Nick Chapman

why has the "When it Drops" site eliminated the new books section?

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:42:00 -0700

Unfortunately we’re having problems with the book feed. We hope to have it fixed soon! Sorry for the inconvenience!

"A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out."

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:43:34 -0700

“A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”

- George Bernard Shaw (via theimpossiblecool)

"Dropbox is one reason I now have a strict rule to only invest in teams. There are other examples of..."

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 06:30:33 -0700

“Dropbox is one reason I now have a strict rule to only invest in teams. There are other examples of companies I missed and other examples of the converse - companies where I invested in mediocre people chasing a great idea and the company failed - but Dropbox is emblematic to me as to why you should always invest in people over ideas.”

- Dropbox and why you should invest in people

Growing is Forever

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:30:54 -0800

Growing is Forever

"At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested..."

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:18:24 -0800

“At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google.”

- Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

"Don’t worry about what others think about you. Take your light and make it shine bright and..."

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 09:32:21 -0800

“Don’t worry about what others think about you. Take your light and make it shine bright and overpower their darkness. It is in you! Shine bright.”

- Michael Lopez - It Must Be the Shoes…

marcovhv: Watch this guy completely destroy the Glee cast…

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:33:37 -0700

marcovhv:

Watch this guy completely destroy the Glee cast…

When It Drops? Today! After almost a year of on-again-off-again...

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:33:38 -0700

When It Drops? Today!

After almost a year of on-again-off-again development, I’m really excited to announce When It Drops! Now you can easily find what new movies, music, DVDs, games, and books are coming out each week. Ryan Sims came up with the original concept and did a smashing job on the design. Special thanks to Noah Stokes who has not only been doing a great job as our one and only user, but also for getting the ball rolling on this. Finally, you can also follow us on Tumblr if that’s more your thing!

WORDS by Everynone

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:29:00 -0700

WORDS by Everynone

aaronbenson: Sad, Sad, Sad.

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:57:39 -0700

aaronbenson:

Sad, Sad, Sad.

"Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits that the company..."

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:08:36 -0700

“Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits that the company operates at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. I think it’s reasonable to regard fine typography as falling within that mandate, but unfortunately, they are falling short of that promise. Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty.”

- Subtraction.com: Better Screen, Same Typography

"We’re just trying to make great products. We don’t think Flash makes a great product, so we’re..."

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:49:42 -0700

“We’re just trying to make great products. We don’t think Flash makes a great product, so we’re leaving it out. Instead, we’re going to focus on technologies that are in ascendancy. If we succeed, people will buy them and if we don’t they won’t. And, so far, I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad. We sell like three iPads a second.”

- Steve Jobs at the D8 Conference

Cupcake Cannon Amazing cupcake shooting captured on a high speed...

Tue, 11 May 2010 13:53:00 -0700

Cupcake Cannon

Amazing cupcake shooting captured on a high speed camera (via Bryan).

Resize Images with RMagick

Mon, 03 May 2010 06:00:49 -0700

I’m working on a little command line tool for generating HTML photo galleries and needed to resize some images with RMagick. Unfortunately there were a shortage of good, concise examples of how to use it. So, for my own future reference and yours, here’s how to resize an image to maximum dimensions while preserving its aspect ratio. You can provide a width and height to resize_to_fit, or just one value as I am here.

require 'rmagick'

# Read first image from file
image = Magick::Image::read(image_path).first

# Resize image to maxium dimensions
image.resize_to_fit!(250)

# Write image to file system
image.write(thumb_path)

# Free image from memory
image.destroy!

In this example, we’re reading an image, resizing it, and then writing it to a new path. Do make sure you write it to a new path so that you don’t overwrite all your images. That would be sad.

Alternatively, you can use resize_to_fill to have the image fill the dimensions provided. This is great for generating square crops of your images.

image.resize_to_fill!(250)

The destroy method also turns out to be quite important. Because the Ruby garbage collector doesn’t know how much memory is being used inside of ImageMagick, the library underlying RMagick, it doesn’t garbage collect often enough. This can turn into a big problem if you’re resizing a large number of images in a loop. Fortunately it’s easy to address.

image.destroy!

Lastly, if you’re working with JPGs and would like to change the quality, you can pass a block to write.

image.write(thumb_path) { self.quality = 75 }

RMagick is great and does all kinds of neat stuff. Now that you’re up and running, take a look at the rest of the instance methods for more cool image manipulation goodness.

Dry the River on Black Cab Sessions

Sat, 01 May 2010 19:01:08 -0700

Dry the River on Black Cab Sessions

Speak with Conviction Poem by Taylor Mali. Kinetic Type by...

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:27:00 -0700

Speak with Conviction

Poem by Taylor Mali. Kinetic Type by Ronnie Bruce.

Photo

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:59:24 -0700

Better Password is now “mo betta” because the haters...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:50:30 -0700

Better Password is now “mo betta” because the haters wanted symbols in their passwords. I hope you’re happy now haters.

My biggest kodak moment (via Jon Tan) “What do you call...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:54:45 -0700

My biggest kodak moment (via Jon Tan)

“What do you call taking a photo of a volcanic eruption together with the Northern lights on a starry night ? ‘Once in a lifetime opportunity’ doesn’t really cover it. “

Editorial: Engadget on Microsoft Kin

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:43:00 -0700

Editorial: Engadget on Microsoft Kin:

I’m completely confused by the Kin. Here’s Engadget trying to make sense of it. I like this quote from Josh:

It was literally one month ago that the company was extolling the possibilities and benefits of its completely rethought OS, a ground-up, reboot effort from the Windows Mobile team. An OS which taps into the Zune ecosystem, plays Xbox Live games, is built around the concept of social networking integration (sound familiar?), will have rich apps and great options for developers, and is built for state-of-the-art hardware. So, how does the company move from its halo mobile devices to the Kin and have it make any kind of sense? From high-end, iPhone-stomping phones, to two devices which are seriously under-spec’d (4GB, really guys?), severely lacking in services (no apps? no calendar?), and questionably designed (uh, the Turtle). How does this make sense for Microsoft, and more importantly, the consumer?