A few days ago, I went to buy a pair of new shoes. I decided that I would put effort this time into actually looking for vegan (or as they say, cruelty-free) shoes. Generally I am more lax about leather/pelts than most other vegetarians, but I still don’t like supporting the industry. So I decided to go and buy hemp shoes (FYI, paylesss hoes seems to have leather-free shoes, according to the TVA). I found this little place called Left Feet, which had hemp shoes that didn’t look like a hippy designed it.

The shop is small. Very small. With limited selection that caters to people who go out of their way to buy products that are typically made with leather. After I found a pair that I liked, I brought it home and saw a pamphlet at the bottom of the box (emphasis on their part, not mine).

Join the Blackspot Community

You’re now the owner of a pair of Blackspot shoes. It’s a purchase that could be unlike any you have made before. By buying Blackspots you’ve become a member of an international movement to regain control of our own minds and communities.

The open-source logo, hand-drawn on the side of your Blackspots, is a symbol of resistance against the kind of big-money hyperbranding that has been undermining civil society for decades. Earth-friendly, anti-sweatshop (made in Europe), cruelty-free, and pro-grassroots, the Blackspot model represents fundamental change.

The open-source logo they talked about looks like below. Despite the name the logo is white, not black. The black you do see is dirt. If you touch it, it feels sticky. Kinda like gum.

The reason why it’s called an open-source logo is because anyone can supposedly use it. It’s not a particularly great logo, and it likely didn’t go through over a dozen iterations.

On the plus side, they were very well priced for what they claim to do (organic hemp, biodegradable materials, made by unionized workers). I am happy with the purchase despite the smaller selection.

I was first made aware of the fact that maps.google.com now uses geolocation by sdwilsh, which is new in Firefox 3.5. But when I loaded maps, I was surprised to see that it didn’t work when I visited the site. And I was using something even more recent than Firefox 3.5, Minefield. Surely, it has geolocation, so what is going on?

The reason maps doesn’t support Minefield is because of *drumrolls* … browser sniffing. Developers… no wait… GOOGLE web developers, I thought we moved on?

The actual bit of code is here unminimized and tidied up ;

function isBrowserGeolocationSupported(){
    if (window.navigator &&
        navigator.userAgent.search("Firefox") != -1 &&
        navigator.geolocation)
        return true;
    if (window.navigator &&
        navigator.userAgent.search("Chrome") != -1)
        return Number(String(/Chrome\/[0-9]+/.exec(navigator.userAgent)).substr(7))>=2;
    var gearsFactory=null;

The hell? Ok, so I understand they do a bit of browser sniffing because it looks like Chrome had a old/broken implementation of geolocation. But I wish there was a more graceful way of doing this (maybe something like navigator.geolocation.version < 1). One that didn't break every application that may implement geolocation that isn't named Firefox. Because, those exist too.