A Whole Lotta Nothing

links for 2007-03-31

• Babygadget: Bong-Bong Boxer
  cute boxers
  (tags: kids design)
• Fossil
  pretty sweet looking watch.
  (tags: wishlist design)
• Hollywood Hills Fire 2007 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  whoa.
  (tags: flickr hollywood fire)

links for 2007-03-30

• Windows Server Monitor
  This looks like the solution to my jrun/windows "fail in the middle of the night and leave the server down until someone wakes up" woes
  (tags: windows serveradmin coldfusion)
• Word Spy - Sabbath mode
  my refrigerator has this
  (tags: appliances judaism hacks)

links for 2007-03-27

• YouTube - Divison II Basketball Championship... Barton vs. Winona St.
  Great game ending.
  (tags: basketball youtube)

links for 2007-03-24

• xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
  This is great on so many levels.
  (tags: blogging comics comedy)
• Marek P. Michalowski's beatbots
  A perfect bot for a rockin' Spoon song. Awesome.
  (tags: robots music tech)
• Target is selling knockoff LikeABikes for 50 bucks. on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  So totally buying one (even if it's a knockoff)
  (tags: bikes baby target)
• CanSecWest Applied Security Conference: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
  hack into a macbook pro, and you get to keep it.
  (tags: contest osx mac)

links for 2007-03-23

• Boxbe Blog » Blog Archive » Integrating Boxbe with Gmail
  Interesting whitelist email hack for gmail
  (tags: gmail email hacks)
• Sears CompuCarve
  The sears 3D printer thingy. Kinda sorta create objects from your computer, but looks like it's limited to 1" thick wood
  (tags: sears makezine)
• NPTL Home
  Pretty cool that North Portland has one, I wish my town did.
  (tags: pdx tools library diy)
• Apple TV: iTunes Store Movie Quality vs DVD, HD, Cable
  I thought apple moved to 720p video at the iTunes store but apparently not yet.
  (tags: apple itunes video)
• How-To: Automatically back up your computer - Engadget
  ugh. Can't someone write a happy fun GUI to rsync so I don't have to write long ass commands by hand?
  (tags: rsync serveradmin linux)

links for 2007-03-22

• Blackdot.be :: Apache 64-bit Binaries
  running windows server or xp 64bit? Here is apache especially for that environment.
  (tags: apache windows serveradmin)
• Smallist : Better living through smallistry.
  Sometimes I like to get small. Really really small.
  (tags: green shopping blogs)

links for 2007-03-21

• Interactive Architecture dot Org » Gary Chang - Reconfigurable Living Spaces - Suitcase House Hotel
  reconfigurable house with sliding walls, etc.
  (tags: architecture clever design modernhomes)
• Scribbling.net
  David Allen's true core idea behind GTD: not having to waste effort or worry about junk. The freedom to be truly lazy.
  (tags: gtd wordstoliveby)

links for 2007-03-20

• YouTube - Richard Stallman Free software Song
  Now with drums.
  (tags: freeculture fsf youtube singing)
• Curbed: On the Market: 92 Jane Street, Totally Transparent
  Holy crap, what a nice (and insanely expensive) house.
  (tags: nyc architecture design)
• Peripheral Produce | Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival
  Next month's portland film fest (featuring a screening of Helvetica)
  (tags: film pdx todo)

I wasn't supposed to die...

It looks like parts of Will Wright's excellent keynote were uploaded to the SXSW site today and I mistakenly opened all three parts into browser tabs. The resulting sound was quite pleasing, so I recorded all three tabs running at once, as I switched between them. It ends rather perfectly, so watch the minute or two all the way through.

links for 2007-03-19

• Open Architecture Network | Improving living standards through collaborative design
  cool idea: open source architecture projects
  (tags: architecture opensource design)

links for 2007-03-18

• TWENTY FOUR: Taylor Lane Typography!
  Whoa, nude pin-ups made with nothing but fonts. You've never seen kerning like this before.
  (tags: nsfw fonts art)
• Get Your Money Right: The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network
  "It’s not about making money. It’s about keeping money."
  (tags: hiphop money advice)

SXSW 2007 recap

The big room, originally uploaded by mathowie.

- SXSW was huge this year. Word on the street was 5,500 interactive attendees filled the halls. Due to this, a lot of the big public parties were full and required lines.

- The subject matter felt like a perfect mix of various subjects. Sometimes a SXSW feels like every panel is about blogging, or money, or mobile apps, or CSS, but this year felt like it had something for everyone. Kudos to Hugh and the planners for getting that just right.

- There was almost no hallway time! I think it was the crowds, because when panels would get out, it was like a flood of humans taking up every inch of the halls and you'd be swept up if you were sitting on the ground with a laptop. So all my schmoozing was at parties instead of the convention center.

- Having half the talks on one side of the convention center, and half a ten minute walk away on the other side seemed like poor planning. I felt like I was back at college, running across campus during a short break.

- This was my seventh SXSW but the first one that I truly enjoyed stress-free. In the past, I'd wake up early and hit the first panel and motor through the entire day, but I'd eventually reach exhaustion early in the evening and have to retire early. This year I stayed on west coast time and only saw one panel before noon the entire time. It was a great vacation, and it's all about staying out until 2 and sleeping until 10.

- The panel I spoke on went alright, but I think what held it back was that I never met two of the participants before. My favorite panels always include people I've known and can joke with. I'm afraid the unfamiliarity came through to the audience and we would have been a lot more fun to listen to and watch if we were looser around each other. Lane Becker's panel reminded me of this, and I always love Lane's panels because he can keep things jovial and everyone seems to be old friends (without being chummy)

- There never seemed to be enough time for questions. Talks either ran too long or questioners rambled. If I were to redo this year, I would have brought a wind-up egg timer and convinced our moderator that after every 5 minutes of the panel talking to each other we'd stop and take a question (and those asking questions would have 1 minute to get it out).

- There were a lot of parties, but they weren't outrageous. There was no imported sashmi platters or fire dancers like in 2000, this was simply a bunch of rented bars with free drinks (a party at SXSW this year seemed to run about $5k which isn't an insane number, especially compared to whatever people did during the bubble of 2000).

- I heard a lot of advice on how to run a business online, both good and bad. I decided on the flight home that I'll be starting a new blog talking about the lessons I've learned building and running a business. More on this soon.

- Wil Wright's panel blew my mind. He talked a mile a minute, but not so fast you couldn't understand or keep up. It was like a full 40 minutes of total laserbeam concentration for me. His slides were great too -- revealing his points in several layers as he shotgunned us with his thesis -- you barely noticed that he probably made them in Microsoft Paint using cilp art from the 1980s. They almost had a handmade quality to them.

He played Spore for about ten minutes and it was an incredible simulation game. It was a perfect mix of SimCity, The Sims, and the basic principles of science. It looked quite fun (a bit cartoony and Wii-like) and I could see it being immersive without consuming my entire life like I bet World of Warcraft would. I can't wait until that game gets released.

links for 2007-03-13

• Erik’s Blog » Whois Spam
  Even whois gets spammed/gamed (whois flickr.com to see)
  (tags: whois webdev spam)

links for 2007-03-11

• Badger: Badge Any RSS Feed With Yahoo! Pipes - kentbrewster.com
  Incredibly simple RSS-to-javascript-to-HTML converter.
  (tags: api rss pipes json hacks)
• Yeeaahh!
  yahoo redesign from the subtraction guy
  (tags: yahoo design css sxsw)
• Free Wireless Internet (WiFi) Access Points in Austin, Texas
  all the free wifi in Austin during SXSW
  (tags: sxsw tips mapping)

links for 2007-03-10

• Illustration Friday
  Cool looking blog on illustration art
  (tags: art blogs)

links for 2007-03-09

• water landings
  So out of 150 million commercial flights since 1970, there have been arguably 3 water landings ever.
  (tags: airtravel)

links for 2007-03-08

• more against openID (tecznotes)
  I pretty much have OpenID working for MetaFilter, but I fear a rogue server setup by someone meant to send out fake credentials could really disrupt a community and many supporting sites
  (tags: openid cracks security)

Quote from the Hodge that I just found while ego searching...

John Hodgman: No, I do not take requests. I'm sorry. I learned my lesson after the I AM NOT MATT HAUGHEY incident of Portland (look it up).

-- Books: The Areas of My Expertise - washingtonpost.com

It's good to know I've had an impact.

links for 2007-03-07

• Confessions of an Empty-Nester - Zillow Blog
  Great story of selling the huge house and leaving the burbs, moving downtown and enjoying life
  (tags: home realestate seattle via:zawondy)
• MeFi Podcast 3 is live | MetaTalk
  I interviewed Adam Savage yesterday and put it up last night. Fans of the show will love hearing about all the upcoming episodes.
  (tags: mythbusters mefi podcasts)

links for 2007-03-04

• Video Snickers: Stop and Go
  Looks cool, but the message is: nothing makes me hungrier for a Snickers bar than beating the piss out of someone within an inch of their life.
  (tags: commercial videos animation via:gulfstream)

links for 2007-03-03

• TUAW How To: Use your iTunes library over AirPort Disk - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  Nice reference if I ever move to external storage of iTunes content
  (tags: apple itunes howto)

links for 2007-03-02

• FastTV on fastcompany.com
  Latest multitouch video, now using a wall-sized screen
  (tags: computing tech visualization)

links for 2007-03-01

• Magnetosphere :: Audio by Trentemoller
  Awesome little Processing visualization. This should be a music video/movie intro
  (tags: animation processing video music)
• BobGeiger.com: Kerry Versus Swift Boat Benefactor: The Transcript
  A swift boat funder gets questioned by Kerry
  (tags: politics kerry)
• plasq.com - Introducing Skitch...
  amazing looking screenshot app for the mac that auto-uploads to flickr for you.
  (tags: osx applications screenshots)
• Erased.info - The Danish Poet
  Oscar winning animated short -- only online version I could find that still works
  (tags: animation oscars)
• Cousin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  I don't know if this makes it any clearer, but this is how the whole nth cousin thing works
  (tags: family wikipedia reference)

Apple Rumor: Multitouch Everywhere!

I'm pointing to SBJ's post about multitouch Apple rumors because I really want this to be true.

Multitouch is amazing. When I got to see Jeff Han demo it at Etech last year, everyone was blown away, but it feels like it's a couple years off, right? If Apple could release it in 2007, they'd get to leapfrog the entire industry and be way ahead for a long time.

I've been waiting for a new iSight-equipped LCD display for six months and I've wondered why they didn't release one ages ago, but if multitouch sensitive displays are on the way the long delay makes sense. Even cooler is imagining multitouch apps like iPhoto (imagine being able to throw photos around your desktop and sort them all with your fingers), Garageband, and iMovie (I could save a lot of time if I could manipulate the timelines by touch).

The multitouch rumor would also explain the previous rumors about 50" monitors coming from Apple. A 50" monitor seems insane to have on your desk, but if you watch Jeff Han's demos, you can see why size matters for manipulating screen details with both hands.