Capn Design

June 2010

This month I posted 22 entries, crafted 115 tweets, listened to 342 songs, watched 17 videos, bookmarked 3 sites, took 149 photos and favorited 39 things.

Secret Stash

“This project is about concealing valuables, secrets, bad habits and personal information in our workplaces. Here, hidden spaces/ messages were created within 8 general objects such as wood boards, lamps and disposable coffee cups.” Very impressive. I’d like to see how these objects were created as well. [via Fast Company Design, a great new blog]

20100629cargobikes.jpeg Cargo Bikes

I’m surprised I don’t see more of these in NYC. I could see a lot of deliveries being made with something similar. I suppose the main limitation would be cost.

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

I’m hoping the title signifies the nerdiness of this post. Roughly, this CSS property works some magic to improve kerning and add ligatures where they are available. It’s on by default in Firefox, but not for Chrome or Safari.

20100628hawkkrall.jpg Hawk Krall Illustration

Hawk has been illustrating hot dogs for Serious Eats and I’m kinda in love. I love the colors. You can buy prints if you’d like to put some hot dogs on your wall. I know I do.

20100625hicksdesign.jpg Jon Hicks' Lovely Fluid Redesign

Jon puts Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design article to work and rebuilds his blog to work in one to four columns depending on the width of the viewport. Fluid designs have been done before and they’ll be done again, but this is a nice one.

20100625worldcup.jpg Halfway in - 2010 World Cup

The Big Picture delivers again. The other photos from the event are definitely more beautiful, but probably not more awesome.

Take Our Jobs

For those who believe illegal immigrants are taking our jobs, they invite you to do so.

We are a nation in denial about our food supply. As a result the UFW has initiated the “Take Our Jobs” campaign.

Farm workers are ready to train citizens and legal residents who wish to replace them in the field, we will use our knowledge and staff to help connect the unemployed with farm employers. Just fill out the form to the right and continue on to the request for job application.

Catalog Living

There is ridiculousness in catalogs. Molly Erdman does a hilarious job of point it out. Here’s an example.

Hats under a bed

Hi Nancy, it’s Elaine. I’m going to be a little late for lunch. I can’t find my hat or my back-up hat.

[via @LittlePriest]

Studio Ghibli to Make Games

The first game available is called Ni No Kuni and will be a game on the DS in December and PS3 next year. Jori and I will be visiting the Ghibli Musuem on our trip to Japan next month. Maybe they’ll let us try it out? In the mean time, watch this trailer.

20100624streamliner.jpg 1948 Buick Streamliner by Norman E. Timbs

This car is spectacular.

Gourmet Live

Condé Nast announced the rebirth of Gourmet as Gourmet Live today. The iPad app looks amazing and has lots of user-focused features (easy to scan and read, friend-driven recommendations) and will draw primarily from the huge catalogue of content. Mediaite quotes Anil Dash explaining that the app will be “suffusing the really great content in Gourmet with tradition, with state-of-the-art social media, networking and collaborative game playing engine.” Sounds like fun to me.

Sports Highlights in Online Video

Posted June 22, 2010

With the NBA Final, Stanley Cup and World Cup all happening around the same time, I’ve been taking in a good number of recap, live-streamed and highlight videos. It turns out people are getting a lot smarter about how they surface interesting moments in a game.

NHL Highlights

I find it annoying that recaps for games I care about are sometimes only 30 seconds long. Sure, 30 seconds of a Cubs game is enough for most people, but I’d like at least a couple minutes. The NHL has solved that with their game highlight videos (pictured above). While there’s no commentary, they show you ever goal and a selection of exciting saves and hits. This is great for finding your favorite moment from a game or getting a sense of everything that happened. MLB’s At Bat app let’s you watch a condensed version of the game in 10 minutes, but I’d like a version with just the good parts.

ESPN World Cup Highlights

On Friday, we watched some of the US World Cup match on ESPN3.com. I don’t remember if these showed up during the game, but right as the game ended, I noticed all of the little tick marks on the timeline. Those were highlights for each of the teams. This is a great way to go back during the game and review some of the choice moments. I’d also love if they kept a marker of where you were when you left live time.

Have you seen any other original ways of displaying sports highlights online?

20100618pixelart.jpg Shawn Smith's Pixelated Sculptures

I thought this was just Lego art, but these are actually square wooden rods that are colored with ink. It feels very unique, even if it’s not. [via waxy]

Should You Organize Your Data for Your Descendants?

Posted June 15, 2010

Tina wonders about all of the stuff on her computer.

I am currently trying to consolidate all of my backups, re-organize all my work and personal files, photos, music, videos etc. As I am going through my stacks of harddrives I am realizing that my kids will eventually inherit a mountain of data.

People rarely organize their physical mementos thoroughly, but it’s also a lot of work. Digital is easier with iTunes and iPhoto (or whatever), but can we just trust that search will be good enough? Do we have an obligation to curate?

I have always been somewhat laissez faire about organizing my data, but this issue puts my previous approach in question. While I’d love for my kids — and their kids — to find hidden gems on their own, it’d be nice to tell some short stories with albums and playlists.

Have you ever seen a digital scrapbook about someone who has passed? Do you feel a desire or obligation to provide one?

20100615bridge.jpg The Flipper Bridge: Changing Traffic Flow

As you cross from China into Hong Kong by car, you have to move your car from the right side of the street to the left. In order to do that smoothly, NL Architects have designed the Flipper bridge. As Kottke aptly pointed out:

The only way that could be more cool is if one of the lanes went into a tunnel under the water or corkscrewed over the other lane in a rollercoaster/Mario Kart fashion.

Scott Adams on Betting on the Bad Guys in Investing

Adams argues that investing with our hearts is much more likely to end in an empty wallet.

Instead of investing in companies you hate, as I have suggested, perhaps you could invest in companies you love. I once hired professional money managers at Wells Fargo to do essentially that for me. As part of their service they promised to listen to the dopey-happy hallucinations of professional liars (CEOs) and be gullible on my behalf. The pros at Wells Fargo bought for my portfolio Enron, WorldCom, and a number of other much-loved companies that soon went out of business. For that, I hate Wells Fargo. But I sure wish I had bought stock in Wells Fargo at the time I hated them the most, because Wells Fargo itself performed great. See how this works?

20100614qwerty.png iPad Frees Designers From the Tyranny of QWERTY

Looking at this and the Optimus Maximus keyboard, the iPad looks like a great deal.

20100608localstourists.jpg Locals and Tourists

Looking at photo data, Eric Fischer creates maps that show what areas are dominated by local or tourist photographers.

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

[via burrito justice]

Graphic: How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

The graphic shows that artists make their money back fastest by selling self-pressed discs and slowest by streaming on Spotify (it’s a 32,000x increase). While it’s important to note how little artists make from streaming music, it doesn’t consider how much they make on merch and concert tickets as a result of the increased exposure a streaming service may provide.

It seems more and more artists consider their music loss-leaders for physical goods and experiences.

How to Open Feeds in NetNewsWire with Google Chrome

Posted June 4, 2010

Recently, I switched to Chrome. In general, I prefer it to Firefox, but there are some differences that bug me. The biggest is the inability to auto-discover feeds and load them in NetNewsWire (or your desktop feed reader of choice). The RSS Subscription Extension got me close, but I had to figure out the rest. Here are step by step instructions.

  1. Go to the extension page and install the RSS Subscription Extension.
  2. Navigate to any page that has a discoverable feed set up and click on the feed icon in the location bar.
  3. 20100604feed1.pngClick on the dropdown that defaults to ‘Google Reader’ and click on ‘Manage…’.
  4. Click the ‘Add…’ button.
  5. Enter ‘NetNewsWire’ (or whatever) as the description and the following code as the URL: javascript:var url=decodeURIComponent('%s');var feedWindow = window.open('feed://' + url.substr(7)); feedWindow.close();
  6. Go back to your blog of choice, click on the feed icon and, NetNewsWire now being your default, click the ‘Subscribe Now’ button.
  7. PROFIT.

I won’t go into boring detail, but we need to use javascript because %s writes out an encoded version of the feed URL. So we’re copying the URL, decoding it, opening a window with the feed protocol, then closing the window.

As I noted before, this isn’t just for NetNewsWire, but for any desktop feed reader. If you want to know how to set your feed reader to be the default for the feed protocol, just ask Google (but you’ll need to use another browser).

This Drummer is in the Wrong Gig

In my mind, he’s filthy rich and gives back to the community by improving crappy local bands with insane drumming.

20100602fifashirt.jpg World Cup Celebration Shirt

There is one bad thing about this shirt: you can’t buy it. Someone make this now. [via buzzfeed]

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