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A production still from Objectified showcases an interview with Dieter Rams.

Gary says “…it’s about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them.” And it features a pretty star-studded cast, including perennial DLB favorites Naoto Fukasawa, Jonathan Ive, and IDEO.

Putting an email address on a website is a lot trickier proposition than it used to be. These days, the web is populated with evil spambots, crawling the web and scraping email addresses off websites, which they can then use to solicit your interest in perverse sexual apparatus or imitation Rolex wristwatches.

But for those of us who are selling something, we have no choice but to provide a way for our readers to contact us. Now, in the past, many things have been done to accomplish this: overly elaborate or unnecessary contact forms, replacing part or all of an email address with an image, or munging an email address.

All three of these techniques are unsatisfactory. First, all of these techniques are often beatable by smart spambots. Second, and even more importantly, the bottom line from a usability perspective is quite simple: These strategies convolute things for users. The easiest interface element we can provide for our users is link that, when clicked, opens up a new email addressed to us in their email client.

The best solution I’ve ever seen for this, and the one I use all the time, is encoding the email address with javascript. This strategy provides several advantages:

1. No known spambot can harvest an email address based on a random key encrypted email address.
2. It seems quite unlikely that any will be able to any time soon.
3. The website user gets the easiest possible experience.
4. It is very easy to do with free online tools like this anti-spam email link obfuscator.

The one clear disadvantage is that it requires a user to have Javascript enabled in order to view your email address. Now, according to the W3C, about 95% of users have it enabled, and by all accounts that number is rising. But, nonetheless, this is a limitation.

A second disadvantage, and one that is common to all of the presented strategies, is that this is merely an attempt to fix a symptom rather than an attempt to solve the real problem of e-mail spam.

The advantage of this approach, as I see it, is that it does not do so at the expense of causing problems for innocent users.

New Zealand artist Julian Oliver‘s latest work, levelHead, allows viewers of the piece to interact with a 3D world by simply moving wooden blocks around in front of a web cam…Through moving and rotating coded blocks, the “player” attempts to move a tiny trapped man through an elaborate, interlocking labyrinth stretching one’s spatial memory and logical reasoning skills.

As much as I like taxing the limits of my reason in order to understand the complex requirements of a seemingly hostile world, I’m not sure I need an augmented reality in order to do it.

Could this possibly be any fun, or is it just training us for something unsavory?

Via.

We take these things seriously.

“Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.”
-Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

Taxi Key to the City makes these nice Taxi Cards, cards you give to a taxi driver in a foreign country (here, China) to explain to him or her where you want to go, as almost certainly you don’t speak Chinese, and on my experience, Beijing taxi drivers in particular speak just enough English to make it very dangerous to try to communicate.

DLB loves this diagram, from the Beijing Taxi Cards website.

When I was in China, I stayed with a family of American ex-patriots, and they lived in an ex-patriot community. They give out packages of these kind of taxi cards when you move in. The ones they give you are specific to your neighborhood, whereas the ones sold here are more general (they are mainly targeted at tourists for the 2008 Olympics).

When I didn’t have access to the handy pack of taxi cards, I had to resort to asking a Chinese person to making some for me. I did this quite a lot, and it was always an exercise in anxiety. In fact, you really just transpose your communication anxiety onto another person; now, the question became whether or not you could successfully communicate the information to the person whom you asked to make the card, as opposed to the taxi driver.

This is a card I had a nice Chinese woman make for me.

Seeing these reminded me of Seth’s post earlier this month, it’s the perfect “low hanging fruit,” business plan. A nice little design firm idea.

This is the card I wish I had when I was there.

So, I can tell you two things about these cards:

1. Learn from my experience. If you’re going to China for the Olympics, this is a product that will save you a lot of strife.
2. There’s still only one Amazon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money selling taxi cards.

Here at Design Less Better, we have a strong preference for images with strong contours and high contrast, qualities one often finds in printmaking. Today we have some fine examples of this craft.

First up, we have a couple of prints from Stephen Alcorn’s Modern Music Masters series.

I love the geometry in this piece, especially the mountains. It’s so well composed. The viewer’s eye travels from the symmetry of the train engine up to Johnny’s gaze. Is it just me, or are his eyes meant to be part of the stars?

Then there’s this Woody Guthrie print:

There’s a lot to like here. The sense of motion and fluid lines are great, but I think what attracts me most is the setting. Flanked by corn, walking the highway, it’s like Guthrie is traveling the Midwest somewhere close to my hometown.

If you’re into Johnny and Woody or just great typography, you may appreciate the fine folks at Yee Haw Industries:

Dean-O here is one of my personal favorites. It’s a little kitschy, but it makes me chuckle every time I see it.

I discovered these guys locally from some of their posters which are featured prominently in the restrooms of Zingerman’s Roadhouse, here in Ann Arbor.

Letterpress is usually associated with stuffy business cards and wedding stationary, but Yee-Haw is bringing it back down-home in style.

Richard Holden, of the firm Holden Cherry Lee, has an interesting take on the problems of overcrowded urban living, and on an overpriced housing market, the Micro Compact Home.

The homes are an exact cube, with a side length of 9 feet. They contain everything needed to live, including a toilet, shower, minibar, sink, cooking facilities, a double bed, and "dinner for five". Horden cites the aerospace industry as a primary influence. They are currently being tested with students in Munich, and Horden cites plans for short-stay business living in London.

You’ve got to see some of the plans for this thing, particularly the tree village, and the beautiful dream of the low e-home. I wish I was organized enough to live in one of these.

The micro-compact low e-home is all-electric and powered by photovoltaic solar panels of 8sqm with a small diameter vertical axis wind generator.

Background

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer, by asking the user to copy some distorted text. You’ve probably seen them, either here, or elsewhere on the web. If not, just click here for an example.

The Internet Archive is going to help Spidey enter "the digital age".

reCAPTCHA gets these words from books that the Internet Archive is digitizing. Digitizing books is done by photographically scanning the book’s pages, and then transforming these scans into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR).

All this together means that when you leave a comment, in addition to contributing to the discussion, you are both proving you are a person, not a spambot, and helping humanity’s effort to archive it’s knowledge digitally.

The Problem

Which is all milk and honey, but there’s a problem. As good citizens of the web, and as WordPress users, BlogLESS utilizes reCAPTCHA’s handy WordPress Plugin. But, as good citizens, BlogLESS is further committed to web standards. This means that all our HTML and CSS needs to be valid. Unfortunately, the WordPress reCAPTCHA plugin doesn’t validate XHTML out of the box. (As it turns out, this is not its fault. It actually can’t validate out of the box, which we’ll see.)

The good news is, the fix is easy, once you understand the problem. You don’t need to be a pro to make your WordPress comments template valid again.

The Fix

First, you’ll need to find the php files that write the reCAPTCHA to your comments template. They are two, although the file names changed between versions. I’ve checked against the lastest (v2.91), and the oldest version I could find (v2.5). If your version is somewhere in the middle of the two, you’ll have to extrapolate a little, but it shouldn’t be hard.

Anyhow, both versions have a file called recaptchalib.php. Version 2.5 has a second file called recaptcha.php, which changed to wp-recaptcha.php by 2.91. In any case, they should both be found in a directory that looks something like this:

Error the first

By 2.6, reCAPTCHA fixed this first error, so if you’re up-to-date, you can skip this step and move on to Error the second below. However, if you’re using 2.5, the fix is very easy. Open recaptchalib.php, and locate lines 126 to 130. These lines contain a complete <noscript> block. Find it and replace it with the following:

	<noscript>
  		<iframe src="'. $server . '/noscript?k=' . $pubkey . $errorpart . '" height="300" width="500" frameborder="0"></iframe><br />
  		<textarea name="recaptcha_challenge_field" rows="3" cols="40"></textarea>
  		<input type="hidden" name="recaptcha_response_field" value="manual_challenge" />
	</noscript>';

Error the second

That one was just sloppy, and again, was fixed early in the plugin’s development. Unfortunately, the second validation failure is quite a bit more insidious. It takes place in the main plugin file ([wp-]recaptcha.php). In 2.5, find line 57. In 2.91 it’s line 431. In any case it looks like this:

	<style type='text/css'>#submit {display:none;}</style>

The w3c tells us that this error is because "The element named above was found in a context where it is not allowed. This could mean that you have incorrectly nested elements — such as a ‘style’ element in the ‘body’ section instead of inside ‘head’…" Jackpot.

As it turns out, this puts us in a bit of a jam. Why? First, we’re in a noscript block, so we can’t apply this definition with Javascript (the most obvious choice). Second, the purpose of this definition is to hide a submit button that occurs in our WordPress comments template and replace it with the one that we create on the following line (59,432) of our plugin file. This means we can’t use an plugin-scope PHP conditional.

So, the somewhat counter-intuitive way to handle this — but the only valid way you’re going to get — is to make two alterations. First, comment out the line that’s causing the trouble:

	<!--<style type='text/css'>#submit {display:none;}</style>-->

Now, open your comments template, usually:

and find the submit button (any input with id="submit"). Now what we’re going to do is actually only write the submit button for browsers that support javascript. Instead of your defacto submit button, use something like this:

	<script type="text/javascript">
		//<![CDATA[
		/* Cf. http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/making-recaptcha-validate */
		document.write('<input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Post this Comment" />');
		//]]>
	</script>

Awesome!