All-Encompassing Trip

Japan six months after the earthquake & tsunami

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:18:51 -0430

Japan six months after the earthquake & tsunami:

Unbelievable progress.

I wonder if I could borrow or rent a slide scanner next time I’m in D.C., use it to scan...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:45:00 -0430

I wonder if I could borrow or rent a slide scanner next time I’m in D.C., use it to scan Kate’s collection of her grandfather’s slides, taken ca. 1940 when he worked at the P&W Railroad, and put them on the Internet. They’re really spectacular.

Edit: P&W, not B&O.

Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:17:00 -0430

Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection:

Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.

Beautiful collection; I specially love the ones from New York City, D.C., and San Francisco. It makes me a bit sad that with the rise of digital photography and things like Instagram, probably nothing I ever shoot will be as unique and noteworthy as these photos.

Meteor likely cause of southwest U.S. light show

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:35:40 -0430

Meteor likely cause of southwest U.S. light show:

PASADENA, Calif. – A meteor is the most probable cause of a bright, colorful fireball witnessed by people in a wide swath of the southwestern United States, according to Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL.

Residents from Southern California to Arizona to Las Vegas reported seeing a streak of light move rapidly from west to east around 7:45 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, Sept. 14.

“We’re virtually certain this bright display was caused by a meteor, probably the size of a baseball or basketball, that burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. It appeared much larger because of the heated and glowing atmosphere along its path,” said Yeomans.

Or so they want us to believe…

Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 3

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:36:57 -0430

Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 3:

Includes support for a boatload of HTML5 and CSS technologies, such as the HTML5 History API, web sockets, local storage, and CSS transitions, animations, 3D transforms, and gradients. This makes me so happy.

iOS Frameworks

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:12:03 -0430

iOS Frameworks:

iosframeworks.com provides a carefully selected list of frameworks and classes that can be used as building blocks when creating apps for iOS devices. These libraries represent the best practices for development on the iOS platform. If you’re not using them, you’re probably doing too much work.

I feel like this should be a Tumblr: Vladimir Putin, Action...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:34:00 -0430

I feel like this should be a Tumblr: Vladimir Putin, Action Man.

(Photo credit: Reuters/Oleg Popov)

Your idea is bad and you should feel bad

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:08:02 -0430

Your idea is bad and you should feel bad:

Kelly Sutton:

The problems that your project solves shouldn’t start with “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” Instead, they should always be phrased, “X sucks because Y and Z.” You may not even have a solution. Technology may not even be the right solution. But please stop adding social layers to social layers and raising 5 million dollarbucks.

Facebook Fan Page GUI PSD for Designers

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:23:45 -0430

Facebook Fan Page GUI PSD for Designers:

A fully layered, nicely ordered, completely vector based, up-to-date, pixel-perfect, time-saving, free-to-use, rocket-launching graphical user interface of Facebook’s like pages.

Twitter Web Analytics

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:05:21 -0430

Twitter Web Analytics:

Sweet, Twitter is launching a traffic analytics tool like Facebook Insights, to track how much your website content is being shared on Twitter and how much traffic Twitter sends to your site. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time.

ifttt

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:11:00 -0430

ifttt:

nikf:

Ifttt — that is, If This Then That — is a terrific service that I’ve been using for the last week or so. Basically, ifttt allows you to specify tasks based on web services: for example, “If I Post a Photo to Instagram Then Copy it to My Dropbox”.

It’s free, has a tonne of pre-baked ‘Recipes’ for you to try, and I can’t recommend it high enough. What a phenomenally brilliant idea.

Huh, this is pretty kickass. It’s like Automator for the Web.

Gradient Scanner

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:53:00 -0430

Gradient Scanner:

Nifty: upload an image with a gradient, say, one made in Photoshop, and this tool generates the equivalent CSS syntax.

(Via Veerle Pieters.)

LiveReload

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:59:56 -0430

LiveReload:

Web development tool for OS X that watches for changes in the file system, so that when you save a file, it is preprocessed as needed (with support for SCSS, LESS, CoffeeScript, and more) and the browser is reloaded; and if the changed file is a stylesheet or image, it’s updated instantly without reloading the browser.

Who, Not What

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 21:12:00 -0430

bananacasts:

ronbailey replied to your link: Why Tumblr is Kicking Posterous’s Ass

The only thing Tumblr has going for it, in my estimation, is the community. I would have left long ago if my friends weren’t all here.

Right. It’s more a matter of who uses the service than what the service offers. This is what I should have articulated but instead wrapped it up as one service being seen as “cooler” than the other. If certain contributors in this community switched to Posterous tonight, Posterous’s usage would jump. “If you build it and the right people start using it, they will come.”

I disagree. In my opinion Tumblr is, more than a blogging platform, a social network; and what the service offers is precisely the social interaction, through the Dashboard, that enables the community to exist in the first place; a feature that Posterous lacks, since their “Reader” is treated as an afterthought, is poorly implemented (mine only goes back two pages, even though I’m following about 40 blogs), is relegated to a tiny link in the corner, and is non-existent in their mobile apps. Posterous might be a fine alternative for the blogging part of Tumblr, but not for the social aspect.

Pearl Jam — Olé

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:55:21 -0430

Pearl Jam — Olé

Holy crap, Nike is finally making the Back to the Future shoes....

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:08:42 -0430

Holy crap, Nike is finally making the Back to the Future shoes. Want. So much want. Now where’s my Mattel Hover Board, dammit?

The NIKE MAG is no longer the “greatest shoe never made.” The mythical shoe that originally captured the imagination of audiences in Back to the Future II is being released – and they’re here to help create a future without Parkinson’s disease.

1500 pairs of the 2011 NIKE MAG will be auctioned on eBay with all net proceeds going directly to The Michael J. Fox Foundation. Each day for the duration of the ten-day auction, one hundred and fifty pairs of the 2011 NIKE MAG shoes will be made available via eBay’s Fashion Vault. The auction starts September 8, 8:30PM PST, and will end September 18. Thanks to a previous 50 million dollar match given to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, all donations will be matched, effectively doubling the contributions from the auction.

The original NIKE MAG was worn by the Back to the Future character Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, in the year 2015. It came alive, lit up and formed to Marty’s foot. The 2011 NIKE MAG shoe was designed to be a precise replica of the original from Back to the Future II. The aesthetic is an exact match, down to the contours of the upper, the glowing LED panel and the electroluminescent NIKE in the strap. The 2011 NIKE MAG illuminates with the pinch of the “ear” of the high top, glowing for five hours per charge.

Two workers fixing the antenna of the Empire State Building. My...

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:19:06 -0430

Two workers fixing the antenna of the Empire State Building. My palms just got super sweaty looking at this photo.

(Photo by Vincent Laforet, via reddit.)

The best cities for the young and broke

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:25:00 -0430

The best cities for the young and broke:

Washington, D.C. – “I think the relevant question is not whether the city overall is expensive,” my friend Mona says, “but whether there is a good selection of affordable places to live, interesting jobs, and inexpensive things to do.” Washington, D.C., is not super-cheap, but the city has something most others don’t: jobs. The unemployment rate is well below the national average, at 4.2 percent. Even though the federal government has made some cuts in the last few years, it’s still hiring. These jobs are some of the most stable, and offer the best benefits. Jobs at nonprofits (of which there are 4,000 in D.C.) are also a draw for service-oriented college grads who aren’t jaded yet. Unlike the rest of the country, media companies there are actually hiring, too. And since there are so many colleges and universities in the area, they provide a lot of employment opportunities.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:45:14 -0430

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites. Images show the twists and turns of the paths made when the astronauts explored the lunar surface.

At the Apollo 17 site, the tracks laid down by the lunar rover are clearly visible, along with the last foot trails left on the moon. The images also show where the astronauts placed some of the scientific instruments that provided the first insight into the moon’s environment and interior.

All three images show distinct trails left in the moon’s thin soil when the astronauts exited the lunar modules and explored on foot. In the Apollo 17 image, the foot trails, including the last path made on the moon by humans, are easily distinguished from the dual tracks left by the lunar rover, which remains parked east of the lander.

It was the Spring of 1982. In the Southern California desert...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:07:37 -0430

It was the Spring of 1982. In the Southern California desert region known as Buttercup Valley, cameras were rolling on a film called BLUE HARVEST: HORROR BEYOND IMAGINATION. A SoCal science-fiction nut named Mike Davis had heard rumors about the production just having gotten under way. He and his pals decided to pack up some camping supplies and go check it out. This was the 1980s, a time when film productions were able to remain much more secretive than they do today, due in large part to the producers being able to stem the flow of information much more effectively in the absence of the internet. But just Earthling spies do their best work when boots are on the ground, so too would Mike Davis and his network of Bothan spies.

None of these Bothans died to bring us this information, but they did get sand everywhere imaginable (and unimaginable). The photography that follows is a never-before-published archive of private shots snapped on set during the filming of RETURN OF THE JEDI.

Click through to see a ton of amateur behind-the-scenes photos of the filming of Return of the Jedi. So cool.