Uncredited

It’s time to change our password habits.

“Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.”

Nicely illustrated by XKCD.

Adobe does math.

I’ve been using Illustrator for 12+ years, and although I may bitch about it frequently, every now and then I learn something new about it that improves my productivity.

Today I learned that the Transform tool does simple math. Need to add 86px to a box element? Put down the calculator and simply type ‘+86’ in the Transform tool. It also handles subtraction, multiplication and division.

Who knew and old dog could teach me new tricks?

Spicing up your site with some great free fonts.

Google Web Fonts recently updated their look & feel and bumped their collection to 190+ free fonts.

Personal favourites

• Rokkitt - Strong slab-serif font, looks great for headers.
• Swanky & Moo Moo - Great for that sketched look.
• Open Sans - A nice substitute for Lucida Grande or Arial.

If that’s not enough for you, check out the great free @font-face kits at FontSquirrel. They’ve even got an app that converts any of your fonts into @font-face compatible formats (which is surely against the license of most fonts).

My favourite icon sets.

There are a ton of great icon sets available for iPhone and general webdesign. Here are a couple of my favourites.

Glyphish - A nice collection of useful silhouette icons in vector format (Free > $25)

Glyphicons - Another nice collection of vector silhouette icons (Free > $50)

Fugue - 3000+ tiny, full colour icons, in PNG format (Free > $60)

IconSweets2 - Another nice set of vector icons (in psd format), free for personal & commercial use. (Free)

Icon Dock Social Media - Lovely full colour vector social media icons covering most popular sites. (Free)

Wide emails make MailChimp cry.

Apparently, making your email too wide, really, really hurts the MailChimp chimp.

This width is ok

but too wide and, pop! My arm!

AT&T’s Data Plans & Tethering

It’s easy to explain why iPhone tethering with AT&T costs $20 more, and gives you no additional data, they know that the average user will rarely be able to use 2GB of data with their phone alone, so they promise it, with no expectation that it will ever be used.

Once you add tethering to the mix, it becomes much easier to use that 2GB of data, so they’re charging you the extra $20 under the assumption that you will actually hit your allocated data cap.

If the average user’s data usage increases (without tethering), you can be sure the price for data will increase as well, since the $25 you’re paying now assumes you’ll really use 500MB (or less.)