Pixel 2 em calculator

Every website that I've built for the last months have been in em's instead of pixels. Well, not completely, just the font size and line height. The advantage is working with em sizes is that your font sizes are scalable in Internet Explorer. On top of that it's much easier to offer a website in another font size by changing the base font size of the body-tag.

There's only one problem. If you have to work with a design in Photoshop, everything is measured in pixels. You have to do some math to convert those pixels to em's. Now you have scary pixel/em tables, but that won't work for me. So I decided to use my ASP.NET knowledge to create a Windows .NET application. It's my first app (so be gentle with me) but it does the job. I wrote the program just for me, but since there are a lot more who make web sites in em's I decided to throw it on the web. So here it is:

• Download Pixel 2 Em Calculator.exe
• Download the Visual Studio project

Update: Version 1.1 of this tool is published on The Bright Lines.

If you want to read more about using about using em instead of pixels, I recommend the following articles:

• The Incredible Em & Elastic Layouts with CSS
• How to Size Text in CSS (a list apart)
  

Pfffff!

Sometimes it just not your week. I've got mine now, although it's a long week. About one and a half week ago my computer decided it wasn't compatible with a Windows update (well, that's at leas my conclusion) and kept the CPU at 50% at least. No chance to uninstall the update. After some research I decided to once again (3rd time this year!) to re-install my Windows.

After got over that, it was time for the whole family to get sick. Bweeech! Monday I did nothing but sleeping or watching Teletubbies, Tweenies or In The Night Garden with Isabel. I'm getting slightly better now, at least good enough to work and I hope I'm rolling at full steam next day from tomorrow.

Isabel is getting cuter everyday. Since her 2nd birthday she even lets us hug her. Victory!

IKEA stainless steel scissors part 2

I just had to laugh my ass off after I've seen a search result that had a link to my article about IKEA stainless steel scissors on the top! Funny what a little bit of search engine optimization can do sometimes :)

And you know what's so funny about it? If you make a link from your website to this article about the IKEA scissors, you make it rank even better. Your link becomes a vote of some sorts.

Results on Google.com:


Results on Google.nl:

Graffiti or not?

I keep a close eye on the StumbleUpon blog of Ricardo, a friend of mine. A just had to laugh about this picture. It looks like graffiti, right. Well, it isn't. At least not in the traditional way. He's cleaning! Apparently the police don't know if it's a crime or not.

IKEA stainless steel scissors (yeah, right!)

I think these scissors are barely a month in my possession...

I'm on a galactic conquest (multiple times)

With all the large 3d-games out there, you forget it's all in how the game is set up, not always how it looks like. Take the game Galcon (short for Galactic Conquest) for example. The graphics are simple, even the whole game concept is simple. But that's perfect for me. I don't have much time, so i can dive into a multi-player game quickly without having the commitment to be online for at least an hour. Perfect.

Screenshot of Galcon:

Blog redesign

The blog is undergoing a redesign. As of now it's still unfinished but you should already get an idea of how the blog is going to look like.