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Can you dig it?
I'll tell you what, they just don't make movie trailers like this anymore. Of course they don't make too many gang fight movies where some of the gangs consist of zombie-esque baseball players and mimes, either. And we wonder where we went wrong as a nation...
Technorati Tags: movie video youtube warriorsStupid Photoshop tricks
I've been using Photoshop for over 10 years now. During my earlier years some of the built in features we take for granted today (like layers) were not available yet, and as a result I developed some really strange and convoluted ways of doing some very basic things. Like making shapes. Even though there has been a rounded corner rectangle tool for like forever, I still whipped out the marquee and paint bucket every time. Why not use the PS shape tool? Because I didn't like how hard it was to get nice clean non-anti-aliased edges. I always thought to myself, "Why doesn't Adobe make an option to snap the edges of my shapes to whole pixels?" As I discovered today, they do. And probably have for a long time.
If you have somehow missed this like I did, here is a very detailed guide on how to get nice crisp corners edges on your Photoshop shapes.
Step 1: With the shape tool selected, click on the little triangle in the tool options palette.
Step 2: Select the checkbox that says "Snap to Pixels."
Step 3: Punch yourself for not discovering this years ago.
Technorati Tags: photoshopI've done near worn out this MP3
It takes every bit of restraint I can muster to not just post Jens Lekman MP3s all day long. Somehow in my obsession I missed I Killed a Party Again, a tour-only EP released in 2004, even though it is clearly available for download from Lekman's own site. It's a pretty unique EP compared to his other work, and accourding to Jens contains a lot of "drunken sad teenage confessions, words of wisdom. all caught on my little dictaphone when i was 15." I've listened to this EP almost non-stop for the past two weeks.
Thank you Google for getting me my milkshake
Have you seen those television commercials for Sonic Drive-In's Oreo milkshake? I like to think that I am above the influence of advertising, but somehow that little ad got stuck in my head and for the past month or two I have needed an Oreo milkshake like I have not needed anything ever before. My life was empty and unfulfilled as I stayed strong and told myself that I did not in any way need a giant milkshake full of cookies. But as with nearly all of my moral battles, I gave in to the cries of desperation from my stomach and on Saturday night around 10:00 I found myself on the way to drown my weak will in frozen dairy deliciousness. In my enthusiastic dash to the drive-in, it never occurred to me that I did not actually know where to find a Sonic. Luckily I remembered reading just that very afternoon about Google's new 411 service, 1-800-GOOG-411.
Having launched earlier this month I wasn't expecting this Google Labs product to be nearly as polished as it was. Not only did the automated operator software recognize my voice commands (not helped at all by the desperation in my voice), but it gave me exactly the results I was looking for and offered to send the results as a text message to my phone or patch me through to the business if I wanted. And best of all, this was entirely free. Here is a GOOG-411 cheat sheet, but unlike Google's SMS offering it was so intuitive that you don't even really need to look at it. I can only assume that they will be integrating this with Google Maps and sticking some ads into each call, but even at this early stage they have the best 411 service around and earned a spot in my speed dial.
Oh, and my milkshake was just as delicious as I had hoped.
Technorati Tags: google sonic milkshake 411Suddenly, I get this whole "mobile is the future" thing everyone is talking about.
So remember how a couple of months ago I (and the rest of the internet) was all ga-ga over the iPhone? I didn't know if I could make it until this summer when it is released. Well it turns out I couldn't, and I caved in and got a Windows Mobile phone (the Cingular 8125 to be exact). It has to be at least twice as thick and four times as heavy as the iPhone, but I AM IN LOVE. This thing is awesome. Now I understand what people are talking about when they refer to the cell phone as "the third screen" and dump gazillions of dollars into mobile startups. Here are some of my experience from my first week with my new phone:
- I was terrified that this phone is actually running a version of Windows on it. I had visions of getting Blue Screens of Death during the middle of calls and adware. Although I did manage to completely crash the phone twice in my first night, it has been acceptably reliable since then.
- This is very much a Windows-y phone. I can change almost anything I want, including things I probably should not be able to change on my own. This was definitely created by software developers, whereas the iPhone seems much more designer-led. For example: The LCD brightness control is only accessible on the touchscreen display. In the control panel to adjust the brightness however, you can turn the display back light completely off. If you are foolish enough to see how dark the lowest setting gets, this means that unless you squint very hard and hold the phone under an extremely powerful light you will never find the control to turn the brightness back up again. That little mistake took me about 20 minutes to correct.
- The UI is extremely ugly. Unsurprisingly this is one of the iPhone's biggest selling points. My Cingular 8125 runs on Windows Mobile 5, which while only a year old feels like a relic from the early days of Palm. Microsoft probably had to deliver to a wide variety of hardware specs, and Windows Mobile 6 looks a bit nicer, but there is a ton of room for improvement here.
- Installing applications took a while to figure out. This may have been exasperated by me being primarily on a Mac, but it seems to me like there are about four distinctly different ways to install a program on your phone, some of which are impossible to do without hooking it up to a Windows XP box. For Mac-using Windows Mobile phone owners, The Missing Sync is an essential. And this will probably not shock anyone, nearly every application I have tried out suffers from the same featuritis/designed by programmers problems as the OS itself.
- I put a Nintendo emulator on it, and my productivity went through the floor. In the last week I have played probably 6 hours of Mike Tyson's Punchout. This feature alone would have been enough for me to buy the phone. This is also the feature that will likely get me fired from my job because I'm playing Excitebike in a meeting (I haven't yet, I swear!).
- Text messages are awesome with a QWERTY keyboard. Luckily there is a character count on the SMS Creation screen because I find myself typing little essays constantly. Another feature is that Windows Mobile handles text messages just like e-mails. I didn't realize how anemic the Motorola UI was in this aspect until I started playing with the Outlook-inspired Message Center.
- Wi-fi on phones will be the death of me. I am hardly lacking for internet access in my life. But now that my phone has wi-fi, I am finding all sorts of new reasons to hop online. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to read postsecret during church this week. I haven't even turned on the Mobile Data part of my phone yet because I have never been unable to hop on a wi-fi network when i needed connectivity. Supposedly I could run Skype on this phone, but even by my pretty lax standards that seems just a little too nerdy.
- The multimedia capabilities are completely underrated. A year ago if I had a phone that could hold 2GB worth of media and had a giant touchscreen display I would have been giddy like a schoolgirl. But now, with all the previously mentioned awesome features, I have barely even played with them. Although to be able to give the phone an honest evaluation I just watched an episode of the Colbert Report on it. It was awesome.
- Typing on a touch screen is not fun. At all. It takes me about 4x as long to dial a phone number using the touch screen as it would on a normal keypad. It will be interesting to see if Apple finds a way to fix this, because at least I have a pull out QWERTY keyboard when I need it.
- There are about a million mobile apps that should be built. With all the hype in the mobile market, nothing I have seen is really more advanced than Twitter and Dodgeball. That is to say, the space is still extremely primitive. Think the internet in 1996. As more phones in the U.S. become equipped with broadband and more generous data packages this space will explode. The best mobile app I found was Yahoo Go!, although I couldn't get it to even work on my phone. I think there is just an amazing possibility to do some really groundbreaking HCI work in this area, especially when you combine things like GPS (which I plan on adding to my phone ASAP).
All in all, I am giddy about my new toy. I've even made a couple of phone calls on it! Expect more updates in the near future, especially once I figure out to blog from my new phone.
Technorati Tags: mobile phone cell phone iphone Cingular 8125 windows Windows Mobile 5 pocket pcMaybe Michael Jackson isn't so crazy after all.
Any man who wants to build a 50-foot robot version of himself that roams the deserts of Las Vegas and shoots lasers at incoming planes is ok in my book. Godspeed, King of Pop.
Busdriver
Now I'll be the first to admit I don't get to that many hip-hop shows (a sad byproduct of living in Salt Lake City), but the ones I have been to almost always let me down from a performance standpoint. So when I saw Busdriver last summer open of for Islands, I was not at all prepared for an intense showmanship that most closely resembled Cedric Bixler (of At The Drive In / The Mars Volta fame). The best part of the show was that he genuinely seemed to be enjoying himself, and that feeling continues on his new album, Roadkill Overcoat. Labeled with the ever-helpful genre of "underground hip-hop," Busdriver has sought out a new, more experimental direction for himself with some pretty successful results.
MP3 Busdriver - Casting Agents and Cowgirls
Technorati Tags: busdriver mp3 musicIra Glass on Storytelling
I love This American Life. Love it. Hands down, it is the most consistently amazing hour of mass media ever. Why is it so amazing? Because of the care Ira Glass and the people behind the show put into their craft. If you are in the business of telling a story (and who isn't these days?), you really need to watch this four part series on YouTube by Ira Glass on how to tell a story.
Part 1: The basic building blocks of a good story - How your high school English teacher ruined your ability to tell a story
Part 2: Finding great stories - "Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."
Part 3: Good Taste vs. Skill - Why you aren't as good as you wish you were, and why this is good.
Part 4: Being Yourself - If you want to be on TV, don't talk like someone who is on TV.
Technorati Tags: art story storytelling communication radio media ira glass this american lifeHow to measure the speed of your web pages
A few days ago I was building a web page that required a rather heavy use of JavaScript includes (like the deli.cio.us links and last.fm "recently played" list here on this site) as well as several Ajax calls to the server. During testing I noticed that the page was dog slow and assumed that all my extra JavaScript tomfoolery was the culprit. Not knowing exactly how to tell where the hangups were in my loading times, I set off Googling like a madman (mixed with some bugging of my cubicle neighbor Mac) to find an easy solution to test web page speeds.
The first solution I found was the Firebug Firefox extension, conveniently already installed on my machine. Firebug is by far the most thorough solution I found. With the Firebug pane open in your browser, select the "Net" tab where you will then see each item the browser has to download, and details about each item. It was everything I was looking for, but I really don't like browsing with an extra pane taking up screen real estate. And the only way you can see and info about page loading in Firebug is to have the pane open.
That's when I noticed FasterFox (another Firefox extension) had the option of showing page download times in the browser's status bar. While it doesn't offer any of the details that Firebug does, it sits nicely out of the way but is always available without having to open any browser panes.
Although the combination of Fasterfox and Firebug has worked great for my needs, there are a couple of issues that you should be aware of. First, the results are highly dependent on your internet connection. If you are on a super fast or slow connection your results will be skewed. Since internet speeds are always fluctuating anyways I don't really see this as a big deal. Results should still be accurate enough to find bottlenecks in your pages. The second issue is that your browser caches page elements to improve download times, and this can cause you to miss big problems in your code. One solution to this is to clear your cache before testing, but I am way to lazy to ever do that. An easier solution is to use a site like WebWait to confirm your local speed tests. WebWait simply downloads the page you request and reports the wait time. While I'd love to see the WebWait have some more advanced features like Firebug, it is still a pretty handy tool to have available.
Should you be concerned about the loading times of your web pages? Of course you should! Just check out the problems Fred Wilson has had with his popular blog over load times. There was a time when I always checked page weights during development so that I could keep things relatively fast for dial-up users. Over time web design has moved more towards lightweight CSS based layouts, and the public has moved towards increasingly fast broadband connections. For the past two or three years I kind of got lazy and stopped caring about page speeds, and never really had any problems. But with the increasing use of 3rd party Flash/Javascript widgets and asynchronous Ajax calls, this is an issue that responsible web builders need to consider again.
If you know of any other good ways to test page speeds, please let me know in the comments!
The two huge music related events from today
Sometimes I hate how much I write about Apple here, so I'll get that one out of the way first. Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry asking them to abandon DRM. While I often think Jobs is full of, um, "great salesmanship", his letter is a lengthy dose of common sense in an industry full of saber rattling and hyperbole. Here is a choice quote from the letter:
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
It will be interesting to see how the Big 4 and iTunes (and the rest of the online music industry), who are already facing pressure from several European nations to ditch DRM, respond. Jobs basically threw down the gauntlet and it is up to the labels to either go along with Apple or look really, really evil. Which as you know they seem to have no problem doing.
Speaking of the major labels, Warner Bros. announced a partnership with Last.fm. In the long run I think this might be the bigger piece of news of the two. Basically starting this week WB is going to open up its entire catalog of music for streaming from Last.fm. The details are pretty scarce so far, but it seems like if you are a paying subscriber (the best $3 you will ever spend) you will be able to stream any Warner Brothers music in the last.fm player whenever you want. I have a hard time believing that I haven't missed something here because that is an amazing bargain, especially if the other labels follow. Could this be the beginning of a free streaming version of iTunes? If so, what does it mean for the other subscription-based services like Napster and Yahoo Music?
Technorati Tags: music mp3 itunes drm last.fm warner brothers RIAA Apple