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.

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.

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 --!


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall, I’m loving it.

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.)

If you haven’t heard, the whitehouse.org team has announced that their entire platform is running on drupal and a few other open source projects powering their servers.

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.

As any Mighty Mouse user probably does, I hate it’s little fucking nipple for all the times it forgot it could scroll.

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.

Continuing with my experiments in stop motion photography comes my latest project.

The scene is what’s leftover from a bonfire the night before (in what probably will be the latest bonfire of the season), chairs turned upside down over night by the wind make for a memorable view.

5 hours of shooting frames every 15 seconds with my Canon Rebel XT on a tripod, with the shutter handled by Dragon Stop Motion on my mac.

Post processing included bumping the vibrance and highlights all the way up in Aperture for every shot and doing an Image Sequence in Quicktime Pro set to 6 frames per second.

The song is The Field’s Everybody’s got to learn sometime.

The video is embedded below but I highly recommend you click through to Vimeo and see it in HD:

View “Fall in Muskoka, a timelapse of the sunset” in HD.

PS: There’s another timelapse coming later on today.