled the Boot Camp drivers a bunch of times from the retail DVD. Nothing.
Somewhere on the internet just now (I can’t remember where, unfortunately), a single sentence fixed it. “Use the install DVD that came with the computer.” I uninstalled all Boot Camp stuff from the Retail DVD, popped in the DVD that came with the MacBook Pro, and magically, everything is working.
2009/07/14
Mystery Ranch, Put to the Test
I mentioned Dana Gleason’s Mystery Ranch backpacks in a post the other day. Here’s a story attesting to the quality of their packs written by a member of a hotshot crew in the Southwest.
The USPS, Your Box and You
I get packages all the time. I buy a lot of stuff on the internet. I always ship USPS because I live in a building where UPS, FedEx and DHL can’t get access to the lobby without you personally being there to buzz them in. The Postal Service, though, does have access to the lobby because that’s where they deliver our day-to-day mail. FedEx/etc. will either leave a notice that they stopped by, leave the package outside the door (on the street) or if you’re lucky, show up just as someone is entering or exiting the building, and they’ll pop it inside. A notice is a tough one, because good luck getting them to reschedule the delivery when you’re actually home. It’s a better bet to go get the package, which entails a bike ride somewhere and negotiations to get your package from the distribution center.
But the non-USPS carriers at least have package tracking figured out. The package tracking number tells you where your package is (or last was scanned) at all times, and is updated in real time. The UPS driver drops off your box to you and as he’s driving away you run upstairs and refresh the tracking page, and it says “Delivered.” The USPS does not work that way, or rather, sometimes they do. There are two different tracking-related products they sell: Tracking and Delivery Confirmation. Tracking is only available on more expensive shipping options (Express), Delivery Confirmation is generally available.
The above screenshot is from the delivery confirmation page for something I was expecting to arrive today. The package wasn’t there when I left the house after 7:15am, and it wasn’t there when I went home on my lunch break just now to go get it. Where is it? Well, as I discovered, “Unit” doesn’t mean your house. I’m not the first one to think it does. It turns out “Arrival at Unit” actually usually means arrival at the distribution point for the delivery zip code. For me, that means my box got to the 47th Street Post Office on Cottage Grove at 7:15am this morning, and is now roaming the greater north Hyde Park, south Kenwood area. It may show up today. It may show up tomorrow. This is the price you pay for Free Super Saver Shipping. (I think the confusion is probably still worth the ~$14 I save, especially now that I know what to expect.) More information on the USPS and their tracking and confirmation options is available in an eBay Guide here.