5 by 5  

Dan Benjamin’s Internet broadcast network. I have been listening to his shows for the past few weeks and like his style.

photoblog #1

Tuesday, March 23rd 2010

Some photographs I have taken that represent some of what my eyes see every day. Captions in spanish, this was an email I sent some speaking friends a while ago.

Nuestro gato, Telmo Rodriguez en mi silla favorita:
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Un loco, sentado en la cera:
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Mi bicicleta al frente de nuestra casa:
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Un hotel que queda al  lado de mi oficina:
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la intersección donde lisa trabaja
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una “soda” donde hacen un desayuno riquísimo
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el desayuno de esa soda:
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un artista y a alguién que no le importa
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nieve en el parqueo de mi oficina
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asi se pone la llanta de mi bici cuando hay nieve
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unos maes caminando en una calle que está cubierta de nieve
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no sé como explicar esto. el edificio del fondo es una escuela. talvez eso lo explica:
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tratando de fotografiar la nieve:
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Finder Droplets for Mac Editors  

I’m only using Coda and TexMate, but this is dope.

(Via Derek Punsalan)

Kanye West’s redesigned and overhauled WordPress blog  

I may be late here, but this is a very interesting move. It seems he’s dropped all of his old content for a more visual approach. The entire thing is almost completely void of any words, yet the content takes over the entire website and it feels as if he is communicating in a better way.

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.

@FONT-FACE GENERATOR

Saturday, March 20th 2010

Font Squirrel’s awesome tool to generate @font-face declarations (including setting up your fonts) has received a lot of press recently, and it is well deserved.

I don’t recall when I came across it, but I have come to rely on it for many things. From using it to test use cases and actually refine my own implementations of @font-face to letting it take over in recent client projects. In fact, it’s powering the very post titles you’re looking at right now (which in turn are using the amazing League Gothic).

One project that is relying on this is Young Diplomats‘ new website. A labour of love between Salazar Studios and Hightop has ended in this amazing design taking full advantage of modern browsers to render a font that would never have been possible months ago.

Screen shot 2010-03-20 at 5.43.35 PM.png

Not to mention the HTML5 video implementation that successfully enables native playback of the intro video on several platforms (speaking of which, it is still not completely clean since the code is a bit messy and not as easy as one simple <video> tag, but clearly that’s where things are heading).

Way to go, Font Squirrel. Typekit is fun, but for those of us who want full control, there’s nothing better.

ACDControl

Sunday, March 7th 2010

A linux utility to manage brightness on Apple Cinema Displays. I got it to work perfectly on my Ubuntu set up.

(I have been experiencing an incredible error in my OS X set up for the past 2-3 months that I haven’t been able to crack. It seems to be a random system freeze where nothing crashes, the computer simply locks up and remains somewhat responsive (ie. the mouse works). It’s a long story that I’ve been documenting for a while and hope to fix soon enough.)

For now, I have jumped back on Ubuntu for the next week or two full time while I get through some important projects. I spent some time today setting up all my stuff, including my two external Apple Cinema Displays but there is no support for brightness control through the system. Thankfully somebody has written up a piece of code to solve the issue. It’s called ACDControl and I am documenting it here for my own future reference:

Examples:

acdcontrol --detect /dev/hiddev*
Perform detection, which HID device is actually your display to be controlled.

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0
Read current brightness parameter

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0 160
Set brightness to 160. Note, that brightness setting depends on your model. Generally, this parameter may get values in the range [0-255].

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0 +10
Increment current brightness by 10.

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0 -- -10
Decrement current brightness by 10. Please,note --!

Two great books

I want to share these in case you are interested in the same things I am.

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.

On Backups

Wednesday, February 10th 2010

This is a quick note to keep track of what’s just happened on this site.

I just lost two years of comments and files hosted here. Long story.
My desktop blogging apps had my posts (from the last two years) backed up which I’ve now just re published (so I apologize for all the old content showing up in the feed).

I’ll be tweaking the site and going through small problems here and there, but for the most part the site is the same, except with less comments.

Live and learn.

On Calendars

From an email I sent a friend today:

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.

Field Notes Memo Book

Some notes after using the Magic Mouse for about two weeks

Wednesday, November 11th 2009

Magic Mouse

The most noticeable issue with this mouse is how prone it is to scratches. This thing is like the first iPods in that regard —actually it’s exactly the same and it collects scratches as bad as those guys did. The white glass surface is the wrong material to be using. It may be possible to clean and polish, but wait, am I really considering polishing the magic mouse after two weeks of use? Sigh.

In actual daily use, the mouse performs great in all my tests.

The laser tracking lives up to the hype —this is my first— tracking movement on a large variety of surfaces. It’s also very accurate and I haven’t had a single issue with it disconnecting from bluetooth automatically. It’s been as reliable as a wired mouse.

Left and right clicking work as you would expect if you were using a mighty mouse; that is to say, you have to lift one finger to make the correct click. With both fingers on the device it will always recognize a click as a left click.

Magic Mouse

I was worried the scrolling wouldn’t work as promised when I got this mouse, that something would go wrong and make it somehow as stupidly silly as the nipple in its predecessor, but boy was I wrong. The multi touch sensor does a great job recognizing my finger/fingers when moving them up or down on the mouse, and with momentum scrolling enabled, it is the best scrolling experience on a computer I’ve ever experienced.
I assume that this, in part, is Apple’s way of making up with all us mighty mouse users.

I also wondered about the lack of a middle click option —not the lack of side/expose buttons, seriously people your mac has hot corners, use them!— but I figured that software hacks to implement the much loved middle click (aka new background tab button) weren’t too far away. Sure enough, here it is (implemented as a three finger click).

Battery life, as with all Apple products, clearly will not live up to the advertised capacity (of 4 months). Mine is sitting at 62% left.

Magic Mouse Battery Meter

Overall, I’m loving it.