YouTube – Red Fang "Prehistoric Dog" i'm not really into metal, but i can appreciate its sonic qualities. awesome video and i gotta say the song itself is pretty rad.
I AM T-PAIN iPhone app if they make a similar iphone app for Kanye West I'll buy an iphone just to use it.
Kooks | a short film by Guy Fiorita localism taken back to the city block. great explanation of just how wacked localism can be. [via Korduroy.tv's tweet]
No Impact Man great looking docu about a man who decides to practice what he preaches and gives up the good life of consumerism. awesome.
Beastie Boys – Doublecheck Your Head a mashup of Beastie Boy lyrics and music. Take the lyrics from Check Your Head and combine/mix/cut/match them with music from all their other albums. very refreshing and well done.
Apple: Secrecy Does Not Scale – Anil Dash is Apple slowly self-immolating when it screws over iphone developers with all this secrecy garbage? maven indie iphone devs are fleeing the platform in packs. is the iphone's golden years over?
Custom Letter — LetterCult holy crapola. so much juicy good typography here. loving it. inspiration for days. [via @Nybe]
Scientists Are Concerned About Cancer in Animals new nasty, virulent forms of cancer are being discovered in wild animals, that are the result of heavy carcinogenic environmental contamination. are human beings really the top of the evolutionary chain? How did cheap crap from Wal Mart become the thing we collectively care about most? [via @jimmoriarty]
Isolator my new favorite app. when you need to concentrate on something your doing in a particular application (like writing a blog post in Safari or designing something out in photoshop) just hit the command keys for this app and it hides all your other app windows and the dock and presents your current working window on a black background. hit it again to return the windows. should be built into Mac OS X.
Minimal Mac one my new favorite blogs. tons of tips on reducing the visual clutter on your desktop (both the virtual and analog ones). less is more.
The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone required reading for the 4th of July: "Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar."
Surreality Only Beginning | TPM please file this under "batshit crazy": "It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Either Palin is resigning ahead of some titanic scandal (which should emerge in short order if it exists) or her resignation was triggered by an even more extreme mental instability than we'd previously suspected."
Travelling Surf Enforcer for Hire (Windandsea to O'side Harbor) What I'm selling here is one week of regulation at your break. This includes intimidation and violence against the donkeys sporting SUP's, sponges, Stewart longboards, and funboards…. (via @surfysurfy)
Ruins of the Second Gilded Age – The New York Times Photo essay with captions by Edgar Martins documenting the recent real estate bust in the United States. "People are present in these images, bit not physically. You trace their action, the destruction they left behind." – amazing.
"Nearest Tube" Augmented Reality App for iPhone We've been hearing a lot about "augmented reality". Here is a perfect video example of how "augmented reality" will help your daily life. think of this as an simple version of how this concept will change our lives in the future.
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky "The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several."
doubleTwist "All your stuff, on all your devices, with
all your friends — in seconds" – nice lifestream app. watch the demo.
TPM Photo Features | Talking Points Memo | Just Say No Yes to Earmarks "When the 2009 spending bill passed last week, Republicans on the Hill– and the stray Dem — were united in a chorus of earmark-bashing. In the words of Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY): "Cut 'em all out." But it turns out that while the senator from Kentucky voted against the bill, he had $10.6 million in earmarks — 13 separate earmarks, to be exact — in the bill. And he is by no means alone. Several members touted their opposition to the bill and then voted against it, even as they tucked in earmarks for their own districts (thanks to Taxpayers for Common Sense). Oh the shame." – I guess it's useless to question why we're getting stuff like this from TPM and not CNN or NBC?
The Year in Pictures: The Fairey Tale Continues … a really nice summary of the whole fracas caused by the Shepard Fairey "HOPE" poster and the quest to identify the original photographer, for purposes of acknowledgment. James Danzinger started the quest, which has had several abrupt turns, the most sinister of which AP claiming sole copyright over the image and trying to go after Fairey litigiously. In the end this story is about identifying the photographer (Mannie Garcia) and giving him due credit for creating the photograph behind one of the most iconic images of our generation. and Danzinger sums it all up eloquently.
FireScope – HTML Brains at your Fingertips "FireScope is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug, to extend it with reference material for HTML and CSS. The extension's core functionality is centered around a new Reference panel, which contains a search tool for looking up HTML elements, attributes, and CSS properties." – awesome!
PLYWERK | HOME amazing upload and print service for mounting your photos to maple or bamboo backings. beautiful products. slightly on the expensive side.
Big Cartel really nice minimal shopping cart service. i don;t understand though how they make money if they don't take percentages.
The Black Lips Get Kicked Out Of India | series on VBS.TV short story: The Black Lips are scheduled to play 6 dates in India's version of American Idol. At the first show in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, the bass player moons the crowd and then plays his bass with his dick. They do other stupid stuff, oblivious ignorant of Indian cultural customs. The show ends with bottles being thrown at the band and the tour organizers pressing charges and the police trying to arrest them. They flee. A ton of stuff happens. They barely escape India and Indian jails. – Definitely a rough, scary experience for the band and a witch hunt lead by utlra-conservative nut jobs whose brutality is legendary, but despite what Vice Records says this has nothing to do with 'artistic freedom', it's about a group of people going to a foreign land, who's ignorance of cultural customs almost lands them in jail. It's obvious from the video that they had no idea what they were doing and no one had given them a list of dos and donts. Luckily the story has a happy ending.
Coudal Partners – January 20, 2009 good advice, but choose wisely: "BUY TEN SHARES of COMMON STOCK
in an AMERICAN COMPANY TODAY. Invest in and for the future. Right now. Pass it on."
I Love Stars | Potion Factory new tiny little add-on app that rates your songs in iTunes with "as few brain cycles as possible". awesome.
Rob Forbes on ways of seeing | Video on TED.com "Rob Forbes, the founder of Design Within Reach, shows a gallery of snapshots that inform his way of seeing the world. Charming juxtapositions, found art, urban patterns…" Great talk about design in the modern world.
WP Candy – Easier Theme Development with Sample WordPress Content this makes designing themes easier. a good option for populating a word press install with dummy text for purposes of designing themes. It has all the different kinds of data and tags, so that you'll know pretty accurately how your theme will hold up. much better than using your real blog's data.
sIFR lite "Once upon a time some really good web developers created sIFR. Their goal was to seamlessly convert HTML headlines into nice fonts. Well, these developers did a great job getting it to work nicely. Looking at their code, I decided I would create a "lite" version of sIFR using a more object-oriented approach. sIFR Lite is a bit easier to read, and more intuitive to use"
An online hotel booking agency sent me a form to fill in and send back. I tried to do the whole thing digitally with Adobe Acrobat and my scanned signature. The whole process was so frustrating, I had to resort to printing out the form, filling it in, with my chicken-scratch handwriting, scanning it back in and sending it off.
Acrobat’s ‘digital signature’ features were definitely designed for some heavy and secure business usage. The only problem is that the software is so hard to use, I can’t imagine a business oriented user having the time to figure this application out. Most business people just don’t have the time to read manuals, like it or not. Simplicity is not on display in Acrobat. There’s so much useless bloated feature creep, it’s ridiculous.
I’d consider myself a power user and this application totally had me doing limbo moves. Once I finally made it through the torturous maze of figuring out how to fill out the form and adding my signature I had five different versions floating around my desktop. Adding insult to injury, I checked the finally pdf in Apple’s Preview app and the signature isn’t even on the form?! You mean to tell me, whoever recieves this form, has to have Acrobat just to even view the signature? How lame.
If I could give the Acrobat dev team my two cents, here’s what that would be: their current ‘digital signature’ feature should be called ’secure/verified digital signature’ and they should add a new feature called ’simple signature’ that just allows you to add an image file to the form that has your scanned signature. Wanna be a little bit more secure? Have the editing capabilities of the doc locked by password, upon saving. This ’simple signature’ functionality would suffice for 90% of most users’ needs. The ability to add 3D models to a pdf doc? I found it hard enough just to add a plain old image.
Some indie mac developer needs to come out with a pixelmator-style app for pdfs. Design a pdf editing application for 70% of users that has 30% of the functionality of Adobe Acrobat. I’d buy that for 10 or 20 bones.
Naked Light is blowing my gourd, right about now. It’s a non-destructive image editing app kinda like how Aperture works with Raw images. Except it throws modal windows out the er, um, window along with layers, pixel dependancy and a million other crap factors that make apps like Photoshop look prehistoric. I’m super excited about this app, to see how other application makers digest the paradigm shifts that Naked Light seems to represent. [via DF]
Hi, my name is Ed. I’m a graphic designer who lived in L.A. I quit my job, sold my car, rented out my house and moved to Mexico. Along the way, I learned how to surf and fell in love. This blog is my story. In these pages I write about and photograph my daily experience. I also post about things I find interesting: art, design, photography, music, tech, etc...
