Via tingilinde:
A movie of the January 15 Stardust re-entry.
Movie taken from a NASA DC-8 aircraft as the Stardust sample return capsule entered the atmosphere in the early morning hours of Jan. 15, 2006.
This video is much cooler than the nothing I saw when I tried to watch the Stardust re-entry from bright, bright [...]
Don Norman’s Design as Practiced describes some of the process and problems around redesigning the way Macs are turned on and off.
(Via BeatnikPad)
It always fascinates me to see a description of all the forces that end up affecting a seemingly relatively simple thing as standardizing how a machine should be turned on and off. [...]
I don’t remember what I was searching for. Somehow, I stumbled upon Radio News on Radio Days, which has a collection of Creative Commons-NC/ND-licensed recordings of old radio broadcasts, including Edward R. Murrow’s Orchestrated Hell broadcast of December 3, 1943.
I had never heard such extended recordings from this time [...]
A year is a long time … and not long at all.
A friend pointed me at ShellExView for listing and selectively en/disabiling Windows shell extensions. Hopefully now I’ll be able to figure out which recently installed app is making Explorer frequently hang several seconds.
I’ve been working pretty steadily on Singleshot 2.0 and, more directly, a new revision of my photos web site. As soon as I’m sure things are running smoothly, I’ll package up the new Singleshot code and make release 2.0.
I’ll be turning the old gallery.xythian.com site into a bunch of redirects into the new site.
What’s [...]
I’ve been playing with rawdog. It’s a simple RSS aggregator that runs from cron and emits an HTML page. It has some available plugins to expand the functionality, but the appealing thing to me was how simple it was to set up and use. No big commitment to [...]
I’m going to be importing posts from my old photo site blog. They’ll show up in new categories starting roughly in February 2002 through March 2004. The Movable Type instance that I used for them no longer works, so it’s semi-automated importing from the HTML archive that I will be [...]
I’ve been wrestling with how to update my web photo gallery for a while now.
I finally have a plan:
Take all the photos from my gallery install and ‘recent photos’ singleshot install and put them into one directory tree.
Tag the files that were in gallery albums with XMP metadata indicating which album they [...]
From Luminous Landscape’s recent article about video:
A reader sent along the following link about using a Canon 1Ds and Final Cut Pro to produce a new animated feature film by Tim Burton, called Corpse Bride, scheduled for release on September 23, 2005. Fascinating reading.
The way movie-making involves so much problem solving fascinates me. [...]
Lynn posted about intelligence and happiness. In the comments, Angus McIntyre said:
Intuitively, I feel that imagination may play a part here, but there’s an open question as to whether the ’successful’ intelligent person is successful because they generate better ideas, or because they generate more ideas and, crucially, know which ones to pursue. [...]
A Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago I was doodling in Painter and decided to show people. Every day since then I’ve drawn a little cartoon and written a caption. Today I decided to put whatcartoon.com up with these cartoons.
It launches with 14 cartoons in the archive, [...]
I’ve been playing with Yahoo Music. It’s nice enough but it is really irritating that it doesn’t pick up the Play/Next Track/Previous Track/etc buttons on my keyboard when YME does not have focus. WMP does and I’ve gotten used to using those buttons to control music playback while using other apps (such [...]
Check your disks’ running temperatures. Be sure they’re not operating outside their envelope. The disk you save may be your own.
Of course I had to apply the header rotating technology I developed for the other blog to this blog’s header image.
In this case, I added a semi-transparent white rectangle to ensure the header text is readable over any of the possible background images without having to limit myself to a narrow set of colors in [...]
Until today, I had no idea you could download the Windows Media encoder software for free. It’s nice.
I sort of feel guilty for using a single-platform media format. Sadly, Windows Media is just better than Quicktime in a couple of key areas: a) the player b) the encoding software available to [...]
This is pretty old (from a 2003 keynote), but I hadn’t seen it.
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy:
Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software …there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. [...]
Once you stop getting new information, make a decision. Exactly one person must own every decision. A wrong decision is frequently better than no decision.
Almost every technical decision has usability implications.
The engineers have to care about usability to even recongize the questions.
Kung Fu Hustle is fun. The pacing is good, I liked the references and gags. I assume there were plenty that I missed, but didn’t feel like I had to get all of them for the scenes to be good.
I only made it part of the way through Shaolin Soccer so I was [...]
A promising refinement of the $14 Steadicam device described in the first issue of MAKE Magazine. I subscribed to MAKE and loved the first issue.
The modified design adds a tripod head and makes changes to avoid needing to drill through steel — which should make it much easier to build. It’s a [...]