Many of us AFOL's (Adult Fans of LEGO) wonder, what's up with the crazy prices of LEGO?

Reality Prose has our answer:

Overall? LEGO is not "more expensive than ever before", it just feels like it:

Now, the dream set is closer to the $400 range. It doesn’t mean that LEGO doesn’t make sub-$100 sets. They do, and more than ever. It just means that in comparison the $25 set looks a lot smaller than it did when the largest set was only $100. LEGO pricing has become a victim of its own expanding market.

I've been using Markdown for years now as my blogging format of choice. I've used it in Wordpress, Movable Type, Typepad, Jekyll & Octopress, and now Markbox.

I <heart> Markdown.

Thanks, John!

I'm testing out a basic IFTTT recipe that reposts monkinetic posts to my app.net account.

Update: Sorry I didn't realize when I made the recipe that it was going to grab the last n existing posts and repost them as well. Whoops. Thankfully it only reposted the last 3 posts.

So, like a sheep, I install the latest Adobe Flash (bleagh) this morning so I can watch the Superb Owl Iron Man 3 commercial, since Adobe's being a snot and pigging backing on the Superb Owl's popularity to get more Flash installs out there, and I see this:

Since when does Flash install Chrome? /me Googles

Apparently, since at least August of 2012 accordion to this Adobe Forum post:

For regularly scheduled Flash Player releases, such as our 11.4 release, users are notified of new features included in the release and may opt to download the latest player via http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer. This workflow allows users to optionally download software from select Adobe partners along with Flash Player. Adobe offsets the ongoing development costs of Flash Player, which is made available for free, by offering users these options. Bundling Google Chrome and Toolbar???

Hm.

Three things you should be wary of,
A new kid in his prime,
A man with all the answers,
And code that runs first time.

• @deurig on app.net, quoting Threes Rev 1.1 by Duane Elms and Leslie Fish.

Finally, I suspect that if I made a sandwich out of this stuff and Nutella, I might very well translate bodily into heaven.

Scalzi has Bischoff cookie spread.

I'm starting to think that app.net is the Minecraft of social media... :)

@deurig

Back in September, I posted about an idea I had while commuting to work: DropDownMarkBox describes my frustration with publishing times on Scriptogram (an otherwise fine and good looking service) and how I thought I might build a similar system.

4 months later, working in my limited spare time, Markbox is a reality, in Beta, and getting better.

#winning

Markbox now supports static files (images, CSS, javascript, etc) stored in your Dropbox folder:

The blog post.

Minimalism is Simple.

It's old old news, but I love the Saul Bass-ish design on Andy Baio's Waxy.org.

There's nothing that can fill your underwear faster than seeing your product fail during a Steve Jobs demo.

Don Melton, Safari Released to the World

Trent Walton writes about responsive web design in Flexible Foundations:

If I could go back in time 3 years I’d tell myself that the red jacket is going to make me look like an asshole. Then I’d slap myself and point out that flexible grids and flexible images are great, but ultimately I should be focused on making things truly scalable by thinking twice before I used pixel values in my CSS.

Trent has a great quote from Andy Hume, too:

If you think about it, responsive layout is not a new thing. Open a simple HTML file in a web browser, and the content automatically adapts to fit the width of that browser. The web is responsive on its own—by default. It's us that's been breaking it all these years by placing content in fixed-width containers.

I don't spend a lot of time these days on the front end, but I'm going to be thinking about this the next time I am.

/via Dribbble

This site is now hosted on markbox, my new Dropbox and Markdown blogging platform.

Markbox is running on Google's AppEngine, which is a pretty great platform, even with its warts. All posts are sitting in my Dropbox (in /Apps/markbox/posts/) and template files live in /Apps/markbox/templates.

I can post from Mou, my favorite OS X Markdwn editor, or (as I am now) from within the app itself. It's pretty much my ideal blogging platform right now (it should be, I wrote it :-) ) and I've got even more ideas coming.

I released some new features to Markbox Beta users today: an overhauled template system that now supports template includes, and new template sync options. Read the blog post!

This post brought to you by Byword, the iOS Dropbox-based editor. It's beautiful!

After reading this article (ostensibly about the properly-impressive 440ppi screen on a new Android device) I was struck by the photos of the HTC phone, and posted this on https://alpha.app.net/sivy/post/1587966:

Android makers still styling devices to show off hardware features, like an Alien PC.

iOS devices aim to make the hardware disappear, the device is the OS.

Oh, you thought I was talking about the Mac?

I've worked on blogs, CMSes, or websites for 15 years. I'd completely sworn off them when I left Six Apart. But it looks like I'm growing a new product in that space. We'll see if it survives the replant from fertile mind to product soil. :-)

Stay tuned.