The Analog Kid

Boing

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:40:06 -0400

Boing

T-Rex

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:39:04 -0500

T-Rex

CS193P updated for iOS 5 (iTunes U)

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:33:00 -0500

CS193P updated for iOS 5 (iTunes U):

I wouldn’t be where I am today without Stanford’s excellent iOS development course. I can’t recommend it enough.

It’s never too late to start learning something new.

April and I shot some weddings this fall. One had a dress-up...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:01:26 -0500

April and I shot some weddings this fall. One had a dress-up table.

staff: Introducing the new and very improved way to customize...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:13:00 -0400

staff:

Introducing the new and very improved way to customize your blog.

With themes organized by category, realtime previews, and an advanced code editor, it’s never been faster or easier to make your blog yours.

Internet Explorer users will still see the old Customize interface while we wrap up IE testing.

This is really, really neat, although scrolling seems a little janky in Safari 5.1.

(Looks like 2011 is indeed the year of linen on the desktop.)

Steve Jobs: 1955–2011

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:35:00 -0400

I was lucky enough to see Steve present in person at WWDC this summer, where I met the rest of my geek idols for the first time. Struggling to jump from biochemistry into software development, I’m always inspired by this quote from his Stanford commencement address:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Thanks for everything, Steve.

PS3 controller driver for Mac OS X

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:06:05 -0400

PS3 controller driver for Mac OS X:

As sketchy as it is to install a “version 0.01” kernel extension on a pristine computer, I can confirm that this thing enables bluetooth pairing between a PS3 controller and a new MacBook Air running Lion. Combine with Richard Bannister’s emulators and enjoy.

As usual, my favourite image from the 2011 Nikon Small...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:46:00 -0400

As usual, my favourite image from the 2011 Nikon Small World competition features Daphnia. See others from the Lives Within a Drop of Water collection.

NoiseES 1.3

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:22:48 -0400

NoiseES 1.3:

The talented designer/developer Shaun Inman just released a hefty update to his video game music player, NoiseES. Version 1.3 adds support for Sega Genesis and SNES sound formats as well as system-wide recognition and import of each format. This is a must-have for any nerd—get it while it’s hot!

Got it? Good.

I really admire Shaun’s ability to craft his obsessions into polished products. While building a game engine from scratch, the decision to compose and encode authentic NES music in lightweight MML necessitated the inclusion of an NSF player. NoiseES precipitated from those early experiments.

He’s been on fire lately and released his fantastic game The Last Rocket a month ago. Get that too.

FitVids.JS, a jQuery plugin for fluid width video

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:40:05 -0400

FitVids.JS, a jQuery plugin for fluid width video:

Resizing embedded video is a pain in the ass and CSS alone doesn’t cut it. Interesting.

Coming Soon: Merging Apple IDs

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:22:05 -0400

Coming Soon: Merging Apple IDs:

As a MobileMe subscriber from day one, being able to merge my @me.com address of choice (tied to an Apple ID that cannot be altered or deleted) with my original iTunes account is a welcome solution to one of the most insignificant non-problems imaginable.

Still, it’s one less thing to deal with.

I always wanted to do this: microbiologists from CURB Media grew...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:11:00 -0400

I always wanted to do this: microbiologists from CURB Media grew bacteria and fungi on a pair of giant petri dish billboards for the movie Contagion.

They’re at Queen & Spadina here in Toronto. Check out the Flickr gallery too. (via Devour)

April and I are shooting another outdoor wedding this weekend,...

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 23:19:00 -0400

April and I are shooting another outdoor wedding this weekend, which means I get to play amateur wildlife photographer again. Here’s my favourite image from the last one.

Vlambeer is bringing their fantastic freeware game Super Crate...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:59:00 -0400

Vlambeer is bringing their fantastic freeware game Super Crate Box to iOS. I’m curious to see how they’ve solved the controller problem, although this alone might justify the existence of the iCade.

If they have a native iOS port (ex-Flash), why not sell it on the Mac App Store too? Let me swap the jump and shoot buttons (Z and X, but everyone knows X is jump) and I’m sold.

"Real people care about getting things done, not about the minutiae of technology. Respect that and..."

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:59:00 -0400

“Real people care about getting things done, not about the minutiae of technology. Respect that and you’ll create apps that real people really want to use.”

- Matt Legend Gemmell for Tap! magazine (via Kyle Baxter).

I’m such a sucker for indie synthpop, I’ve had this...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:26:00 -0400

I’m such a sucker for indie synthpop, I’ve had this stuck in my head for days.

Inhae Lee’s latest My Milk Toof story is particularly...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:40:00 -0400

Inhae Lee’s latest My Milk Toof story is particularly imaginative and charming.

Sane RSS usage

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 23:53:00 -0400

Sane RSS usage:

Good advice from Marco Arment:

RSS is a great tool that’s very easy to misuse. And if you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about 10 items per day, you’re probably misusing it. I don’t mean that you’re using it in a way it wasn’t intended — rather, you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you.

…

RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to.

The irrational compulsion to hang on to things “just in case” manifests in oversubscribed feed readers and bloated Instapaper queues. It’s ridiculous, but the entirely voluntary glut of posts to be read can be overwhelming.

Do yourself a favour and take a minute to unsubscribe from noisy feeds, ones you keep marking as unread because “you’ll get to them later” or ones you just don’t enjoy reading anymore. If that includes mine, go ahead; I won’t mind. Chances are you’ll feel better about your feeds.

At risk of exposing myself as a pseudocompetent fraud, here are...

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 23:17:00 -0400

Writing CSS and watching the changes

HTML, theme code and documentation

Uploading the theme

At risk of exposing myself as a pseudocompetent fraud, here are a couple shots of my “web design” “workflow”. I use Panic’s Coda to write CSS and watch my live site at the same time. Resizing the split view makes it easy to see how my responsive layout adapts to different screen sizes (although nothing beats a real device).

Hosting External Stylesheets in Dropbox

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:33:15 -0400

Many Tumblr themes are styled exclusively with a single massive <style> tag. I suppose this is fine for publication and cuts down on HTTP requests, but actually working like this—editing, pasting & previewing one document ad nauseam—is a nightmare. Here’s a tip that in retrospect seems totally obvious but never occurred to me until now.

In lieu of an actual server, you can use a public Dropbox folder to host external stylesheets. This way you only need to paste your site’s structure—the HTML—into Tumblr’s preview window, making it faster and easier to alter the appearance.

Put your site’s resource folder inside your public Dropbox folder and link to the stylesheet’s public URL (e.g., http://dl.dropbox.com/u/xxxxx/folder/file.css) in the theme’s header. The folder structure is preserved, so you can still reference images using relative paths in the CSS.

Alternatively, you can create a symbolic link to the “live” part of your working directory in your public folder using this terminal command:

ln -s ~/Working/Directory ~/Dropbox/Public/website.com

After saving the stylesheet, in the time it takes to reload the browser Dropbox should have already published the updated file. You’ll see the changes immediately, all without dealing with Tumblr. Et voilà.