The bikeshare will be launching tomorrow at the RAC, an opening celebration will take place at noon.

The retriever weekly reported: "Alongside SGA President, Jeffrey Kee, senior information systems major, [David] Murray is working on putting into action a "Bikeshare" program that should be in use within the next couple of weeks. It will allow students to use bicycles for free from the RAC and take them to Arbutus, Catonsville, or wherever else they may want to go. Murray has also been looking into possibly expanding the bus routes available for UMBC students." - http://www.retrieverweekly.com/features/david-murray-presents-new-ideas-as-sga-vp-1.3098952

UMBC Athletics has announced: "You are cordially invited to join us this Friday, October 25th, at noon, for a tour of the newly renovated UMBC Fitness & Wellness Weight Room in the RAC. Not only are we re-opening the weight room, we've added 15 new cardio equipment pieces to the RAC cardio balcony, and a new SGA/Recreation sponsored bike/ride share truss area.
The festivities will include giveaways (water bottles, pedometers, drawstring gym backpacks, and kotex products), along with some cool demonstrations.
I hope you'll join us for the Grand Re-Opening of these areas!"

Congratulations to all those who have worked towards this goal in the past few years- including the Climate Change Task Force Transportation Committee, and the UMBC SGA Department of Environmental Affairs and the Catonsville Hub!

Learn more about bicycling and other sustainable transportation options here: http://sustainability.umbc.edu/transportation/ 

• With bike racks, bike lockers, and even bike racks on the UMBC Transit buses, we have array of options to stay active on two wheels!
• Bicycles should be parked at racks and registered with the campus police.
• The UMBC Cycling club organizes road rides and mountain biking rides, long and short, near and far.
• Patapsco State Park, and the nearby Gwynn’s Falls Trail and Jones Falls Trail in Baltimore also offers scenic and safe routes to access the city. Learn more about biking in Maryland.

Developing for high-resolution displays often requires different image resources for each image. Because of this, there’s been a need for a more standard way of serving responsive content images – ones that adapt to different resolutions and viewport sizes.

What if the browser had a way of knowing which images to load without fetching any unused resources? We can already achieve something similar with CSS using a combination of media queries for pixel density or resolution to display hi-res background images. For instance:

@media (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2), (min-resolution: 192dpi) {
      .hero {
        background-image: url('../img/hero-bg-2x.png');
      }
    }

This will display hero-bg-2x.png as a background image only when the device pixel ratio is at least 2, or the resolution is at least 192dpi.

Fortunately, the new srcset attribute addresses our need for adaptive content images. It allows us to define high-quality images for high-resolution displays without affecting users on lower resolutions.

How srcset Works

Currently, the first implementation of srcset only lets us define a set of images for different pixel densities using resolution modifiers. To see how it works we’ll need the latest nightly build of WebKit, as it’s the only browser that supports srcset. This is cutting edge stuff!

Simply add the srcset attribute to an img element and at least one resolution modifier. The browser then displays the most appropriate image from the available options. For example, the 2x modifier targets the image to use if the display has a pixel density of 2 or higher:

<img src="my-dog.jpg" srcset="my-dog-2x.jpg 2x">

This tells the browser that if we’re on a display with 2 or more device pixels per CSS pixel, it should use “my-dog-2x.jpg”. Meanwhile, users on lower pixel density displays will see “my-dog.jpg,” so no bandwidth will be wasted on the hi-res image.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, srcset has a long way to go, but it’s pressing forward in the right direction and helping us solve a problem we’ve needed solved for quite some time. Overall, this will be a more intelligent way to serve our content images.

A future implementation of srcset will allow us to load images based on the viewport size:

<img src="dog.jpg" srcset="dog-mobile.jpg 720w, dog-tablet.jpg 1280w, dog-desktop.jpg 1x, dog-hi-res.jpg 2x" alt="Rover">

Of course, we still need to use the src attribute for browsers that don’t support srcset. Those browsers will simply ignore the srcset value and gracefully fall back to src. Although browser support for srcset is currently our biggest hang-up, Boris Smus and James South have developed some handy polyfills we can use in the meantime.

The post Thinking Ahead: Multi-Resolution Images with srcset appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The Geolocation Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Geolocation API Specification. This specification defines an API that provides scripted access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Writing Modes Level 3. CSS Writing Modes Level 3 defines CSS support for various international writing modes, such as left-to-right (e.g. Latin or Indic), right-to-left (e.g. Hebrew or Arabic), bidirectional (e.g. mixed Latin and Arabic) and vertical (e.g. Asian scripts). Inherently bottom-to-top scripts are not handled in this version. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Custom Elements. This specification describes the method for enabling the author to define and use new types of DOM elements in a document. Comments are welcome through 21 November. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Americans have spoken, and they want their weed legalized. 

A new poll from Gallup has shown that for first time in US history, a clear majority of Americans favor marijuana legalization. 

With a 10% increase from last year, 58% of Americans now want freedom to smoke their pot.

Support for legalization is divided along party lines (no surprise here). 35% of Republicans support it while 65% of Democrats support legalization. The greatest increase of support has come from independents; in 2012 they were 50%, now they are at 62%.

So what do all of these numbers mean for government? The Obama administration made it clear that they wouldn’t challenge the new weed laws of Colorado or Washington. Has the time come to legalize weed?

In other exciting marijuana news…

A Seattle thrift shop has reported that they received a donation of 2.5 pounds of marijuana. The Seattle Police Dept. poked fun at the situation saying:

“Donating to thrift shops is a terrific way to give a second life to your well-loved velcro sneakers, keyboards or flannel zebra jammies. However, thrift stores cannot accept the following items: tires, soiled mattresses, laptops, and large bags of marijuana.”