How to draw
How to draw anything in one step: Draw a dog covering the thing you can’t draw. The examples are hilarious. (via waxy)
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How to get a free haircut
How to get a free haircut on the street in San Francisco. Like crowdsourced media, it sort of works but is probably better done by people who know what they’re doing.
How to solve crossword puzzles
NY Times resident crossword puzzle master Will Shortz on how to solve the NY Times crossword puzzle.
Mental flexibility is a great asset in solving crosswords. Let your mind wander. The clue “Present time” might suggest nowadays, but in a different sense it might lead to the answer yuletide. Similarly, “Life sentences” could be obit, “Inside shot” is x-ray and my all-time favorite clue, “It turns into a different story” (15 letters), results in the phrase SPIRAL STAIRCASE.
Writing with style
Kurt Vonnegut shares his tips on how to write with style.
5. Sound like yourself. The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.
(via chris glass)
Dennis Darzacq’s falling photos
You’ve likely seen Dennis Darzacq’s photos of people who look like they’re falling and about to hit the ground at a high velocity. Lens Culture has a video that shows how Darzacq makes those photos; he plays a clever mind trick on viewers that makes jumping look like falling.
Everything had been prepared in advance. Everything was ready. The models launched themselves into space. There is nothing false in these scenes. These moments really occurred. There is no fiction, no retouching or special effects. Photographed in the courtyards of buildings or in streets in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in Nanterre and in Biarritz, these young people were just being themselves, simply performing jumps in a modern urban setting. And the photographer shot the images, intervening only to give a few guidelines as to their movements. However, at the moment of the leap, chance and gravity also intervened.
How to write screenplays
Advice on writing screenplays.
I think people see inspiration as the ignition that starts the process. In fact, real moments of inspiration often come at the last minute, when you’ve sweated and fretted your way through a couple of drafts. Suddenly, you start to see fresh connections, new ways of doing things. That’s when you feel like you’re flying. The real pleasure of any script is the detail. And a lot gets lost in the process. Put it back in at the last minute.
How to solve a Rubik’s Cube
You know what you need? 14 pages of handwritten instructions on how to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
LOLO-TOFA-BO-LOLO-FO-BATO-LOLO
Exactly.
Freefall survival tips
Some survival tips for your next unplanned freefall.
Snow is good — soft, deep, drifted snow. Snow is lovely. Remember that you are the pilot and your body is the aircraft. By tilting forward and putting your hands at your side, you can modify your pitch and make progress not just vertically but horizontally as well. As you go down 15,000 feet, you can also go sideways two-thirds of that distance — that’s two miles! Choose your landing zone. You be the boss.
If your search discloses no trees or snow, the parachutist’s “five-point landing” is useful to remember even in the absence of a parachute. Meet the ground with your feet together, and fall sideways in such a way that five parts of your body successively absorb the shock, equally and in this order: feet, calf, thigh, buttock, and shoulder. 120 divided by 5 = 24. Not bad! 24 mph is only a bit faster than the speed at which experienced parachutists land. There will be some bruising and breakage but no loss of consciousness to delay your press conference. Just be sure to apportion the 120-mph blow in equal fifths. Concentrate!
Update: See also this longer article from Popular Mechanics. (thx, hugo)
Spotting fake photos
Five ways to spot a faked photo. Comparing the light reflection in the various eyes in a photograph is an especially clever technique.
How to find images on the internet
How to find images on the internet, an extensive list of links and resources.
How to survive a nuclear blast
Advice for 1985: how to survive a nuclear blast. (via delicious ghost)
How to take better photos
A list of 21 ways to shoot better photographs. I can hear my photographer friends snickering about the cliches on the list, but if you don’t know much about photography but are interested in learning, you could do worse than to explore some of these techniques.
Ed Boyden on How to Think “in
Ed Boyden on How to Think “in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure”.
Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
(via spurgeonblog)
Short piece on how to tell if
Short piece on how to tell if you’re being followed.
If you must check for surveillance, don’t keep glancing over your shoulder. Appearing to suspect you’re being followed suggests you’re doing something to merit it. Anyway, if you’re being tailed by a serious outfit they won’t only be behind you, but ahead and to the side as well; there won’t just be one or two people on your case, but a whole team, with others in reserve. Maybe the whole street is following you.
I read a lot of Tom Clancy in high school and some of my favorite parts were the descriptions of how surveillance worked.
How To Survive in Prison as an
How To Survive in Prison as an Innocent Man Convicted of a Sex Crime, written by an innocent man convicted of a sex crime. This is an odd article, at once full of good advice, hints of mental instability, and defensiveness. In a section outlining the importance of regular exercise, he suddenly switches gears to:
Not only do we prisoners have to stick together, but we men must also join forces in our fight against feminism.
Exercise regularly, keep healthy, stay away from drugs, and keep your mind sharp. And ps, down with the feminists!! (via cyn-c)
Fireball in your hand
How to make a fireball you can hold in your hand. Sweet Jesus, that’s cool.
Update: According to the commenters at Boing Boing, this may or may not be a hoax. As usual, use caution when attempting to hold fire in your hand. (thx, seuss)
Advice from a photo editor at a
Advice from a photo editor at a national magazine on how to talk about photography, particularly to those who know little about it.
I have a sweet technique I use for finding the great images from a shoot that really tends to piss-off the editors: I edit the film without reading the story. This helps me tune into which images have the most impact on me and which ones transcend subject matter and become forces in their own right.
His description of defending good photography applies to design as well.
How to run Greasemonkey scripts in Safari.
How to run Greasemonkey scripts in Safari. Doesn’t work with some scripts, but something is better than nothing. (via justin)
For my future reference, How-to: Proper GMail
For my future reference, How-to: Proper GMail IMAP for iPhone and Apple Mail.
Tip for reading long online articles with
Tip for reading long online articles with footnotes: open the article in two browser windows, one for reading and the other for the footnotes.
How to make clear ice cubes: boil
How to make clear ice cubes: boil filtered water twice to eliminate dissolved air and minerals.
Mario Batali on how to sauce pasta.
Mario Batali on how to sauce pasta.
What you want to eat when you eat a bowl of pasta…is pasta. Americans overdress their pasta 99.9 percent of the time. It should never be a bowl of soup. It should be noodles, with a little stuff.
Everything is open for negotiation
Everything is open for negotiation and for three months, Tom Chiarella tried to get deals on everything, from a hot dog to a gallon of gas to a TiVo.
Within weeks I discovered that restaurants will typically give you four desserts for the price of three if you ask for a sampler. That a draft beer is generally good for a free refill with a little prodding. That you can get an extra 20 percent off at Ikea by pressing past the cashiers, past the floor salespeople, up into the bottommost managerial rungs, by comparing the price of one perfectly well priced dresser with its slightly less well priced but better-sized counterpart one floor down.
Update: Bargainist has a piece about how to haggle that’s worth a look.
A 13-step guide for buying a car
A 13-step guide for buying a car while controlling the sale and the price.
It works only if you truly are willing to walk away…and then refuse to bend when they try to put you off or change the terms. Stay civil, do not let any emotion in. You are on a mission, Marine!
Fantastic advice. My dad is a skilled car buyer and on one particular occasion, spend two grueling hours dinkering with a used car saleman over a junky but good-running truck. He walked out at least twice and kept escalating up to the manager before getting the price down from $2300 to around $400.
For your fun office lunchtime activity: a
For your fun office lunchtime activity: a bunch of tips, folding instructions, and paper patterns for making sweet paper airplanes.
A bunch of presentations on how to
A bunch of presentations on how to scale web apps, including Flickr, Twitter, LiveJournal, and last.fm.
How to find 4-leaf clovers. “However, the
How to find 4-leaf clovers. “However, the more leaflets, the harder they are to find (and the luckier they are): the record is an 18-leaf clover, and the highest I’ve ever seen is 10-leafed.” (via bb)
How to survive a black hole. If
How to survive a black hole. If you’re in a rocket ship about to fall into a black hole, you might live a bit longer if you turn on your engines. “But in general a person falling past the horizon won’t have zero velocity to begin with. Then the situation is different — in fact it’s worse. So firing the rocket for a short time can push the astronaut back on to the best-case scenario: the trajectory followed by free fall from rest.”
How not to write a science book. “6.
How not to write a science book. “6. Avoid mentioning scientists or experiments. You’re a journalist, so it’s your job to explain things to people in ways they can understand. You always found science class difficult, and that class was taught by a scientist and involved experiments. Therefore no one can understand scientists and experiments.”
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