1 day, 2 hours ago
movies, reviews
Hancock is a drunken, superpowered non-hero who feels a calling to help people but never manages to do so without wreaking his own havoc. Eventually he meets Ray, an idealistic PR guy who makes it his mission to turn around Hancocks image.
Hancock is an extremely odd movie. It tries to combine braindead superhero action with comedy and pseudo-deep themes of self-realization, purpose and awakening. Perhaps that’s theoretically possible, but it certainly didn’t work this time. Had Hancock been two movies — the action comedy and the for your consideration reel, probably at least one movie been a better for it.
Hancock has moments of mild fun and action. Watch Hancock on DVD.
3 days, 3 hours ago
diary, noscope, Work
I know I promised the ether that I’d publish a Noscope redesign today. And here it is; white squares on what is currently a grayish background in a fixed-width single column left-aligned design.
One day I woke up and felt like shedding my old clothes. Since I make my living doing websites, cleverer people than me might have advised that I do that years ago. I’d tell them that redesigns are essentially bad, and should only be done if you have really good reasons to do so. Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of reason for quite a while.
At one point I had a love-affair with liquid-width designs — you know, designs where if you scale your browser window, the contents stretch to fit? As it turns out, we were starcrossed lovers. This, in part due to James apt observations that the appearance of fullpage zoom spells the death of said mistress. I happen to agree.
Fullpage zoom is only available in modern browsers — nearly all browsers built after the year 2001, or in humanspeak: not IE6. That means users of said browser aren’t welcome here any more. That includes potential clients for my webdesign business; yep, I’m that serious. I won’t build your crap anymore! Shoo! Go back to your Ford T and speak of how the old days were better. All those are met with an unwelcome message.
I’m a fan of both simple, changing and not changing designs. Those are three core values that are fairly hard to wed. My attempt at doing so spells square shapes, no cut corners, a single column (another bandwagon I’m late to join) and changing backgrounds. Right now I’m really satisfied with the current Apophysis generated fractal flame gracing the underbelly of this vehicle of text, but it’ll change. From time to time. That and colors.
In fact, at one point I wanted every color to be so customizable that I tried to concoct deadly mechanisms to achieve my goals. The idea was to upload vectorized SVG icons, and colorize and convert them to PNGs on the fly, serving iconography fitted to the time of day, my mood, heck, even your mood. No such luck, this time around.
I also ditched the tabs;
Before:
After:
Today, well, even back when I added the tabs in the first place, tabs indicate instant effect. This being an HTML powered website (the best type of powered website), the effects were never instant. So no more tabs, except on the frontpage, where the effect is instant. I knew this all along, but I told myself that I wanted to unite the various sections and bring focus to other content than just this journal. I have no such illusions any more, now I just want you to look once at my contact page, because I think it looks really nice.
4 days, 2 hours ago
diary, noscope
Cabel writes: Japan: URL’s are totally out. His photographic evidence is compelling. Reading it, I was reminded that I was still clinging to the www part of my web address; my prime argument was that the www is integral in saying “this is a website”. No more. If simple search keywords are the next big thing, I might as well jump on the no-www bandwagon before it’s way too late. As such, henceforth you shall find no more instances of three consecutive ws in my urls.
1 week, 3 days ago
diary, posters, Projects
It’s grand opening day at my very first real webshop. So far, it’s entitled No Shop, but what it should really be called is me plotting posters on art canvas, packing it and sending it off to you. Because that’s what it is.
What’s that? Aren’t you already selling print-on-demand via ImageKind and RedBubble? I am, and while I have no plans to retire those services, depending on how things play out, I might stop adding stuff there. The grand idea behind a do-it-myself shop stems from asking the questions: what would I want? What would I pay for? What would Jebus do?
As much as I love the democratization driving ImageKind and RedBubble, there’s an intangible feeling to what I’m trying to do with this that those services can’t bring. I print things myself, put it in cardboard tubes and send it off to where it is you live. This type of all-inhouse logistics and support lends a level of “personal” and “worthwhile” to the poster project that I find the online print-on-demand services lack.
For now, there’s still a number of unknowns; the shipping is a flat fee for everyone, but that’s likely to change once Matilda from down under orders the ten-pack. Also, right now not all posters are for sale, simply those in ISO A2 format. Paper type is limited to art canvas, which means posters come printed on a really nice textured piece of cloth.
This is an experiment rooted in friend (mostly family, actually) requests. It’s something I’ve been doing behind the carboard scene that is this website; now that me-shop is open to people who don’t know me. If you love art-canvas posters and if you like my style, then I might have a deal for you. No posters for you.
1 week, 3 days ago
deskvu, diary, Projects
Resident digital life refurbishing outlet, Deskvu, or in humanspeak: website holding wallpapers, has been updated. There’s a refreshed layout, an updated frontpage and most interestingly: an option for you to submit your own wallpapers. Woohoo! Let’s see what happens to that. Unchanged is the amount of wallpapers there, or the features to instantly crop any wallpaper to your Mac, iPhone or your PSP.
2 weeks, 1 day ago
diary, ethics, philosophy, scifi
Sure, Star Trek-style teleportation seems like the next big thing. Sure we could go on vacation in July just by stepping on to a transporter pad and be instantly moved from A to B; B probably being Acapulco or somewhere really nice. Off the bat we would love it, but have you ever pondered the moral and ethical implications of teleportation?
The basic form of teleportation involves you being disintegrated, your particle pattern stored in a buffer, transmitted and then reassembled elsewhere. Does that come with your soul? As the godforsaken semi-determinist I happen to be, sure, I can believe that the — for lack of a better word — the soul is simply a momentary configuration of molecules. What you are, right now, your hopes, your hurting shoulder, your innermost secrets and your latest monument to human achievement; all of that is simply a pattern of particles. So when you teleport, Trek-style, all that veltschmerz is teleported right along with your flesh.
Except, for the briefest of moments, you reside in a pattern buffer; a computer so powerful that it can not only hold your entire chemical configuration, but it can even run Photoshop CS3. Given that, what’s there to stop you (or the prop-like teleporter chief) from making a copy of you?
Therein lies the ethical considerations. The duplication that happens in teleportation is way beyond that of human cloning. Dolly can hop and dance happily unknowing that she is a a clone of what her mom was when she was born. At least she’s not a replica so exact that even memory, history and everything is carbon copied.
Could it be done any differently? Could your actual particles be transferred instead of duplicated? Probably, but it would still mean moving matter across distances. Duplication style teleportation, on the other hand, would only transmit matter-less information, and as we all know: Einsteinian law dictates that as the speed approaches that of light, weight approaches infinity. So in order to travel at the speed of love, that which travels must have no weight. It’s a conundrum. Either we teleport comfortably, implicitly trusting our transporter chief, or we don’t teleport at all. Maybe now Acapulco doesn’t sound so interesting after all.
On a closing note, there is a subtext to the above. It says: I’m going on vacation and I’ll see you again in July. Or August. Whichever comes first.
3 weeks ago
productivity
Back in the day, invitations to Gmail were so scarce and popular that people would pay for them. Today, the Gmail invite window is just a nuisance. As it turns out, if you wish to be rid of said framed box, simply give away all your invites. Personally, I just invited myself 100 times over; makes one feel all welcome.
Update: Alas, things aren’t so simple. Within a week you’re given 50 new invites. It seems you need the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension to truly hide the box.
3 weeks, 2 days ago
firefox, mozilla, productivity
Some have computers at home and at work. Some of those used to use Google Browser Sync, which has now gone the way of the polar bear dodo. Those people should use Mozilla Weave now.
Besides the woven logo, Weave offers syncronization of bookmarks, tabs, cookies and whatnot. In the future, it’ll even sync all sorts of addons such as themes and other miscellanea. With an open API, Google might even plug that aching need we have to sync our photos and data.
3 weeks, 3 days ago
movies, reviews
There’s an event happening. People stop dead in their steps and start killing themselves. It starts in the big cities and spreads like a pandemic. All the while, science teacher Elliot and his girlfriend tries to get away from what in the beginning seemed like a bioterrorist attack.
This is M. Night Shyamalans sixth film since his breakthrough, The Sixth Sense. Unsurprisingly, The Happening is also a mystery twist ending film.
Shyamalan clearly knows his suspense. The music, the camera angles, the clever playing on common fears works very well. Indie movie makers should take note, in fact, because the way the story is told, we wouldn’t have cared if it was all recorded on the field behind your grandmas house one summers day. I’ll bet most of the budget was spent on the actors. Speaking of which, Zooey Deschanel does very little beside being a pretty face. Her acting is slightly reminiscent of stalks of corn blowing in the wind; but perhaps that was the directors intention.
Ultimately, making this type of movie is risky. Unless there’s an emotional payoff in the end, it doesn’t matter how good the preceding film was. Like a good detective story, you start with the end and work your way from there. How Shyamalan approached this one I have no idea, but something went wrong. Perhaps he just forgot a good mindfuck. In any case, it just wasn’t happening for me.
4 weeks, 1 day ago
comics
Behold, the drawing prowess of Edgar Pierre Jacobs, French Belgian comic book writer and illustrator in the 1950ies. Besides his own excellent series — Blake & Mortimer — of which (some of) the above covers are examples, Jacobs helped out Hergé with his Tintin series. So successfully in fact, that Hergé immortalized Jacobs on the cover of Cigars of the Pharaoh. Second mummy from the right portraits Jacobs, and says “E.P. Jacobini” on the coffin.
June 18th, 2008
diary, flash, voxpop, webdesign
Remember SVG? Pioneered by Adobe back in the day, Scalable Vector Graphics were to compete with Macromedias Flash. They never could (and so they bought them), but the result — the SVG standard, is interesting for HTML / CSS uses. While inserting an SVG image requires the use of a special svg tag plus browser support or plugins, the future might include support from the img tag and background-image property. The possibilities are rather delicious; logos and icons can retain their scalability, gradients can stay smooth no matter the resolution. All the while, filesizes are kept small, perfect for cellphones and useful for modern browsers and their spanking new full-page zoom features.
Alas, we’re not quite there yet. Even Wikipedias use of SVG involves PNG for cross-platform-compatability. PNGs are a pretty good start, though. So how do they do it? I’ve found only a few ways to convert SVG files to PNGs on the fly, but none that I can install on my webserver; the closest being an ImageMagick powered one.
Dear tech savvy reader, please feel free to chime in with your vast knowledge. Is there a system — preferrably PHP / GD powered — that’ll let me generate a PNG image from an SVG image? Is it possible at all?
[Update]: No, no it’s not possible. GD apparently doesn’t support it. Here’s a list of supported rasterizers of SVG.
June 17th, 2008
books, reviews
Eon is the story of an asteroid that enters earth orbit some time in the future. Inside the asteroid are seven tube-shaped chambers in succession. The chambers have outwards gravity, soil and air. The seventh chamber goes on forever.
Our earth explorers encounter wonderful things in the various chambers, especially chamber 7. Sometimes what they encounter is so fantastic you have no clue what’s going on.
As you might deduce, Eon is hard sci-fi. At times a hard read but filled to the top with impressive ideas. It’s also a very strange book, which — I’m sure — is why the book hasn’t been optioned for a film; it’ll be a feat to turn this book into a movie, even though the Eon CG Challenge made impressive headway.
Albeit strange, exceedingly vast in scope and at times twistingly and mindbendingly hard to follow, Eon is a very recommended read. Eon was followed by Eternity, a sequel, and Legacy, a prequel.
June 10th, 2008
indiana-jones, movies, revies
There’s a mystical place in South America, one which a crystal skull holds special powers over. Pushed by Russian soldiers, Indiana Jones and his friends travel there to unveil the mystery surrounding it.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is fairly predictable, as evident by conjecture I wrote prior to seeing the movie (which turned out to be mostly true ). Indy is 19 years older which makes it 1957 since Crusade was 1938. That means we won’t see Nazis, which makes the charicatured-villain-compass point towards red Russia. Indy’s been to the middle east, India, Tibet and Japan. What’s left to see? Mayan pyramids and Moai statues. It was one or the other. In fact, there’s a lot of other things you might deduce by simply looking at the poster.
You’d think predictability would detract? Nope. This is Indiana Jones, not an M. Night Shyamalan movie. It simply has everything an Indy should have. It starts with the classic Paramount logo fading into — well, something. It has the hat, the whip, the snakes. It has a bunch of in-crowd references that only the die-hards will notice and love (hint: it’s not the first time Harrison has said “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”). It delivers on the acting, the effects, the setting — even the story is alright considering 19 years have passed.
There are only three things to criticize about this movie. First of all, one gets a slight feeling that everyone is trying too hard. Secondly, at one point Indy says “nucular” — which is not a word. Finally: why three Star Wars prequels — why not three Indy sequels? One of these points detracted the 6th star from a perfect review. You pick.
None of that matters much, as I absolutely loved this movie, and I can’t wait to own it several times over, and I’ll be first in line for Indy 5.
June 6th, 2008
interface design, photoshop, usability
Photoshop — the image app that does all the things the free alternatives do, plus those extra few things we just need — is scheduled for a fall update dubbed CS4. Judging by the above screenshot by John Nack, the entire suite is getting a massive UI overhaul. I have comments on that.
First up, an observation. Ever since Photoshop 4, each consecutive version has gotten slower while computers have gotten faster. While there’s been UI improvements, it seems to have been at the cost of performance. I would wager that if Adobe simply tweaked and sped up the CS3 interface, they could re-package it, rebrand it CS4 and sell it again with absolutely no new features. I’ll wager that, and that it would sell it like hotcakes. Alas, somehow I don’t get that vibe from the above glimpse.
So, some quick thoughts:
- There’s a very large application bar right at the top, which takes up quite a lot of space and looks very non-standard. Either that’s one usability blunder of galactic proportions, or the bar holds some extremely important features. Let’s explore. The zoom factor, the hand tool and the zoom tool are also available in the tools menu and are hence redundant. We’re left with the app icon, which one must wonder what does, since we’ve already started the app. After that, there’s a “to-Bridge” icon, some window-tiling pulldowns and a huge looking “ESSENTIALS” bar towards the right. Wait, those aren’t useful? That’s just clutter!
- The redundant app-bar buttons are like those extra buttons Dell and Logitech place on their keyboards; buttons like “Shopping” or “Mail” — who needs’em? No-one! That’s who! In fact, we gladly pay extra for less buttons.
- Honestly, what are “ESSENTIALS” in Photoshop? Are they essential enough to spell in all-caps? Can I customize them? Personally I’d call “Gaussian Blur” essential, but somehow I expect to find stuff like “Version Cue” or maybe Adobes online photo store inhabiting that menu instead.
- It’s nice to see Mac finally getting a fullscreen feature, even if it’s pseudo-fullscreen and not stemming from Apple. As some readers may remember, I’ve been barking up that tree for ages.
- The Photoshop icon is still square and says “Ps”, but now it’s dark blue on lightblue. Is that maybe because this is not the “Pro” version which, one might assume, will don the royal darkblue cape?
- The bulk of the panel interface looks trimmed up and nice. Points if it’s faster too.
- Does anyone use Bridge? Personally, I need a Bridge kind of app — but one that’s fast enough that it can actually compete with a third-party imageviewer and be more than just an excuse for a coffee break — welcome though that may be.
- Window-tiling looks useful for those 10% of the time when we need it.
- Nack touts: “Our job is about functionality, not ideology”. I’ll tout: “Your job is functionality, not building a fucking slow as molasses but flexible interface with a redraw rate comparable to that of an Etch-A-Sketch”.
It seems iTunes is no longer the only application that suffers from Real Player syndrome.
June 5th, 2008
design, posters
Hopefully the first in a series, the poster below is named after the Aztech capital whose arts and crafts — or specifically whose patterns it is inspired by.
As a kid I used to draw labyrinths all the time, pen on paper; as an adult, ballpen on paper — usually while on the phone. It feels good to finally give those labyrinths the time they deserve, even if it means pixels on paper.
It was an interesting challenge, even, a challenge best described by showing steps in the process (step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5). Basically, painting the shadows was a pretty daunting task: what parts are topmost and what parts are below?
18 Comments
Comment
