internet

Seems like a strange title, but I caught a YouTube video, documentary in my feed which grabbed my curiosity.

The documentary, as you can gather from the title of the post, was about people in Japan that life out of small cubicles in internet and manga cafes.

Unlike any cafe, internet or otherwise, I have visited in the UK; these cafe's were open 24 hours a day and allowed you to pay by the hour, day and in some cases 14 days.

Staying the night

One of the videos I watched after the first documentary was about a couple who decided to have a night in one of these said Internet cafes as it was cheaper than renting a room.

The camera panned to the cost. For a 24 hour it worked out around £25 (with the exchange rate at the moment here in the UK); a 2 week stay worked out to around £250.

In theory, you could fly to Japan and stay for 2 weeks at a low cost.

For this price you got a small cubicle; some so small you could not lie straight out. From all the research I did you also usually get a computer (it is an Internet cafe after all) along with free charging of phone and WiFi. In some of the others it seems you can get a TV and often access to a collection of Japanese comics.

Drinks and Food vending machines tend to ben available and often a shower - though in many cases this seemed to be at an extra cost.

The cybercafe homeless

I think what really pulled my interest is that they seem to be referred to as the cyber homeless or net cafe refugees.

It seemed that these were places where, if you were living on the street and you got some spare cash - you could have a night off the street. Though, in the first documentary I saw there was one guy who lived and worked as a web host out of one of these cafes - choosing to live there instead of an apartment.

More research to do

This post is really an introduction to a subject I have found interesting. It maybe the first in a number of articles - but I wanted to post it to raise awareness to anyone that doesn't know and may also find it interesting.

Searching on YouTube will bring you a list of videos that your can watch. See if it draws you in as it does me? For a while now I have been watching video and reading posts on people who live out of vans, boats and other alternative accommodation - maybe that is why this peaked my interest?

Either way - there is much more investigations to be done...

The Question

I recently got asked the question of how can I put a line under each of my posts on the multi post screen?

This is a question that I had asked myself at some point as its nice to separate out each post to make it obvious to everyone where each post preview starts and ends. The solution I came up with was to use CSS and place a bottom border after each post; therefore producing the line.

The Solution

The following steps and images show how I did this using just CSS with in the Ultimatum system

1) Goto your template and layout - So - Ultimatum > Template > Layout

2) Select the specific layout you have with your WordPress Default Loop in it

3) Select EDIT CSS > Layout Specific CSS from the top of the layout

4) Select Core WP > Posts from the menu

5) In Post Container (All Posts) section; Post Container Border - Set a size for Border bottom; select solid or some other style and a colour

Doing it this way its using the Ultimatum framework to edit the CSS and produce this effect. There are other solutions; some of which involve custom CSS - but doing it this way works.

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This is something I have wanted to talk about for a while now; I don’t even go through this subject (at the moment) in my growing HTML course - although I do point it out in the Bootstrap section.

So; before we talk about viewport let us go back in time; back to when viewing the internet was done only on a computer and not on so many other devices. Why? Well, i’ve kind of illuded to it in the sentence above ‘when viewing the internet was done only on a computer’. There in lies the essense.

We knew that any webpage we would create would be viewed on a computer and we knew the best minimum screen resolution so we could create a page at these static sizes. The webpage would look great on any system and it was a winner.

However, moving through time we started viewing webpages on other devices; devices such as tablet computers and mobile phones. Systems that had a much smaller viewing space. That meant that these wanderful webpages that we create and look excellent on computers; well, looked rather crap on a much smaller device..

So, much sweat and toll (I presume) was put into answers. Things such as WAP (better left forgotten) were created and left behind - after all; we want an integrated virtual world and not segregated by device. So, along came Viewport..

The viewport is the user’s visible area of the webpage. Now, this will vary from device to device; a tablet (for example) will have a larger viewport than a mobile phone. So, the viewport sets the width of the page to follow the screen-width of the device giving your viewing device the full picture so to speak.

Its very simple to add to your webpages and is the essense of creating a responsive web design and page. We simple add it with a <meta> tag :

Width=device-width sets the width of the page to follow the screen-width of the device (so this will varey from device to device).

initial-scale=1.0 sets the initial zoom level when the page is loaded.

By simply adding viewport to your webpage you will make your page better for mobile viewers..

So, what is viewport? Its a meta tag that allows you to design and create a mobile responsive webpage.

i truly think it's amazing what we can do on a modern smart phone. I remember when all we could do was make calls; yes before even SMS.

I got my first mobile phone back in late 1995. I was a student and needed a phone for where I was staying. As it worked out; with the deal I could get; the mobile phone I got cost me less than a land line. I remember it was a hugh old thing; you got 30 minutes of talk time (by the end of which, it was so hot it would fry eggs) and 12 hours of standby. So I only charged when I was going to make a call.

In 1996 I got rid of this phone as it was no long required and I was mobile less for a year. 1997 saw my second mobile phone and this one included the new technology SMS. The phone has a 1 line lcd which made if fun to write a message; well if I had needed too as nobody else I knew had one. So; again; I got rid of this phone in 1998 and went yet another year without.

1999 was the turn around year. Since 1999 I have never gone without a mobile phone. Technology started to grow in mobiles at that point and from 2000 till 2004 I was a part of that.

I firstly worked for a company that produced a SMSC and we also produced many WAP pages and applications. Not the best web technology; but without that today's mobile webpages may not be as good as they are.

In 2002 I started working for Vodafone. They had vision, even then, that the mobile phone would one day be integrated with the Internet as it is today. They envisaged a phone that could access maps, check email as well as all other office related things. Basically do everything your iPhone or Android phone can do today. Their vision was a little bigger but so was the technology of the day.

It was a few years later in around 2006 when I got my first true smart phone; a Nokia N80. I truly loved that phone and Nokia were the phones to have. I had that for some time till my first touch screen phone which was a HTC and ran WindowsCE I believe.

From then the history has been iPhone 3GS followed by 2 Android phones and now a iPhone 6 Plus. Phew. Now that I have given my history of mobile phones; which I felt is important; I can get onto the subject of how they are amazing.

It's amazing what a smart phone can do. I'm creating this blog post from mine at this moment. I use it to create video and post to YouTube. I update all my online social media friends with images and statuses of what I am doing now.

They can see that lunch I'm about to eat. They can comments on that coffee I have.

But even more than that. You can run you business from your phone; though I wouldn't suggest only from your phone as accounts etc are maybe not its stronger points.

Since mobile providers have given us continuous integration of internet on our phones; it has increased what we could do. Couple that with what IOS and Android plus many apps has offered us; well it truly has become a Star Trek like device.

I think smart phones are amazing because I now spent far less time booting up and sitting at a computer and I think they are amazing because they are more powerful than many of the computers I have owned in the past.

I'm looking forward to what they will offer us in the future but for now; its off to make my next YouTube blockbuster.