Direct and elegant interaction design. Swellcast turns wave and wind data into an inspiring invitation to hit the beach.

This triumphant specimen of modern offset lithography is viewable at a vibrantly crisp 2540 × 2540 dots per inch resolution through direct or indirect passive solar energy as well as artificial light sources while remaining universally accessible in line-of-sight applications and guaranteeing 99.9% visual uptime without necessitating power-redundant centrally-located data facilities or external energy sources.

It’s nice to know that printed works are still high tech.

These sculptures are made entirely of typewriter parts and employ no glue, welding, or soldering.

In case you’re missing it, Elliot Jay Stocks is currently pushing the boundaries of type on the web. And remember, it may not be advisable to try this at work (just yet).

And now he’s brought his touch to Adobe. You might argue that Adobe is already successful, which is true. But they have been mired in their own success. Veen is helping to disrupt that.

Today Adobe announces Creative Cloud. This is a radical shift from Adobe as we know it. They are of course still creating propriety software – that’s the business model. But they are following Apple in the leap to iterative, directly distributed software. This also means their shift to a subscription model. They’re also increasing visibility for touch apps. They’re also announcing 20GB of storage. All of this for one fair monthly subscription – a pretty good deal.

A lot of new, independent graphics apps have been coming on the market. And they’re good. I was beginning to think that Adobe’s days were numbered. With the launch of Creative Cloud, Adobe might be blazing the trail to their own salvation.

Now we can see what we’ve been saying.

Finding a good icon set is always difficult. Some sets have a few good icons but the rest are not as good. Some sets are incomplete. A quality, complete set can be hard to find for the right price.

I have two open-source, vector icon sets that I turn to first for projects – Tango and Gnome. These are large, well-drawn sets, free from copyright issues. They’re also widely used for open-source operating systems and software so they have been tested and found to communicate well. The artwork is available in vector format—if you need to make a custom icon just dive right in. They even provide style guides to help your icon fit with the originals.

It’s always a joy to open up new hardware. I love the smell that comes with unboxing a Mac.

Then there is the pain of reconfiguring your system so you can use it. I’ve had to do this several times in the past few weeks. First, I got a loaner until my machine arrived. Then, I got the new machine. Finally, I got a new hard drive for the new machine. I don’t have a backup drive so I had to set up my system three times in the past 3 weeks!

Of course, I didn’t fine tune the setup in the first two cases because I knew I wasn’t in my permanent setup. Now that I’ve got my final setup, I’m getting down to the nitty gritty — customizing Terminal.

The terminal in my old machine had the colors just the way I like them. I had to recreate that configuration. It took some searching and I referenced a couple of articles to finally get everything working the way I want. Here’s how to do it:

1. Download and install this Terminal theme. This saves you the trouble of having to fuss with the color picker. It gives a great baseline of colors that go together well.
2. Configure the terminal to use colors by adding the following lines to a file named ‘.bash_profile’ in your home directory. If it doesn’t exist already, create it.

   export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad
PS1='\[\e[0;33m\]\h:\W \u\$\[\e[m\] '

   The first two lines tell the terminal to use the colors when listing directory contents. The last line colorizes the prompt.

3. Lastly, give VIM some love This also sets up auto-indent and some other features for a lovely coding experience.

I hope this helps you get your next new system in perfect working order.