Roasting red pepper on the stove
Don't let it blister too bad.
A charred skin.
Wait until squishy.
Design, UI, UX, and all things groovy by Eric D. Fields
Eric D. Fields is a web developer living and working around Somerville, MA. He likes web standards and beverages.
Elsewhere:
- http://ericdfields.com — mainly domain squatting with a pithy old Wordpress install.
- http://twitter.com/ericdfields — nonsense, phat tunes, and warnings of the impending rapture.
- http://krop.com/ericdfields — a destined-to-be-outdated portfolio site.
The Death Of The Blog Post? False. But there's value in looking good.
In the iPhone era, we’re seeing that you can still post content for free online but charge for the experience layer. Think CNN iPhone’s app. Same content, portable, excellent experience.The blogazine format is another way of adding a better experience to the act of consuming 2-D content.
I have to imagine that’s exactly why the magazine format was invented in the first place: newspaper just became too standardized and predictable and really didn’t allow for hot hancrafted infoporn created with time, energy, and craftsmanship.
Excerpt of my comment on the article "The Death Of The Blog Post" on smashingmagazine.com
Terrific article on Smashing Magazine, which I usually ignore as a yet-another-top-ten-list-farm. Worth the read and fabulous visuals which successfully illustrate its entire point.
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I've always admired Bourdain, and couldn't quite put my finger on Ray like he does.
On Rachel Ray: "Aspiring to mediocrity is not a good thing, and that's what pisses me off. It's not OK to buy prechopped onions in the supermarket. It's just not OK. Garlic powder is not food. … It's her world, I just live in it. And on what she spends on (nail care) in a week she could have me killed, and she probably will. But at least I can watch her neck slowly disappear on television.
via timesunion.com
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Just weird #afghanistan
To the left, graffiti'd punisher symbol inside a Taliban base. I'm just trying to remember the whole sign/signifier thing from Post-Modernism theory right now. Hyperreality for sure.
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AirPort Express + friends does everything (Sonos does 1 thing)
An Apple AirPort Express is the best thing to have on your wireless network. Hands down. Extending your wireless range? Screw that bull plop. The real magic of the AirPort Express (APE) are its two glorious holes*.
Assuming you already have a wireless network, you'd add the AirPort Express as a standalone device and use it like this:
Of course you could simply use the APE as your wireless router — in which case that ethernet port has some use — but in this author's opinion, you're better off with an AirPort Extreme Base Station or some other wireless router for your primary transmitter. APE has a tiny body, and tiny bodies have tiny antennas. Just look at your average insect, for instance.
With the aforementioned bumpin'ness plugged into the APE, you can now beam iTunes jams to wherever you want in your domicile. Bonus: you can control it with the Apple Remote on your iPod Touch or iPhone.
"But I only listen to X that I can't get through iTunes."
Well, the good ol' boys at Rogue Amoeba have created a little toy for Mac and PC called AirFoil, which lets any of your audio fly through the air onto the APE. You can beam the whole system audio, or specify an application. There's a super-tiny delay in getting the audio there, but its worth it for a mere $25.
I've loved streaming Pandora Internet Radio onto the APE. Especially since I became a pro member ($40/year for unlimited tunes and no ads). I've also recently came back to last.fm to keep track of my listening habits and publicly expose my awesome taste in music.
But the more I listened to Pandora, the less any of my music was scrobbled to last.fm. So that sort of sucks.
However, $15 later, and my new girlfriend is PandoraJam. She plays Pandora in a standalone app (no more dying with Safari crashes or my own cmd-W misshaps), she can record what comes out of Pandora, she sends my play history to last.fm, AND SHE STREAMS TO AIRTUNES. Bonus: you can control it with the $19 Apple IR remote or Rowmote for your iTouch/Phone.
All in all, I spent about the following on my super-complete, modular, fun and functional audio system
- Airport Express: $70
- Speakers & Receiver: $100 for a decent set of speakers and a T-amp (audiophilia will drive this price way way up, but that's a treatable disease)
- AirFoil: $25
- PandoraJam: $15
- Apple Remote app: Free
- Rowmote: $1
Total: $211
For the rich and lazy those who want an out of the box, just works, Ain't It Cool solution, the alternaive is Sonos, which will run you many more hundreds of dollars and lock you into a system, while somewhat modular, is not as expandable and integrated as what I've just demonstrated.
Peaches and pairs. Either way, music throughout the home is totally delicious.
* Cruder blogs would have had a field day with that description.
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7 distractions of highly effective developers
- Caffeine, usually coffee. Number. One. Priority. In. Life.
- Slashdot.org or reddit.com. Digg is for kiddies.
- Pet- or side-projects. Something they're creating that their off-hours brain can't stop thinking about during the work day.
- Politics. Even if they're "too busy" or burnt out from coding for 12 hours straight to attend a town hall meeting, they've got an opinion on everything about how this country is run and how to fix it, and will rant on it faster than you can say "comment field."
- Porn.
- Drugs. This includes alcohol and tobacco.
- Video games.
This was inspired by salon.com's excellent article The 7 vices of highly creative people from way back in the 20th century, and adapted by me for the 21st century's new creative lynchpin of society.
This list passes no judgement. After all, we still get the job done, eh?
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Will pay for its manipulation.
content as service", where users won't pay for the object but will pay for its manipulation (editorial imprimatur, instant delivery, custom editing, filtering by relevance, and so on.)
via shirky.com
You can read the last two paragraphs of this article and accept them as a great argument, but I'm a sucker for future spec. damn good.
Filed under //
must-read
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Who's gonna build my dream machine?
The new Apple 27-inch iMac has been designed to also work as a standalone display. While this may not be true HDMI IN like so many people would just love to see, it is nonetheless an input to the iMac's gorgeous display.
Given the size and quality of the screen of this computer, and the fact that we have an aging G4 mini doing a decent amount of our media handling at home, I've been noodling with the concept of ditching a traditional TV altogether and just having a computer in the living room.
The big hold up is all the stuff that needs to be plugged into the living room display, basically just disc players and video game consoles at this point, and as a PS3 owner, the latter is also my former. With the iMac taking input now, just need someone to spearhead the initiative to create the missing link between our TV peripherals and le iMac. Something like this:
Now, I really don't even need that cable input, but it'd be nice; there's hardly anything on TV that can't be retrieved from the Internet. We already don't pay for cable (it's just that Comcast bundles it so that Internet without cable costs the same as Internet with cable). And I'm only thinking component for the sake of the Wii. Really, we're in the era of the Single Cable, HDMI. Why HDMI doesn't carry power like USB is something I've wondered but never bothered to look up, but it'd be pretty sweet if you didn't have to plug anything HDMI into the wall as well.
I almost don't need a switch, though I know many people would. I have 3 HDMI inputs on my Samsung, and two of those are taken up by the aforementioned mini and a Roku Digital Video Player. Everything the Roku does could be easily handled through the computer. I don't do that currently with the mini because its too underpowered to do full-screen flash video (Netflix, Amazon on my Roku).
This would more or less eliminate the Apple TV from one's life too. Front Row does the same thing.
I'm sure the speakers suck compared to my TV's, but that could be easily remedied in any number of ways.
So, if someone gets on that missing piece, it'd tip the scales toward me actually going through with this. Is there a downside I'm not seeing?
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