Some friends recommended I take a look at Society6 because they produce some quality large size art prints. But I chose their shop because they also produce iPhone, iPad and laptop skins. On top of the prints and skins they also produce T-Shirts, triple win.

I spent the weekend putting together some custom views of my Deadly Furry Cute work which I hope will look nice on your walls, phones and computers. I’ve already placed some orders for friends and family, I’ll keep you posted on the quality, but all signs point towards great items.

The below print, titled ‘Class Photo’, was selected by the Society6 team to feature in their store front. Many thanks to them for the nod and the added exposure to potential customers.

I’m going to be working on some new exclusive illustrations for the shop over the next few months. Until then, here are some samples from the store. Head over and view the whole shop at Society6.

Since I started working over at Ranker.com I’ve enticed a lot of friends into making lists, and it’s starting to payoff. I was stuck for some geek birthday ideas and reached out for some help, in return I received a bunch of lists with great ideas. Some of the lists venture into the down-right nerdy, but good gifts just sometimes are! We’ll start in my favorite place…

15 Star Wars gifts your nerd will love

This list has everything you need for your fellow Star Wars geek. The list has the obvious Lightsabers as its number 1, but has some nice other additions, I definitely have to get one of those RC Millennium Falcons!  Update: it looks like voting has been turned on so you can check the items if you agree with the addition.

The Sexiest Female Super Hero Statues

Everyone has that friend who collects all the sexy status, here’s a list of gifts just for them! Personally I’m a Zoid/Mecha collector, but I did throw my votes on the items. It’s a travesty Rogue isn’t number 1! That Barbra Gordon addition is also a little weird…

The Greatest Geek Gifts

If you need general gift geekery this list has some potential. I’m particularly interested in the solar power conversion kits. Arkham Horror is also an interesting addition, I own the game and would recommend it, triple read those crazy rules though!

I’m not intending to repost the work a number of fine articles have already done, I’ll be giving you my perspective on some of the steps to take, each site I’ve referenced will be attributed and I highly recommend you read each in full. I’ll also give you an overview of some extra steps I took after this site was attacked.

Secure config.php

Right after installation you’ll want to secure access to your WordPress config by adding some protection to your .htaccess file. Smashing Magazine’s article on security tweeks can tell you exactly what you’ll need to to, but this is one of the most important step you can do.

Remove that admin user

This should be the second thing you do right after you’ve installed WordPress. Changing the admin user might not seem like an important step at first glance. But with a few easy steps and 2 minutes work you’ve just put an extra barrier between you and someone trying to gain access to your admin area. Instructions.

Use the Secure WordPress plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/secure-wordpress/
This plugin covers a lot of smaller bases listed in a few different places. Smashing, WordPress.org and a number of other sites recommend many of these techniques. This plugin just makes the whole process even easier.

Open for attack

Many attacks are levied against websites on a daily basis, big and small, personal and commercial a like. This site wasn’t the first and wont be the last. It’s somewhat true when people say you’re never fully secure until you’ve been attacked. How many people out there buy anti-virus software after they’ve been in the unfortunate position of having a virus, not before?

I had my fingers burnt long ago, so I had already taken many of the steps above. Listed below are some extra steps to secure your WordPress install, ones I’d missed. Special thanks to the (mt) team for helping me out with these.

Enable open basedir restrictions

Enabling these restrictions will stop other users from being able to edit files and will also help you lock down domains which you don’t want any PHP access to at all, simply leave them out of the .htaccess you create. Here’s the link to the Media Temple wiki I used, it should be easy enough to adapt the instructions to your server. Your own hosting provider may also have specific instructions.

Create individual DB users

Much like the WordPress admin user, you should be sure to create individual database users for each site you have. This wasn’t part of my issue but it’s a valid step to take, put more barriers between your sites and the safer they are.

Store external JavaScript inside your theme

This one isn’t particularly critical, if you have the correct chmod on your files and folders you should be ok, but again it’s one extra step. An extra step inside the WordPress file system. Leave your JS files in the root and they’re open to an injection attack.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

By signing up for Google Webmaster Tools you have an early warning system to attacks happening on your site. It wont help you with prevention, but it will help you quickly find and remove malicious code. Stopbadware.org should be your first stop if you do find your site attacked. Once you’ve dealt with the attack you can then head back to webmaster tools and fast track Google unblocking your site.

Check your sites regularly

I can’t stress enough that security starts with you the site owner. Check your sites regularly for malicious code, new users in your WordPress install or strange things appearing in your posts. I know everyone leaves their blog for a while here and there not making any posts for some time, life gets in the way. But taking a few minutes each week to keep WordPress up to date and check for suspicious activity can save you a whole load of headaches later.

Extra Life was started in 2008 by a Sarcastic Gamer Community member. You should read about the events beginnings on the Sarcastic Gamer site. The communities story resonated because I’d also had leukemia in my family. I found myself being highly motivated for the event – I mean why not, marathon runners get sponsored for charity why not 24 hour gaming?

Last year Team Meerkat raised $577 for Extra Life, this year we’re setting our sights even higher, we want to bust that target! If you love games, want to help cure Cancer or simply want to make sure Local Hospitals get help, you should be doing Extra Life too! As the events awesome tagline says “Play games. Heal kids”.

It’s easy to participate in Extra Life at any level;

1. Sponsor an Extra Life team member, Team Meerkat team member or donate directly.

2. Signup to participate in Extra Life and round up four or more sponsors.

3. Create a team, join a team or choose to join Team Meerkat (we’d love to have you!) .

Be a gaming hero and pledge 24 hours to healing kids on October 16th.

Facebook could have avoided all the fuss a long time ago by having a clear Privacy Policy, there Facebook could have outlined exactly what data they wanted to be public. This Policy could have been outlined very early on and each new user would have had to accept it as part of the registration process. The user then knows from the outset which data will be held publicly for searches or advert targeting, and then the user has a choice – accept and use the site or reject and go elsewhere.

After the user has made their choice accepted the Policy and entered the site proper the settings should be simple, usable and use an ounce of common sense. Each post, update or upload is posted to only friends of the user, posting is then clear to everyone “your posts are only seen by the people you choose to be friends with”. Of course your application would also need an override to change the entry from private to public status, and it’s important that the User Experience happens in this direction. This is where common sense comes in: no one wants the hassle of selecting ‘make this private’ every time they want to hide information, what’s far more intuitive is selecting which entries you wish to be public.

Some barriers are good

Yes One’s first objection will probably be that this adds a barrier to entry. Yes it does. This barrier is one Facebook should want; only users who accept or don’t care enough to read the Public Policy become their user base. Facebook would then be free to use the agreed data for any purpose they have outlined openly in the Policy. This totally eliminates having any type of heated community banter over privacy, as long as you stick to your own outlined rules – which brings me on to my next and final point.

Be consistent, don’t go pulling the rug from under your users every six months. No one’s saying you shouldn’t change and evolve your rules with the community and the world at large. People like stability, users are people. Move to a flexible Policy change cycle, once every eighteen months with a period of consultation before the start of the next cycle. Stability  alone isn’t going to cut it though, constancy is needed also. Flip-flopping between Privacy directions, radically changing interface controls or changing Policy definitions is not being consistent. Again, evolution is expected with software and internet applications so change is not an outlandish idea, gradual, intelligent, user friendly changes are paramount. A user shouldn’t have to work to understand an application’s Policies, the application should work to make it’s Policies usable and communicative. I believe the average user is far more accepting than most think, if things are out in the open and clear to understand I think Registrations would be on par.

Enough theorizing, Facebook doesn’t really have any of those options anymore. Not unless it would be willing to rewrite some base Facebook Policies, lose some users along the way, eat a whole lot of humble pie and be willing to take an extended time to rebuild trust in it’s products and data use.

Think like a person

Be clear, be consistent  and be usable. Plan for your data use from the start, anticipate and avoid the Facebook backlash.

Let’s start with one of the most important aspects of Flash building.

Reuse your symbols

Where possible you should reuse symbols instead of creating new ones.
I.E. you need a cloud graphic, an oval button and a spot light effect. For each of those elements you only need one base symbol. Start by creating a circle of any color then convert it to a graphic symbol. Drag an instance of the circle from the library to the stage, go to the properties and set the circle color to white via the ‘tint’ option. Copy and paste this circle a number of times, changing size, shape and opacity where needed to create your cloud. Return to the stage and create your other two elements using the original circle symbol following the same color/alpha change process to get the desired effects.
The same types of symbol reuse can be used with a number of different shapes or combination of shapes. Need a forest? Create one trunk and one leaf, copy paste the leaf to make the tree, return to the stage and pull in as many trees as you need from the library.

Symbol reuse in this manor helps Flash keep the number of individually rendered elements to a minimum.

Keep symbol numbers to a minimum

The number of individual symbols you create works hand in hand with symbol reuse. The simple rule is: do not create symbols unless you need them and where possible create a new symbol from an existing one and transform it.

Never animate using keyframes

Using separate keyframes containing separate artwork is a sure fire way to make your file huge. As a rule, you should always animate your symbols using motion tweens, one moving element is much smaller than using multiple elements to create the same effect.

Never use shape tweens

Under no circumstances should you be using any type of shape tween. The shape tween feature will bloat your movies and substantially slow down play back.

Use Jpeg’s sparingly

While Jpeg’s are sometimes needed to complete a Flash project you should try and limit their use to critical applications only. Jpeg’s affect the file size of Flash movies in a big way, if you have to use them, make sure you’ve used the ‘save for web feature’ in Photoshop before importing them into your Flash library.

Stream user initiated audio and video files

Audio and video files should always been linked to and loaded as a stream from your main Flash file, never include these files inside your main file.
To ensure optimum User Experience, audio and video files which are loaded from within your Movie should always be initiated by the user and should contain Play/Pause/Stop and/or Mute functionality as a minimum. In some cases the ‘no auto playback’ rule may be broken; Video files inside a Flash ad may start immediately, audio files should still require user initiation.

Depending on the type of Flash file you are creating, some or all of the following tips may help you reduce the size of your exported Movie.

Limit your color palette

Using a limited color palette, much like saving a GIF at 128 rather than 256 colors, can substantially lower your Movie size.  It is recommended you use tints of existing colors where possible.

Limit use of gradients

Limiting the use of gradients works hand in hand with limiting color palettes. A good rule is: two is great, five is too many. Remember this refers to individual different gradients, reusing the same gradient is fine (see: symbol reuse).

Limit use of transparency

Using transparency can allow you to create some great effects, but those same effects are slowing and bloating your Movies. As a general rule: individual items which include transparency, I.E. a button with drop shadow, are fine. You should try to avoid layered transparent items and you should definitely avoid tweening multiple transparent items across each other as this will result in playback slowdown.

Should you need to further shrink your Flash file after following all the tips above you may wish to try the following;

Save for an older version

Unless you absolutely need your Flash file to play in the latest plugin it is recommended you save for files for Flash Player 8. Saving files down from a later version to Flash 8 can sometimes shave as much as 25% off the file size.

Drop frame rate

25 FPS+ is the realm of TV and video, your Flash files should be around 15 FPS for optimum playback/file size. Dropping the frame rate, even below 15 FPS may be needed to lower your file size further.

And that’s about all I’ve got in the ‘must haves’ category, if you think of anymore ‘must haves’ or just want to share some advanced techniques please feel free to do so in the comments.

Let us not underestimate that last sentence. This is an important step for the gaming community, not just for the Apple users but for all PC gamers. What Am I talking about? Competition. Having games created for and released only on one PC platform inevitably hurts the market as a whole. Think of how the console market would look like if the only one available was a Playstation. Now imagine if that one console maker released an update that gave you a bloated unusable interface and then forced all it’s game developers to create games for the platform because it was the only way to use new features.
The point I’m trying to make here is that we have choice and a competitive market with consoles. This isn’t even about games, it’s about people being able to use the system they feel most comfortable with.

The Apple platform is now as good as any PC for gaming, gone are the architecture differences of decades past. It’s about time game developers saw this market for the potential it has, but it’s up to us as gamers to help support Valve and any other companies that create games natively for the Mac. Supporting Valve now is an integral part of making this work. Why? Because you’ll not be finding any other large studios games on the Apple Steam platform for a while, at least I think. My guess is that the large publishers will be looking to Valves sales of it’s own Steam based games before making any decisions about bringing their ported or porting/creating games for the platform.

For the good of PC gaming itself, that is why we need to support Steam on Macs.

If you’ve not caught any of the hubbub on BoingBoing or seen any of the teaser images head over to the article Gallery: Valve tease Steam/Half-Life/Left 4 Dead for Macs, in style for a look see.

Update: There is an interesting article and discussion at rockspapershotgun.com where they also point out a list of already ported Mac games. Quite a few in that list so we may see more than just Valve games at launch, however I still think the big publishers will be looking at Steam sales to decide whether to make an Apple push themselves or not.

Update: I took a little break from posting to plan a wedding, in that time Valve have confirmed, beta’d and shipped Steam for Mac. In fact it’s currently installed and downloading Portal which Valve gave away for free with the release of the Mac platform. Here’s hoping other publishers see the value in our gamers too! To comment on the above update quickly: Valve have released a list of supported games at launch, hopefully we’ll see some more mainstream titles shortly. I’d love to have Dawn of War II or Valve’s own Half Life 2 on my OS X side.

Personally this just helps the decision Aaryn and I made about staying with tap water, estrogen and all, solidify itself as the right choice. Of course living in California means we do keep bottled water in the house and car as part of our earthquake readiness kits, but we usually keep it until a few months before its use by date drink it and then buy more (don’t forget to get extra for the kitties!). Day to day we just use filtered tap.

I’m re-posting the infographic here with permission, but please feel free to head over to the source instead;

Dangerous Juggling Stunts (Part 2 Extreme Fire)
Things on fire are great, things being juggled while on fire awesome! Though I’d liked to have seen more unicycle action ^_^

Head over to the YouTube page to comment and rate!

Dangerous Juggling Stunts (Part 3 The Chainsaw)
Yes you read that correctly, a freaking chainsaw. I’ve no idea were you’d go from there though, maybe riding a tiger juggling flaming chainsaws?

Head over to the YouTube page to comment and rate!

Awesome stuff all round again from Nick. Please head over to www.nickpikejuggler.com if you’d like to get info and watch more juggling and show videos, you’ll also be able to checkout where his next gig is in your area!

I’m going to embed the video below for ease of viewing, but if you like what you see head over to www.nickpikejuggler.com to watch more videos, you’ll also be able to checkout where his next gig is in your area!

I don’t want to give anything away but: knives and broken glass aren’t the only crazy things planned!

Head over to the YouTube page to comment and rate!