I’ve been waiting years for this.

Not a big fan of the other changes and features that came with version 10 though.

Apple launched Safari 5, baked with Reader —among other things, which is their take on ‘bookmarklet like’ functionality to take the article you are reading and make it easier to read, except it doesn’t, since it justifies the text (thanks derek).

So I’ve whipped up a simple user script that overrides the rule. To load this in Safari 5 you’ll need GreaseKit. Grab it here.

Keep calm and carry on [reading].

Got my pack of stickers from the Support Web Standards group the other day. Very pleased with where Zeldman’s now-classic image ended up.

These guys are good. I’ve been using them every week for over a year (which is when I abandoned CampaignMonitor) and they keep iterating on features and making their service a real joy to use.

IRO BFSSFG frame,
Chris King threadless headset,
Mavic CXP30’s w/ DT Spokes & Schwalbe Lugano (front) & Vittoria (rear) wheels, Formula Hub in the back with 16/17 DuraAce cogs & Shimano 105 front hub,
IRO crank w/ 46 tooth ring,
MKS Sylvan Track Pedal kit,
Brooks B17 Narrow saddle,
Tressostar cloth handlebar tape,
IRO bottom bracket, handlebar, brake set, seatpost & stem,
Kryptonite Evolution Mini U-lock,
LBS road fenders, bell, seatpost collar & light set.

The one thing that I keep telling people when speaking about building websites is that the actual website and functionality is not the project, but that in most cases it is about helping an organization present their work to the world, and I love the challenge.

We’ve just moved from a text link based portfolio to images of our work, which is why I decided to link to this in the first place.

An animated series (in classic Hanna-Barbera style) about a series of pointless -yet hilarious- conversations between the hosts. It started as a comedy audio show in the UK but was later adapted into the animated television version by HBO, debuting in 2010 (just about a month ago). Do not miss.

What a gorgeous —and convenient— little backpack.

Nuestro gato, Telmo Rodriguez en mi silla favorita:

Un loco, sentado en la cera:

Mi bicicleta al frente de nuestra casa:

Un hotel que queda al  lado de mi oficina:

la intersección donde lisa trabaja

una “soda” donde hacen un desayuno riquísimo

el desayuno de esa soda:

un artista y a alguién que no le importa

nieve en el parqueo de mi oficina

asi se pone la llanta de mi bici cuando hay nieve

unos maes caminando en una calle que está cubierta de nieve

no sé como explicar esto. el edificio del fondo es una escuela. talvez eso lo explica:

tratando de fotografiar la nieve:

(Via Derek Punsalan)

The main navigation that fades in and out as your cursor moves over the header is very interesting, it almost feels like a game. Notice the side menu and the centered comments layout too.

Not only do I like this for the many interesting ideas presented from a blog layout point of view, but I really appreciate the content here. Don’t miss his Creativity post, which seems to be the only piece in which Kanye writes, yet there are no actual words rendered, it’s another image.

I don’t recall when I came across it, but I have come to rely on it for many things. From using it to test use cases and actually refine my own implementations of @font-face to letting it take over in recent client projects. In fact, it’s powering the very post titles you’re looking at right now (which in turn are using the amazing League Gothic).

One project that is relying on this is Young Diplomats‘ new website. A labour of love between Salazar Studios and Hightop has ended in this amazing design taking full advantage of modern browsers to render a font that would never have been possible months ago.

Not to mention the HTML5 video implementation that successfully enables native playback of the intro video on several platforms (speaking of which, it is still not completely clean since the code is a bit messy and not as easy as one simple <video> tag, but clearly that’s where things are heading).

Way to go, Font Squirrel. Typekit is fun, but for those of us who want full control, there’s nothing better.

(I have been experiencing an incredible error in my OS X set up for the past 2-3 months that I haven’t been able to crack. It seems to be a random system freeze where nothing crashes, the computer simply locks up and remains somewhat responsive (ie. the mouse works). It’s a long story that I’ve been documenting for a while and hope to fix soon enough.)

For now, I have jumped back on Ubuntu for the next week or two full time while I get through some important projects. I spent some time today setting up all my stuff, including my two external Apple Cinema Displays but there is no support for brightness control through the system. Thankfully somebody has written up a piece of code to solve the issue. It’s called ACDControl and I am documenting it here for my own future reference:

Examples:

acdcontrol --detect /dev/hiddev*
Perform detection, which HID device is actually your display to be controlled.

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0
Read current brightness parameter

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0 160
Set brightness to 160. Note, that brightness setting depends on your model. Generally, this parameter may get values in the range [0-255].

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0 +10
Increment current brightness by 10.

acdcontrol /dev/hiddev0 -- -10
Decrement current brightness by 10. Please,note --!


Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 has already proven extremely useful to me through the website and the published chapters (on HTML5 video in this case). Mark is a great writer and this is one book I can’t wait to read. Pre-order it now.

The other book is Craig Hockenberry’s iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual. What you should know: Craig is one of the first iPhone developers and is behind the amazing Twitteriffic, his track record is fantastic and his website Furbo is a valuable resource. SUffice to say, the book should cover everything you need to know about this.

I just lost two years of comments and files hosted here. Long story.
My desktop blogging apps had my posts (from the last two years) backed up which I’ve now just re published (so I apologize for all the old content showing up in the feed).

I’ll be tweaking the site and going through small problems here and there, but for the most part the site is the same, except with less comments.

Live and learn.

I have been trying to use a calendar for 10 years and I still consciously believe I am capable of remembering everything without writing anything down.

I —honestly— feel like whenever I write something down in a calendar, I am killing neurones; whereas if I try to remember, I am putting 100 of them on a treadmill counting down the minutes, thus keeping my brain young and fresh.

Make sense?

Yeah…

I have resorted to carrying a fucking memo book with me at all times to write shit down.

And instead of writing things down I draw web pages.

Sigh.

The most noticeable issue with this mouse is how prone it is to scratches. This thing is like the first iPods in that regard —actually it’s exactly the same and it collects scratches as bad as those guys did. The white glass surface is the wrong material to be using. It may be possible to clean and polish, but wait, am I really considering polishing the magic mouse after two weeks of use? Sigh.

In actual daily use, the mouse performs great in all my tests.

The laser tracking lives up to the hype —this is my first— tracking movement on a large variety of surfaces. It’s also very accurate and I haven’t had a single issue with it disconnecting from bluetooth automatically. It’s been as reliable as a wired mouse.

Left and right clicking work as you would expect if you were using a mighty mouse; that is to say, you have to lift one finger to make the correct click. With both fingers on the device it will always recognize a click as a left click.

I was worried the scrolling wouldn’t work as promised when I got this mouse, that something would go wrong and make it somehow as stupidly silly as the nipple in its predecessor, but boy was I wrong. The multi touch sensor does a great job recognizing my finger/fingers when moving them up or down on the mouse, and with momentum scrolling enabled, it is the best scrolling experience on a computer I’ve ever experienced.
I assume that this, in part, is Apple’s way of making up with all us mighty mouse users.

I also wondered about the lack of a middle click option —not the lack of side/expose buttons, seriously people your mac has hot corners, use them!— but I figured that software hacks to implement the much loved middle click (aka new background tab button) weren’t too far away. Sure enough, here it is (implemented as a three finger click).

Battery life, as with all Apple products, clearly will not live up to the advertised capacity (of 4 months). Mine is sitting at 62% left.

Overall, I’m loving it.

A few days ago I read a compelling argument for bailing on the RFP game by Max from Big Bang Technology that got me thinking about this stuff.

Interestingly enough, today I was watching this talk Jim Coudal did at GDC and he presents the idea he pitched to his agency regarding RFP’s.

I thought it would be interesting to cut the clip and upload it, in case Max hasn’t seen it or any of you find it interesting.

I stand somewhere between Max’s and Jim’s take on this.

(This is not my video. It’s publicly available as a 1hr+ presentation on the Coudal video wall. If you have time to spare, I recommend you see the entire thing.)

This is big news for the open source movement but more than that it really goes to show that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, specially at this scale.

Here’s a link to an interesting article (by Tim O’Reilly) in which he makes some good points about the value of tapping into on going open source initiatives and how that enables the government (in this case) to cut costs, get access to countless modules and plugins to achieve functionality they otherwise would have had to develop on their own, have an incredible community of people working on the software making it secure, fast and pretty much the best in can be.. etc, etc.

It’s a good read if you have a few minutes to spare.

Wordpress and drupal are very similar in that they both have gained massive attention both from developers creating things for it and organizations adopting them.. they also do very similar things.

The problems caused by that thing over the years have been simply maddening.

Yet I still use it. Call me an masochist, but I like the stupid mouse otherwise. I love clicking the nipple for a middle click (commonly used to open links in background tabs while browsing).

So the mouse is almost 4 years old and Apple finally updated it with a multi touch scrollball-less thing of beauty. Except that it can’t do a middle click.

God damn.

The scene is what’s leftover from a bonfire the night before (in what probably will be the latest bonfire of the season), chairs turned upside down over night by the wind make for a memorable view.

5 hours of shooting frames every 15 seconds with my Canon Rebel XT on a tripod, with the shutter handled by Dragon Stop Motion on my mac.

Post processing included bumping the vibrance and highlights all the way up in Aperture for every shot and doing an Image Sequence in Quicktime Pro set to 6 frames per second.

The song is The Field’s Everybody’s got to learn sometime.

The video is embedded below but I highly recommend you click through to Vimeo and see it in HD:

View “Fall in Muskoka, a timelapse of the sunset” in HD.

PS: There’s another timelapse coming later on today.

In any case.. and to make a long story somewhat short, Tim’s set took place in the middle of an art installation by the amazing Joshua Barndt, Adrian Dilena & Piotr Adas that I had to photograph:

Update: The Late Night In The Bedroom crew released Tim’s full set on video, so here it is, enjoy it:

Full Set – Tim Moxam from Late Night in the Bedroom on Vimeo.

I won’t go into much detail, but suffice to say I have had my eye on the Canon DSLR line up for a while, so, when the opportunity to own a Digital Rebel XT came up, I jumped on it.

Helped by the fact that I’m reading books on Canon DSLR’s and Apple’s Aperture, my need to shoot is growing exponentially. Luckily I’ve done a bit of traveling in the past month and have been pressed to shoot as much as I probably needed to learn a good amount about the entire process (playing with apertures and shutter speeds, etc).

In any case, and to wrap this up, here is a slideshow of my best pictures so far taken with my new Rebel:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

However, there are others who feel differently about it, like Colin who wonders if it’s worth supporting the service now seeing as how Yahoo! is tanking. It’s an interesting argument for sure, and he’s asking for feedback via a video:

What do you think?

FAIL.

There are no words to describe the awesomeness of this music video. With over 3000 pictures taken to make it work, it really is a damn well-executed concept.

I don’t usually try out Firefox themes. For ever i have used takebacktheweb.org’s mac theme, but for some reason i decided to try out Personas. Perhaps because they aren’t themes as much as they are skins… this extension really customizes Firefox’s chrome, mostly by adding a background image to it, but im pretty happy with what it does, it goes well with my menubar.

the “persona” you’re looking at now is called Firefox Pipes.

Also, the website I have open is one of my latest designs.

Thankfully there is a very promising solution which already lets me do much of what I want, Boxee. A fork of what originally was XMBC (Xbox Media Center) has turned out to be pretty amazing. It’s a cross platform full screen interface for your computer (or tv via apple tv) which not only hooks up to the media stored in your hard drives but it connects to the cloud and let’s you access streaming video from torrents and television networks, music from last.fm, pictures from Flickr and basically anything you can find a feed for. It doesn’t do web browsing just yet, but I’m sure it will, soon enough.

The software is free, there’s a great community around it and it keeps getting better every day. There’s not much else to say about it, it works great and is a dream come true for me and I’m sure many others.

It’s always hard knowing how to interact with people you don’t know but share common interests. I find it’s hard to really make long lasting impressions, which makes having memorable and useful business cards at hand really important.

I keep meeting people but it’s always so hard to stay in touch afterwards (except for when people are on twitter, which really should simply be a rule if you really want to build relationships and stay in touch).

I’m working on improving the way I handle myself amongst geeks like me, mostly because I really love it. The Toronto Twestival can’t come soon enough.

Putting up wall decals:

Some clutter:

Downtown Toronto:

Biking in august:

Rocks, lake & volcano:

Funny face:

Panama city from Casco Viejo:

This all makes me want to get an actual Polaroid camera.   

The earthquake took place near the Poas volcano and there’s an impressive Youtube video from one of the tv stations that really captures what happened (and is still happening).

There’s a lot of coverage from ticos on Twitter reporting live, which is amazing. Technology has come such a long way for this to be a reality (getting reports live from people experiencing it). I’m in the loop even though I’m nowhere close to Costa Rica right now.

The highways are collapsing with traffic making it impossible to get around the capital. There’s reports of casualties already, people are being sent home by employers and there are still smaller earthquakes happening three hours after the first one. Newspapers websites and local internet is saturated, the biggest newspaper in the country set up a live chat on their home page for people to report on and others to stay in the loop.

I’ll be keeping an eye on twitter for more reports and information.

We are looking for something more interesting though, rather than just playful cute desings.
 
We experienced issues with the last set we got (which weren’t from the magic pony), they would not really stick to the walls and actually started falling off the day we put them up.

Don’t do this at home kids. It may result in your laptop dying. That glass of wine sitting on the edge of the case and the laptop is on top of a few books. All because i wanted to document my odd placement of wine glasses while working on my computer

Some fucking song.

Posted via email from I can haz blog!

Their first album was released a few months ago, available on their website as a $5 download and on iTunes as well. Not only that but their first music video is a work of art, set in a simple stage with Francis pulling some awesome dance moves reminiscent of Prince’s style and with live audio, it’s so good they made it available as an HD download.

Their music is lovely and certainly unique, electronic lovers will appreciate the beats and rhythms they produce. Francis voice gives them a very unique sound and brings some classic stuff to their show.

All in all they definitely are a band I’ll be keeping an eye out for.

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to get tickets for telefon tel aviv and matthew dear and it was great. Two bands which I’ve followed for a good while, stuff I love, obviously I was very excited to see them. The venue was pretty hot, it’s apparently a new spot in t.o. (wrongbar), and it worked.

Telefon tel aviv have been doing some really interesting things with their music, mixing lots of influences and ideas to create really compelling sounds.

Matthew was only playing his old songs (which were great for me). He’s such a class act. I love the guy.

• It doesn’t seem to use the Keychain for password storage. I had to retype my twitter.com credentials, it should have pulled them from keychain.
• I’d love to have a stop/reload button instead of two separate ones.
• There is no Import bookmarks feature, so you can’t easily transfer them from safari/firefox.
• I love the thumbnails it adds to google search, but they load very slowly.
• I wish it would open new tabs to the right of the current one, right next to it. This isn’t a feature in any other browser I know of, but you can do it in safari through saft and in firefox through tab mix plus.
• It seems to read cookies from safari. I didn’t have to login to flickr, nice!.
• The make text bigger feature is kind of a letdown coming from firefox and it’s kickass zoom feature (it zooms images too).
• I want to double click on a dmg file in the downloads window and have it open the image file, like safari does.
• It comes with Google Gears. This is great!
• Full screen browsing is awesome (although it crashes when going into it if there’s browsa plugins open).
• It seems like url history doesn’t work. I visit a URL, and when i type it in the address bar again, it doesn’t remember I’ve been there and won’t show it to me in the pop up.

In general it feels really good. Having more than one site open takes some getting used to, but it works really well for reading feeds specially, it opens links on the main window, so I can keep scrolling down without worrying about switching no tabs.

The other noticeable feature in it is the CoverFlow view of links on a page (in the screenshot in the bottom center), which is cool but actually not that useful for me.

All in all, I really like it.

that’s shot in toronto, canada, where i’m living at the moment.

in the morning i was working, i was on the computer.. as you can see

around 3pm we drove out to goodwill, which is far out

beautiful surprise to see the first snow of the season, it got cold

my friend got a ladder, lol

lisa drove both ways

my night/dinner was not recorded

i shot everything. all the music is what i was listening to

Poorleno mixtape link!!!!

made in costa rica my site!

"Yesterday, in video. Shot throughout the day, put together and uploaded today. You should do the same. And when you do, put it in the My Day, Yesterday group. Don’t add any music or anything, only what’s recorded via the camera."

That right there was done in about 20 seconds with a new feature Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 will have. Check out the screencast made by one of Adobe’s engineers. It feels to me so logical to be able to do it, yet we have never been able to do this. It makes me excited for the future of software development, considering the powerful computers we use.

there’s this whole other thing about immigration too; making a life somewhere else is fucking hard work, it requires dedication and lots of small talk… seriously, if you are bad with people, or find yourself not really giving a damn about what others think and do, stay where you are. you will need friends, and you’ll have to make them, go out, talk & listen and be cool.

anyway, i have found that there’s always nice people, but there’s something to be said about the latin culture, and the friendliness of it. back home, people go out of their way to be helpful to you whereas here they don’t give a shit.

there’s so many immigrants though, take a look at the united states, los angeles for example, a city where 50% of the population is foreign born, and look at how hard it is for immigrants to have fucking rights… which reminds me

the other day i was at an american apparel store and found out about a program (called legalize la) they have where the corporation as a whole advocates for immigrants and their rights within the US and call for a reform on the immigration law.

now that is something. it’s coming from a corporation with thousands of immigrants working in LA, and it’s a big feat. that they are speaking up.

let’s change this whole thing. our world as we know it, came to be by, -yah, you guessed it- immigrating.

have a good day, and think about going somewhere, move, or travel, and then, maybe, immigrate somewhere for the experience!

It’s an amazing initiative backed by Canada Heritage and OAE. There are about 70 delegates from all latin american countries and all of us work in areas that revolve around youth and arts. It’s the first time a group this diverse gets together for a week to actually work on policies, toolkits and networks which will be then pitched to actual OEA members on a very special meeting happening tomorrow.

Youth are often neglected, but there is no doubt some people are out there trying to make things better and give us a voice, and it’s our job to actually make it count.

I’ll be doing my best to make a difference.

Travel

I spent August in Mexico with Lisa, kind of attending the AIDS conference and getting to know the country. It was great experiencing their culture, I’d heard so much about mexicans, I had some expectations but I was blown away. It’s a beautiful country, with lots of culture and history. Their food is great once you get used to it, and their beers are excellent. I loved being there and I will gladly go back to visit some of the cities I didn’t get to see. I made the trip by bus, both ways, which was an experience in and of itself. Tiring but well worth it.

Anyway, I got back about 2-3 weeks ago and I’m just about to leave again. This time it’s Toronto, Canada. I’m attending the “Ignite the Americas” forum as one of the two Costa Rican delegates, and we hope to be able to contribute. It’s a great initiative put together by Canada Heritage and other organizations, they are bringing together almost 70 latinos to help create guidelines and programs to help popular education and arts in the americas. I’m excited about that.

Work

I’ve always thought I’m privileged to be able to work in the field that I do. I love designing and it’s been a blast keeping it up for this long, and I really don’t see no end to it. There’s so many things I want to do. One of them is finally put this site to good use, that is, moving the blog elsewhere and dedicating made in costa rica to my business. Portfolio and the whole nine yards.

I’ve seen such growth in the business, the web is getting to be something all businesses no matter where have been understanding and wanting to tap, which is great for designers all around the world. And we are happy to help!.

Anyways, I really need to get used to publishing things online again. So, here’s to that.

Yo siempre he sido un mae muy involucrado con la tecnología y siempre he estado metido en internet. Tengo muchas amistades “virtuales” (que son más reales que muchas otras, pero me imagino que esto le pasa a más de uno), en fín, yo he escrito bastante sobre servicios en internet para varios blogs en “mis tiempos”, me acuerdo de servicios que ya ni existen, me acuerdo cuando otros estaban comenzando, y he visto otros crecer y crecer (vamos al punto).

Uno de esos es el famoso Twitter, que en este momento pasa por unos tiempos no tan buenos pero necesarios para seguir expandiendose. Nació hace como 2 años y resto, en su momento era algo así como un experimento, los tipos que lo hicieron fueron los mismos detras de Odeo (que si no se acuerdan, fue uno de los pioneros en el campo del podcasting, hasta que Apple incluyó la funcionalidad de podcasts en iTunes y les mató el negocio), ni se llamaba Twitter en ese entonces, era twittr, o algo así. En fín, apenas escuché del servicio me fui a probarlo.

En ese tiempo nadie estaba acostumbrado al concepto de microblogging, ese de publicar ideas en pocas palabras (forzadamente), los blogs eran todo, las personalidades de la web 2.0 (ese grupito, ya saben) atraían gente a sus blogs y eso era todo. Ahora todo esto ha cambiado, Twitter empezó a atraer a más y más gente y se convirtió en un medio de comunicación muy importante, tanto que muchos lo que hacen es tratar de tener bastantes seguidores, más gente esuchando, y en este medio eso ha probado ser hasta más valioso que lectores en un blog, en fín, los tipos que lo hacían le fueron dedicando más esfuerzo (hasta que ahora es una compañía aparte), me acuerdo el primer SXSW en el que twitter fue usado (creo que el año pasado), sus números se dispararon, y de ahi así siguió.

Personalmente lo que me llamó la atención fue esa facilidad de publicar tonteras, de comunicarme fácilmente con tanta gente, y ver lo que todos hacen. La verdad, no fue hasta este año que encontré a algún tico en Twitter, siempre estuve viendo como muchos en Twitter eran del mismo lugar y compartían más cosas, en general relacionadas a que estaban en el mismo país (discutiendo noticias locales, etc), lo que fuera. En especifico, amigos chilenos tomaron Twitter y lo hicieron suyo hace tiempo, la comunidad chilena es grande, y tienen muy buenas conversaciones, siempre estuve celoso, porque hablaban en español, porque estaban sacandole el jugo a Twitter.

Como sabemos todo ha cambiado y la comunidad Tica en Twitter crece cada día. Por eso escribo esto, porqué me denominaron pionero de Twitter en ticolandia, la verdad en el sentido de que fui el primer tico en usarlo, puede ser, pero nunca he hecho mucho por hablar de Twitter, y cuando lo he hecho y logro que abran cuentas, nunca lo terminan usando, nunca lo entienden.

En fín, al mejor estilo me despido en 140 letras, encantado con Twitter, igual que hace dos años. Y me imagino que se va a poner mucho mejor.