I Can't Control My Brain

"Five minutes of rocking [a day] would be enough, because it would be five minutes more than just..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:43:00 +1000

“Five minutes of rocking [a day] would be enough, because it would be five minutes more than just about anyone else.”

- Seth Godin. This is one of the things I try to remind myself when I’m sweating programming or writing or something else — the fact that you actually think and care about getting good at this stuff means you’re already ahead of 90% of the pack. Not that I’m congratulating myself. But still.

Idea

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:39:38 +1000

Idea: a t-shirt, on the front of which is an Alien (you know, the one in-between the facehugger and the holy-shit-that-thing-is-fucking-huge stages) bursting out from what is seemingly the wearer’s chest.

No jokes, no witty one-liner on the back, no snarky cross-reference to a video game — just a simple homage to a classic film.

(I did 0.0 research before I posted this — if this already exists, link me up — I’d probably buy one in a flash.)

Reverse Garage Sale MM: I also like the idea of what I would...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:29:00 +1000

Reverse Garage Sale

MM: I also like the idea of what I would call the Reverse Garage Sale, which is: I place an ad, and then maybe I just bring a whole lot of stuff to your house and we hang out for a while. You get a few rolls of nickels, you brew some coffee, and we argue about the value of what I have for a few minutes. There’s nothing that says that it has to be my garage we have the sale in.

SS: That’s good. I like a reverse.

MM: Maybe, maybe I go to your work or job site. Maybe repeatedly. “Hey, you seem pretty interested in that CB — you off work soon?”

From Mr. Owl

An Excerpt From Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland,...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:15:32 +1000

An Excerpt From Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland, performed by Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry recorded the audio version of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. I love the book (so does Joel Spolsky), and I like Matthew Perry (I really wish Studio 60 got a second season), so it’s a pretty good fit.

The only copy of this audiobook that Amazon has is on cassettes. It’s also $124USD. If you don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for an out-of-print cassette tape, I happen to know that you can get an MP3 version of the audiobook to fall off the back of a cyber-truck. You know where to look for it.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t already seen it (and even if you have), you need to go and watch this horrendous Windows 95 instructional video starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. It’s 30 minutes long, and it is hilariously bad.

It’s a start. Got the must-make-something bug again....

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:52:01 +1000

It’s a start.

Got the must-make-something bug again. Maybe I’ll have something new in a day or two.

Previous & Next We read letters, words, lines and pages in...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:53:00 +1000

Previous & Next

We read letters, words, lines and pages in a book from left to right. However, with a blog, someone is writing a “book” and the homepage is where the author is up to in writing the book, so the reader starts at the “back” of the book.

To progress forward and read more, the reader has to go backwards through the book. That’s why navigating pages is a problem on a blog.

In the screenshot above, tell me where clicking on either of those buttons will take me. If I click “Previous,” will I see newer posts or older posts? “Previous” could refer to the time of publication (“posts published previously,” indicating older posts) or to a direction (left, back towards where you started, meaning back towards the homepage, towards newer posts). It could refer to your history (things you were looking at previously) or the blog’s (things published previously). It’s ambiguous.

The solution: don’t be ambiguous. Somewhere, indicate that “hey, this link goes to older stuff, and this link goes to newer stuff.” Some people make the word “older” the actual link, some have arrows be the link and have “older” be the title-text. Whatever you do, don’t just write the words “previous” and “next.” (Alternatively, you could do away with pages altogether and navigate in a Tumblr-esque endless scrolling manner.)

My name’s Scott, and I took 1 (one) whole usability course at university.

http://www.martinjetpack.com/

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:42:34 +1000

http://www.martinjetpack.com/:

And people say we’re not in The Future yet.

http://oonce-oonce.com/

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:42:18 +1000

http://oonce-oonce.com/:

Warning: full-page Flash.

Totally worth it though.

http://github.com/philc/vimium

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:39:12 +1000

http://github.com/philc/vimium:

Chrome + Vim = Vimium.

Vimium is a Chrome extension that provides keyboard based navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.

Tried it this morning and it works great. If Chrome was my main browser, I’d probably be all over this.

4%

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:12:00 +1000

Wikipedia on converting 24p to PAL:

The most popular method [of converting] is to speed up the material by 25/24 (4%). […] As for audio, the ~4% increase in speed raises the pitch by 0.7 of a semitone.

That speed increase doesn’t happen with Blu-ray or DVD, but I get it on television where I live (Australia is a PAL region). I’ve noticed that pitch variance very occasionally.

I can’t help but think that online video distribution will fix these kinds of technical issues. There’s no need to convert to PAL or NTSC or whatever when it’s just 1s and 0s going across a network, right?

Throttle I scratched my own itch again. Throttle is a little...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:48:00 +1000

Throttle

I scratched my own itch again. Throttle is a little Mac OS X app I wrote that (surprise!) throttles your Mac’s bandwidth.

It’s a little spartan (not Spartan) at the moment, but it works.

You can get Throttle from here.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:45:00 +1000

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator:

Converts font files (.ttf, .otf) into EOT and SVG fonts.

Context: the only monospaced programmer-y font on the iPhone is Courier New. How could I let a site involving Mac and iPhone software development be rendered in Courier New?

Point is, SVG font + @font-face = Monaco on the iPhone. Boom.

[[NSPodcast alloc] init]; If I was going to host a podcast about Mac OS X and iPhone software...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:05:00 +1000

[[NSPodcast alloc] init];

If I was going to host a podcast about Mac OS X and iPhone software development, y’know what I’d call it?

NSPodcast.

I explain a little bit more on the site, but I’m considering making a show for and about Mac/iPhone software development. Not a big thing — just some interviews with developers that I think make neat software. I think that’s a reasonable goal to shoot for.

More news on NSPodcast as it happens.

http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:15:29 +1000

http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/:

Hex Color Picker from waffle software (the same group that did Google+Growl, a nifty little program I use every day) adds another tab to the Mac OS X Color Picker for dealing with colors in terms of hex values, a system more familiar to programmers and web designers than a box of crayons.

It works really well and it’s free. Try it.

Computer: internet. From Men in Black II (2002). Mac OS X...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:59:32 +1000

Computer: internet.

From Men in Black II (2002).

Mac OS X v10.1, I think. That QuickTime icon looks about right.

I likes it, I tells ya. You’d think that Vimeo would have...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:16:00 +1000

I likes it, I tells ya.

You’d think that Vimeo would have some kind of if/then/else thing there to change the tense of what’s written depending on who’s looking at it and at what time. I know, I know — it’s pronounced “pedant.”

For the record though, I do likes it.

The Surfaris — “Wipeout” I have a story for...

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:59:40 +1000

The Surfaris — “Wipeout”

I have a story for this one.

Basically, the high school Stage Band (we played jazz-ish standards) was playing a show and the next song was “Blue Train.” My friend, the drummer at the time, had his sheet music in the wrong order, and so he thought the next song was “Wipeout.” When the bandleader counted the band in, most of the band started playing the head of “Blue Train” — “ba-da-ba-da-baaaaah…” My friend, however, did not. He started playing the drum solo intro to “Wipeout.”

It was awkward.

The State — Sideways House Family My boy is dead and...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:08:46 +1000

The State — Sideways House Family

My boy is dead and this house killed him AS IT WILL KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF US!

Too funny. For the record, Thomas Lennon has quite a few funny things to say on Twitter.

15,000? In a row?

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:54:00 +1000

So I had an idea. It was tentatively named “Wasn’t She In?” and it was going to be a web app with two text fields and a do-button. In each text field, you’d type the name of a movie or TV show. When you hit Return or clicked the do-button, the web app would tell you what cast members those two films/shows shared.

The idea is that you’re watching a TV show (say, oh, I don’t know, an episode of The Big Bang Theory) and you recognise one of the cast members (Sara Rue, maybe) from somewhere. You wonder, “hey, wasn’t that person in Movie X?” (in this case, Idiocracy, and yes she was).

Normally, you’d go and find out the person’s name from the IMDb page for the TV show that you’re watching and then do a ⌘+F for that name on the cast list for the movie you thought they were in. “Wasn’t She In?” was going to be a way to streamline that process.

I say was because accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

Let me say that again.

Accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

So, yeah. I don’t think I’ll be following through on that idea.

(btw, Boxee pulls in metadata from IMDb for movies and TV shows, but they don’t pay that $15,000 annual fee. They screen-scrape.)

The Specials — “Little Bitch” As seen in the...

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:00:25 +1000

The Specials — “Little Bitch”

As seen in the dance scene from Sixteen Candles.

From later in the dance: “Wild Sex (In The Working Class),” by Oingo Boingo.