Apple launched Safari 5, baked with Reader —among other things, which is their take on ‘bookmarklet like’ functionality to take the article you are reading and make it easier to read, except it doesn’t, since it justifies the text (thanks derek).

So I’ve whipped up a simple user script that overrides the rule. To load this in Safari 5 you’ll need GreaseKit. Grab it here.

Keep calm and carry on [reading].

The one thing that I keep telling people when speaking about building websites is that the actual website and functionality is not the project, but that in most cases it is about helping an organization present their work to the world, and I love the challenge.

We’ve just moved from a text link based portfolio to images of our work, which is why I decided to link to this in the first place.

An animated series (in classic Hanna-Barbera style) about a series of pointless -yet hilarious- conversations between the hosts. It started as a comedy audio show in the UK but was later adapted into the animated television version by HBO, debuting in 2010 (just about a month ago). Do not miss.

What a gorgeous —and convenient— little backpack.

(Via Derek Punsalan)

The main navigation that fades in and out as your cursor moves over the header is very interesting, it almost feels like a game. Notice the side menu and the centered comments layout too.

Not only do I like this for the many interesting ideas presented from a blog layout point of view, but I really appreciate the content here. Don’t miss his Creativity post, which seems to be the only piece in which Kanye writes, yet there are no actual words rendered, it’s another image.

Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 has already proven extremely useful to me through the website and the published chapters (on HTML5 video in this case). Mark is a great writer and this is one book I can’t wait to read. Pre-order it now.

The other book is Craig Hockenberry’s iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual. What you should know: Craig is one of the first iPhone developers and is behind the amazing Twitteriffic, his track record is fantastic and his website Furbo is a valuable resource. SUffice to say, the book should cover everything you need to know about this.

I have been trying to use a calendar for 10 years and I still consciously believe I am capable of remembering everything without writing anything down.

I —honestly— feel like whenever I write something down in a calendar, I am killing neurones; whereas if I try to remember, I am putting 100 of them on a treadmill counting down the minutes, thus keeping my brain young and fresh.

Make sense?

Yeah…

I have resorted to carrying a fucking memo book with me at all times to write shit down.

And instead of writing things down I draw web pages.

Sigh.

A few days ago I read a compelling argument for bailing on the RFP game by Max from Big Bang Technology that got me thinking about this stuff.

Interestingly enough, today I was watching this talk Jim Coudal did at GDC and he presents the idea he pitched to his agency regarding RFP’s.

I thought it would be interesting to cut the clip and upload it, in case Max hasn’t seen it or any of you find it interesting.

I stand somewhere between Max’s and Jim’s take on this.

(This is not my video. It’s publicly available as a 1hr+ presentation on the Coudal video wall. If you have time to spare, I recommend you see the entire thing.)

This is big news for the open source movement but more than that it really goes to show that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, specially at this scale.

Here’s a link to an interesting article (by Tim O’Reilly) in which he makes some good points about the value of tapping into on going open source initiatives and how that enables the government (in this case) to cut costs, get access to countless modules and plugins to achieve functionality they otherwise would have had to develop on their own, have an incredible community of people working on the software making it secure, fast and pretty much the best in can be.. etc, etc.

It’s a good read if you have a few minutes to spare.

Wordpress and drupal are very similar in that they both have gained massive attention both from developers creating things for it and organizations adopting them.. they also do very similar things.

The problems caused by that thing over the years have been simply maddening.

Yet I still use it. Call me an masochist, but I like the stupid mouse otherwise. I love clicking the nipple for a middle click (commonly used to open links in background tabs while browsing).

So the mouse is almost 4 years old and Apple finally updated it with a multi touch scrollball-less thing of beauty. Except that it can’t do a middle click.

God damn.

In any case.. and to make a long story somewhat short, Tim’s set took place in the middle of an art installation by the amazing Joshua Barndt, Adrian Dilena & Piotr Adas that I had to photograph:

Update: The Late Night In The Bedroom crew released Tim’s full set on video, so here it is, enjoy it:

Full Set – Tim Moxam from Late Night in the Bedroom on Vimeo.

I won’t go into much detail, but suffice to say I have had my eye on the Canon DSLR line up for a while, so, when the opportunity to own a Digital Rebel XT came up, I jumped on it.

Helped by the fact that I’m reading books on Canon DSLR’s and Apple’s Aperture, my need to shoot is growing exponentially. Luckily I’ve done a bit of traveling in the past month and have been pressed to shoot as much as I probably needed to learn a good amount about the entire process (playing with apertures and shutter speeds, etc).

In any case, and to wrap this up, here is a slideshow of my best pictures so far taken with my new Rebel:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

However, there are others who feel differently about it, like Colin who wonders if it’s worth supporting the service now seeing as how Yahoo! is tanking. It’s an interesting argument for sure, and he’s asking for feedback via a video:

What do you think?

There are no words to describe the awesomeness of this music video. With over 3000 pictures taken to make it work, it really is a damn well-executed concept.

I don’t usually try out Firefox themes. For ever i have used takebacktheweb.org’s mac theme, but for some reason i decided to try out Personas. Perhaps because they aren’t themes as much as they are skins… this extension really customizes Firefox’s chrome, mostly by adding a background image to it, but im pretty happy with what it does, it goes well with my menubar.

the “persona” you’re looking at now is called Firefox Pipes.

Also, the website I have open is one of my latest designs.

Thankfully there is a very promising solution which already lets me do much of what I want, Boxee. A fork of what originally was XMBC (Xbox Media Center) has turned out to be pretty amazing. It’s a cross platform full screen interface for your computer (or tv via apple tv) which not only hooks up to the media stored in your hard drives but it connects to the cloud and let’s you access streaming video from torrents and television networks, music from last.fm, pictures from Flickr and basically anything you can find a feed for. It doesn’t do web browsing just yet, but I’m sure it will, soon enough.

The software is free, there’s a great community around it and it keeps getting better every day. There’s not much else to say about it, it works great and is a dream come true for me and I’m sure many others.

It’s always hard knowing how to interact with people you don’t know but share common interests. I find it’s hard to really make long lasting impressions, which makes having memorable and useful business cards at hand really important.

I keep meeting people but it’s always so hard to stay in touch afterwards (except for when people are on twitter, which really should simply be a rule if you really want to build relationships and stay in touch).

I’m working on improving the way I handle myself amongst geeks like me, mostly because I really love it. The Toronto Twestival can’t come soon enough.

Putting up wall decals:

Some clutter:

Downtown Toronto:

Biking in august:

Rocks, lake & volcano:

Funny face:

Panama city from Casco Viejo:

This all makes me want to get an actual Polaroid camera.   

We are looking for something more interesting though, rather than just playful cute desings.
 
We experienced issues with the last set we got (which weren’t from the magic pony), they would not really stick to the walls and actually started falling off the day we put them up.

Don’t do this at home kids. It may result in your laptop dying. That glass of wine sitting on the edge of the case and the laptop is on top of a few books. All because i wanted to document my odd placement of wine glasses while working on my computer

Some fucking song.

Posted via email from I can haz blog!

• It doesn’t seem to use the Keychain for password storage. I had to retype my twitter.com credentials, it should have pulled them from keychain.
• I’d love to have a stop/reload button instead of two separate ones.
• There is no Import bookmarks feature, so you can’t easily transfer them from safari/firefox.
• I love the thumbnails it adds to google search, but they load very slowly.
• I wish it would open new tabs to the right of the current one, right next to it. This isn’t a feature in any other browser I know of, but you can do it in safari through saft and in firefox through tab mix plus.
• It seems to read cookies from safari. I didn’t have to login to flickr, nice!.
• The make text bigger feature is kind of a letdown coming from firefox and it’s kickass zoom feature (it zooms images too).
• I want to double click on a dmg file in the downloads window and have it open the image file, like safari does.
• It comes with Google Gears. This is great!
• Full screen browsing is awesome (although it crashes when going into it if there’s browsa plugins open).
• It seems like url history doesn’t work. I visit a URL, and when i type it in the address bar again, it doesn’t remember I’ve been there and won’t show it to me in the pop up.

In general it feels really good. Having more than one site open takes some getting used to, but it works really well for reading feeds specially, it opens links on the main window, so I can keep scrolling down without worrying about switching no tabs.

The other noticeable feature in it is the CoverFlow view of links on a page (in the screenshot in the bottom center), which is cool but actually not that useful for me.

All in all, I really like it.

That right there was done in about 20 seconds with a new feature Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 will have. Check out the screencast made by one of Adobe’s engineers. It feels to me so logical to be able to do it, yet we have never been able to do this. It makes me excited for the future of software development, considering the powerful computers we use.

there’s this whole other thing about immigration too; making a life somewhere else is fucking hard work, it requires dedication and lots of small talk… seriously, if you are bad with people, or find yourself not really giving a damn about what others think and do, stay where you are. you will need friends, and you’ll have to make them, go out, talk & listen and be cool.

anyway, i have found that there’s always nice people, but there’s something to be said about the latin culture, and the friendliness of it. back home, people go out of their way to be helpful to you whereas here they don’t give a shit.

there’s so many immigrants though, take a look at the united states, los angeles for example, a city where 50% of the population is foreign born, and look at how hard it is for immigrants to have fucking rights… which reminds me

the other day i was at an american apparel store and found out about a program (called legalize la) they have where the corporation as a whole advocates for immigrants and their rights within the US and call for a reform on the immigration law.

now that is something. it’s coming from a corporation with thousands of immigrants working in LA, and it’s a big feat. that they are speaking up.

let’s change this whole thing. our world as we know it, came to be by, -yah, you guessed it- immigrating.

have a good day, and think about going somewhere, move, or travel, and then, maybe, immigrate somewhere for the experience!

Yo siempre he sido un mae muy involucrado con la tecnología y siempre he estado metido en internet. Tengo muchas amistades “virtuales” (que son más reales que muchas otras, pero me imagino que esto le pasa a más de uno), en fín, yo he escrito bastante sobre servicios en internet para varios blogs en “mis tiempos”, me acuerdo de servicios que ya ni existen, me acuerdo cuando otros estaban comenzando, y he visto otros crecer y crecer (vamos al punto).

Uno de esos es el famoso Twitter, que en este momento pasa por unos tiempos no tan buenos pero necesarios para seguir expandiendose. Nació hace como 2 años y resto, en su momento era algo así como un experimento, los tipos que lo hicieron fueron los mismos detras de Odeo (que si no se acuerdan, fue uno de los pioneros en el campo del podcasting, hasta que Apple incluyó la funcionalidad de podcasts en iTunes y les mató el negocio), ni se llamaba Twitter en ese entonces, era twittr, o algo así. En fín, apenas escuché del servicio me fui a probarlo.

En ese tiempo nadie estaba acostumbrado al concepto de microblogging, ese de publicar ideas en pocas palabras (forzadamente), los blogs eran todo, las personalidades de la web 2.0 (ese grupito, ya saben) atraían gente a sus blogs y eso era todo. Ahora todo esto ha cambiado, Twitter empezó a atraer a más y más gente y se convirtió en un medio de comunicación muy importante, tanto que muchos lo que hacen es tratar de tener bastantes seguidores, más gente esuchando, y en este medio eso ha probado ser hasta más valioso que lectores en un blog, en fín, los tipos que lo hacían le fueron dedicando más esfuerzo (hasta que ahora es una compañía aparte), me acuerdo el primer SXSW en el que twitter fue usado (creo que el año pasado), sus números se dispararon, y de ahi así siguió.

Personalmente lo que me llamó la atención fue esa facilidad de publicar tonteras, de comunicarme fácilmente con tanta gente, y ver lo que todos hacen. La verdad, no fue hasta este año que encontré a algún tico en Twitter, siempre estuve viendo como muchos en Twitter eran del mismo lugar y compartían más cosas, en general relacionadas a que estaban en el mismo país (discutiendo noticias locales, etc), lo que fuera. En especifico, amigos chilenos tomaron Twitter y lo hicieron suyo hace tiempo, la comunidad chilena es grande, y tienen muy buenas conversaciones, siempre estuve celoso, porque hablaban en español, porque estaban sacandole el jugo a Twitter.

Como sabemos todo ha cambiado y la comunidad Tica en Twitter crece cada día. Por eso escribo esto, porqué me denominaron pionero de Twitter en ticolandia, la verdad en el sentido de que fui el primer tico en usarlo, puede ser, pero nunca he hecho mucho por hablar de Twitter, y cuando lo he hecho y logro que abran cuentas, nunca lo terminan usando, nunca lo entienden.

En fín, al mejor estilo me despido en 140 letras, encantado con Twitter, igual que hace dos años. Y me imagino que se va a poner mucho mejor.

Player can not detect browser cookies. Please, enable them and reload the page in order to show the content.

Using Safari 3, with cookies obviously enabled. But the truth is they should have tested their video solution on all platforms and browsers, putting the functionality on the site only to have it fail on users simply pisses them off, like it did to me.

It blows my mind that the guys running this site couldn’t get video right. I mean, video online in 2008 is not a difficult thing to do. Not at all. By any means. We’ll see if they get it right.

On the news today is the 3G iPhone (just announced), it’s even better now, but I wonder how it’s going to be sold, it’s only $199 now but I believe you have to get a contract when you buy it, with the old one you could just buy without a contract, and then you could get it to work simply by jailbreaking/unlocking it (which is what I did with Lisa’s and to my ipod, took me 5 minutes with ipwnage), but I’m hearing that this one can’t be bought without the contract.. I’m sure there will be a work around though. I mean, Sweet Jesus Phone loves you and wants to be with you. I just wish they’d addressed the software issues there are with it -Colin has a good post about that so check it out- because there was no sign they did on today’s keynote. Of course it could be that they just didn’t address them now. I want one, but I’m good with my iPod, 3G and EDGE are useless down here in Costa Rica anyway, we’re still using GPRS (sigh).

Twitter of course, is one the first things I’ve started to use again, I love it, even though it’s been having some hard times recently (many reasons why, but i don’t really care) it’s not something I can let go so easily, it lets me connect, it’s a cool app.

Flickr, Facebook, and all the other stuff, I’m in again. Not really doing videos, but Viddler is doing some really cool things, which reminds me that I just got a shirt from them with an awesome letter, it had Colin and Rob with cute little text bubbles, you should see it (note to self: take pictures), these guys are awesome. Gary Vee from WineLibrary is the man now, shit, did you see the Conan videos? Awesome. I got a Vayniacs wristband from Gary too, which fucking rocked (unfortunately i lost it).

Anyhow, there’s a new web app called FriendFeed that I find extremely addictive, because it lets me do cool things and makes keeping up so easy. Basically it aggregates content from anything you want, from you, and puts it all together in one page, then there’s all these other users that you can “follow” ala twitter, so you go on the friends page and there’s all you want to see about the people you follow, twits, flickr photos, blog posts, etc.. So yeah, check it out. I mean, it’s not like you have to, but since you read so far, well what else are you going to do?

It feels good, being back, I’m enjoying it. And I’m loving how important the web is for so many people now, how incredible it is, it really is magic.

grupo folklorico de panama, originally uploaded by josue salazar.

I went to Panama a couple of weeks ago, planning to stay for a month, but now that I’m here I know I have to stay longer. Like a few months more. I’m having a great time, and would love to meet some people (if you’re in panama city, contact me!).

I have to look up a friend here, Zanzaban from the 9rules IRC room, but I have no idea how, so please help me out if you know him.

Anyway, I actually moved before coming here (meved in Costa Rica), finally left the small apartment for a huge house one street away. So I’m excited to go back, in a while of course.

I would say something about the lack of activity on the site, but I don’t know what. I’m a slacker.

The side who’s in favor of it has literally spammed us with bullshit propaganda which really sucks, and anyone with brains knows it. The video you’re about to see, is a parody of the television ads campaign, using popular costa rican slang, and I find it’s a perfect representation of the pro cafta agenda:

The pro cafta agenda I refer to, is the one behind the ads on tv claiming “a NO heart fell in love with a YES heart……” and framing those against cafta as the enemy, they make it (that a person against cafta is in love with a person in favor) this huge deal, this miracle, that this “sinner” is in love with a “saint”. They even go as far as to imply that everyone should be in favor of it, just because they are being told to.

Disclaimer: I’m in favor of the CAFTA, because I believe it’s the best for the country and us, but it doesn’t mean I support those pushing it on everyone, because every costa rican should be free to speak up with his/her vote.

Good stuff huh?. Here’s the latest episode (s02e02).

Total Lunar Eclipse – 08.28.07 from Kendall Bruns and Vimeo.

Arenal and Stars, originally uploaded by IncuBeek8.

This is an awesome picture of Volcán Arenal, which is a must see if you’re in the country.

They are so cute, and apparently so weird, too.

What do I labor for?” she asked in one letter. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

Clearly she was a hero, she kept doing what she did even though deep down she wasn’t sure there was even a God.

is there a point to think of how a top videos list on youtube is being created? why do we have to know every visit is tracked and there are counts for views and we can order the list using any other parameter? why do we have to know a video looks bad because it wasn’t encoded properly? i could go on.

we don’t appreciate the actual reason for all the technology, its all for the kids laughing at the silly videos, all for the guy who missed the concert but is looking at pics from his friends.

try and not think when you next visit a site, use it for its purpose and appreciate it, you will get it.

A red bus, originally uploaded by josue salazar.

I took this as I was driving home away from san jose once, isn’t the view amazing?.

azureus stats for the past 6 months: 508.14 GB uploaded, originally uploaded by josue salazar.

very nice.