Stimulating Pixels

Just stumbled across Kuler. A little web site/tool from adobe setup for community creation and sharing of color themes. If you are stuck looking for a pallet, give it a shot.

A gentleman named Jeff Veen giving a talk at an Ignite show about the idea of “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” He focuses a little on the iPhone with points I think are valid, but that’s just an example for the underlying idea and its refinement. I love the way he describes it.

To me, the the way he talks about stealing is more about learning from someone/something and then using what you learn to create something new for the world. What a great take on things.

I haven’t given it a spin, but this looks interesting: picknik.com. An online photo editor that can tie into other sources like flickr for images. While I don’t have a lot of interest in using something like this myself, it might make a nice tool for someone less heavily into photography.

If it’s simple enough, it might also be a nice transition for someone who’s not that computer savvy as well. That could make for a smoother transition for those folks that are still hanging onto their file point and shoot cameras.

While looking for an open source clip art light-bulb the first site google returned was openclipart.org. However, it looks like they are in the middle of moving stuff around so most of the images aren’t showing up for me.

After a little more digging, I found clker.com which is showing me the images. I’m just dropping a note here so I can find it easily later.

Skimming through my RSS news reader, I came across this video of “The Philharmonicas” playing a song called Powerhouse.

It sounded familiar at first and then at about 1:10, I figured out why. It’s the tune that is used during assembly line scenes in Looney Tunes shorts. Before the www, I used to wonder what the name was but never really had a way to look it up. Even though I’ve thought of it since then, I never looked it up. Perhaps that song was stuck in an old mindset.

More and more the content I see come across my new reader contains video, and the quality of that video (both technically and content wise) continues to increase. Most of the video I consume is not from the original site. More often than not it’s a youTube video that is embedded on another site.

If you are just going for views of your video this is fine, but the real key is to make sure that views know who the hell you are. I expect to see an increasing number of people posting little banners at the start and end of their videos that contain their specific web site. This is critical if the creator wants to draw traffic to their own site and generally speaking, this is the goal since that’s where the ads served make them money.

Here’s an entertaining example I found on Laughing Squid:

Song # 10! “3 Rules of the Internet” from rockcookiebottom.com.

NOTE: For those of you who are afraid of monkeys, don’t worry about the slate in the video window. Other than that photo, I don’t think monkeys even make an appearance.

There are a few tools out there that let you take a long URL and turn it into a short one. One that I’ve used in the past is tinyurl.com, but I’ve recently found another service at http://tr.im/. For a shortening service, that’s about as short a name as you can get. Bonus for the fact that it makes sense and applies to what they do.

To use tr.im, all you have to do is copy a long URL from the address bar, paste it into the box on their home page and hit the “tr.im!” button. They’ll take your long URL like:

and turn it into something like this: http://tr.im/71mv. The trimmed URL is much easier to deal with in email messages and status updates.

The tr.im service provides an additional tracking services as well. Each time someone uses one of your trimmed URLs, the browser will bounce through their server momentarily while it figures out where to send them for the final page. The tr.im server uses this to capture stats on how your shortened URL is used.

Going to back to tr.im on the same browser that you used to create the shortened URLs will show you the stats. If you create an account, you can log in and see these stats from any browser (and you won’t loose the information if you clear the cookies on your machine).

There are a few concerns with the service. For one, you have to make sure you are okay with the fact that you are sending traffic through their servers. This shouldn’t be an issue for anything that’s not sensitive information, but it’s something to think about.

The other thing to think about is permanence. I’m not sure how tr.im makes money, but it surely costs them something to host the service. If you post all your links through them, but their company goes away, those links would stop working. Not a big deal in cases for things like old status messages that you’ll probably never look at again.

It is also possible at some point that they change the way their service works. For example, instead of immediately jumping to the destination URL, they could easily put an ad in between, or even launch a pop-up that you have no control over. It seems unlikely that they would be that aggressive, but as with any free service like this, it is worth keeping in mind that they can change the way things work at any time.

When you shoot a normal video, the camera captures individual frames at a rate around 30 frames every second. When viewed normally, and at the same speed, each second that went by during the recording takes one second to watch in playback. If you use a camera that captures a higher number of frames per second and play that back at 30 frames/second you get what we know as a slow-motion video. By slowing time down in the playback, we can often see fascinating things that would normally be missed because they simply happen to fast for our eyes and brain to keep up with.

One of the first examples of this are the set of photos from 1878 called “The Horse in Motion.” by Eadweard_Muybridge who was the first person to prove scientifically that a horse has all four hooves off the ground in a gallop. Fast forward 130 years and the technology has, unsurprisingly, improved significantly. Today, anyone can buy a consumer level camera that shoots at 1,000 frames/second. The sample videos I’ve seen from this camera aren’t studio quality, but are certainly an example of how far technology has come.

Professional grade cameres are even more impressive. Take the self-promotion piece created by the production company Action Figure. The video is a series of people getting punched in the face by a boxing glove with the Action Figure logo. Since it was released, this video has spread all over YouTube and similar sites, but all those versions seem to be compressed to the point where they loose the sharp details. The original QuickTime movies on the Action Figure site really highlight the quality.

When I was trying to dig up the link for this post, I came across a few supplemental videos on the Action Figure site as well as the main one.

• Main edited piece with funky track (quicktime .mov)
• Directory of all clips, including individuals
• String of the punches with out additional editing or sound (quicktime .mov)

While I like the main video with the tune (Shazam’s remix of “Sweaty” by Muscles), I am more mesmerized by the sting of individuals where you see each punch uninteruppted. Watching the way everything moves provides a glimpse into time that feels almost supernatural. Also, it’s good motivation to try to keep from getting punched in the face.

If you’d like to see some more examples of this, check out Discovery channel’s new show “Time Warp” that is centered around high-speed camera work.

George Orwell’s diary is being transposed to a blog with each entry being posted seventy years after the original. That’s just cool.

Here’s the internal entry about what’s going on and here’s the blog itself to follow. A few days ago, it seems the men caught a snake.

Several people I know use e-mail like it is instant messenger. They keep it open all day and read every e-mail as it comes in. For me, this is horrible for productivity. Constantly changing gears from working on something to dealing with other things means I’m unlikely to make any real progress on a project. So, I only check e-mail a few times a day. People I work with know this so I’ve set the expectation. With a follow-up point that if there is something that needs to be dealt with urgently, they shouldn’t e-mail me. Shoot me an instant message or call me.

One of the key reasons I treat e-mail like this is that in order to make progress on anything other than the smallest of projects, I need blocks of uninterrupted time. There is a nice three part entry over at 43 Folders that is right in line with my thinking on this type of stuff. From the introduction:

“Making Time to Make” is a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work. It’s designed to help you firewall the time and attention you need to get out of the lite communication business and into your studio.

For me, one long block of time is much better than two or more smaller blocks even if they add up to the same (or possibly greater) amount of time. The first part of the series has a quote from Neal Stephenson who shares the idea:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

My favorite quote comes from the second part. “Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.” If you create things, it’s well worth the read.

Making Time to Make – Part 1
Making Time to Make – Part 2
Making Time to Make – Part 3