Some fantastic shots of the top 15 skylines in the world…Tokyo (pictured above) is only number 5.
Monthly Archive for March, 2006
I must say I have been looking forward to this movie ever since I noticed it at the bottom of the pixar wikipedia page. It was also about the time I was putting together expresso and generally addicted to anything pixar…
Apparently the movie is good, very good…in-fact it sounds like it will be truly pixar-good…!
Cars, in terms of character animation, art direction, and story is Pixar at its finest. The animation is absolutely incredible. When close up, backgrounds are realistic. At a distance, they take on the air of an old 1940’s painted postcard of southwestern vistas. The characters (I.E. All cars and aircraft) look like the Micro Machines line of toy cars from the 1980’s, but with fine detailing and texture. As for the story, the late Joe Ranft, to whom this film is dedicated, has been given on-screen credit as co-director with Lasseter, and the film shows why.
I remember the days when it was *actually* cool to have an animated flaming torch on your homepage, now the bar has been raised in animated gif stylings. This guy makes amazing pixel art style animated gif, and has just made an animated short entitled ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006′…it’s gotta be good! I only hope he puts it on his website soon…
Paul Robertson’s Blog here, with plenty more (and cooler) images. I really wanted the animation of the kung-fu kid being attacked by hordes of superdeformer zombies, but it is 1.6Mb…little rough for this page. Also check his Deviantart page with even more cool imagery…
I am always a sucker for timelapse, Ron Frike’s Chronos completly blew my mind…this is pretty good too, frankly it is fascinating simply watching the sky.
Following the (inevitably disappointing) return of Family Guy from the depths of hiatus, rumour has it that Futurama is coming back for 26 episodes…
Ok, so you are reading The Da Vinci Code, you know, like everyone else was last year. You dont want to broadcast your out-of-date-ness, but still want to read the book on the tube…these fake book covers will not only help to hide this, but also attract all sorts of weird looks and conversation. Either that or everyone will move to the other end of the carriage.
So, I finally got around to doing a couple of fake tilt-shift images. Really is mind numbingly easy to do, simply mask a 1-0-1 gradient down the focal point and blur, a little curve editing to enforce the fake colours and you are there…sweetness!
See the Flickr Pool (more photos like this)
See the original photo
Why does it work?
How to do it (a much better explanation than mine…with pictures too!)
Made some changes to the stylesheet, including a new header image. Still not 100% sure whether it will stay or not, it was design out of necessity as I will (am aiming to) add some more sections to this site including my video work, flickr set and perhaps even an about page. Now the bottom part of the header is dark enough to discern (perhaps not read) any further pages which are added, although there is still work to be done…
Go on, admit it…you clicked on it didn’t you…
The banner ad was spotted on one of my daily rotation of sites, I pressed it (yea yea), firefox blocked the resulting popup (got to love firefox), much to my amusement the computer made a farting sound…
Just an inkling, but I think we may be seeing a lot more banner ads of this style in months to come…I still remember the first pseudo windows dialogue banner advert I saw and thinking, bah! no one would fall for that…heh, then everyone was doing them…
Just a quick note to update anyone who is interested in the phone saga…after the rom update, it all worked fine until Saturday night when it went dark and accepted no button presses (crashed). Then classically refused to boot…damnit!
I am wondering now if the best way would be to have some kind of disk image of my contacts/software stored on the removable memory card, that way I could hard-reset on the fly and not have to get back to my computer before having everyones phone number again.
On the plus side…Since I have installed the rom update, the phone now connects to the computer through USB without requiring me to boot into the clean version of windows (sp2), which was a bit of a pain…
Some really sweet images of people painted to look like their surroundings…
The photographer is obviosuly smelling the impending digg-effect and has removed the high-res versions of the images. Not really a great problem, as he has only removed the links to them…the images are still there. Simply open the thumbnails in a new window, replace the word ’small’ in the URL with ‘large’ (geeks think alike) and they are right there 
See the Gallery here
heh, cryptic title eh?…
Yesterday was not a good day for the xda mini s. Every time I reloaded the contacts/software on to the phone, it simply refused to boot up…this did become pretty annoying after the formatting it for the 3rd time.
While hunting for possible solutions, I happened upon the HTC Wizard Blog, through the entry on wikipedia. I was intrigued as the wiki entry had instructions of how you could get the wifi card to run at 802.11g instead of .11b (meaning to the non-techies among-us: makes the wireless connection about 5-times faster). Seems it is just disabled (wtf?) in the phones, but the hardware is there…this is kind of like making a porsche with a fixed speed limit of 30mph. Also, who the hell thought it would be a good idea for a phone to have a registry…gah!
So after hunting around the blog for a while, it seemed that most of the techie types who had this phone are extolling the virtues of upgrading the rom (the operating system). Of course, o2 have only released one rom version, which I am already running…and seems to suck! But this doesn’t seem to faze the phone-techs, as the o2 xda mini s is really the htc wizard phone, as is the i-mate k-jam (rom released last week), the Qtek 9100 (also newer rom than o2 available) and the Orange SPV M3000. Same phone, slightly different shells…
So, the question is…Can I install one of these updated roms, designed for a different flavour of the same phone on my phone…the answer is Yes! But it isn’t for the feint hearted…
Following the instructions here (and here), I begun the process in the early hours (ahh…week-off-bliss!). First installing the little prog on the phone, then running the batch file to remove the phones block on running software designed for other (identical) models. Then, the big rom update itself which chugs away for about 10 mins or so…it is actually pretty simple, but a little hairy when you remember that if it fails the phone really is dead…
First impressions of the updated software are good…although the i-mate loading screen is plug-ugly, when compared with the very nice o2 bubble image…I can live with that, at least until I find a way to add my own. The operating system is slightly tweaked here and there, it does all feel a little smoother too. Noticeable differences include a rather slick skin for the phone application, a couple of new system icons and a very nice new connections dialogue. As well as the illusive upgrade to 802.11g.
I will let you know if it all falls apart next week, I have all the software installed that killed the last one…so I am kinda asking for trouble…
The O2 XDA Mini S is dead again, this is the second time in under a week. Same problem as last time, the phone refuses to boot. What was I doing to it? simply trying to setup the woefully terrible bluetooth support with windows, I am not even sure the bluetooth on this phone works as it hasn’t been able to connect to the pc or the mac, or anyone else’s phone…
Guess it is back to factory defaults again, I have wasted a phenomenal amount of time on this phone…and so far seen little benefit or example of anything truly cool that it can do…
This isn’t exactly at the normal bleeding edge of technology, as it has been floating around various blogs for upwards of a couple of weeks now. I do think, though, that this little movie is pretty accurate for many companies (not just m$), and the well-meaning comments which get brought up at design meetings.
In a nutshell, the apple packaging for the original iPod was pretty slick, minimalist and clever. Apple are masters of packaging, I have opened enough apple products to be looking forward to my next (if you see what I mean). This movie is a parody illustrating why some companies churn out the same old crap over and over.
In terms of the quality of the video, it is topnotch…music synched, movement smoothed and comedy timed…great!
enjoy it here…I am pretty tempted to roll this movie out next time one of my designs is being brow-beaten.
UPDATE 16/3/06: It is confirmed that Microsoft made this…!