Introducing Kreskin, A Band/Album Generator

Kreskin is an album generator, which essentially automates the Wikipedia Band Name Game. To wit:

  1. Go to the Random article page on Wikipedia. The page it goes to is your band name.
  2. Go to Flickr’s most interesting photos for the last 7 days. Find the third image. That is your band’s album cover.
  3. Go to the quotations page and pick the last quote on the Random Quotes page. The last three words of this quote is the title of your album.

You have likely played this game on a grey workday afternoon, but Kreskin makes the process much easier. Using the sources above, Kreskin grabs the needed information and presents you with a lovely image with a permalink that you can pass around, no manual labor needed. Kreskin also picks from a random assortment of freely-licensed web fonts to snazz up your album covers.

Kreskin is an Extra Future 6-hour Project.

Wikipedia Is Broken In Dictionary.app

I’m not sure if this is due to Wikipedia’s new skin (with the “usability” enhancements), some other MediaWiki update, or if the problem is on Apple’s end (Update: It is a problem with Wikipedia’s new skin), but this is another good example of why Apple doesn’t want to rely on third-party vendors for anything.

The image above is what I get when looking up the word “Dictionary” in Snow Leopard’s built-in Dictionary application, and clicking Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page is very long, and should have vertical scrollbars, but there are none.

Update: Mac OS X Hints has information on how a “fix” which involves logging in to Wikipedia and setting your skin to use the previous one.

Hat tip to Shawn Medero.

Wikipedia’s New Look

I don’t see a big visual improvement, but the overall simplification of the UI and reworking the previously atrocious underlying HTML code is a step forward.

Not sure why they went with an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE instead of, say, HTML5, which is practically tailor-made for a website like Wikipedia. I’m assuming that the new layout has been in the works for so long that HTML5 didn’t seem like a viable option at the outset.