This thing looks pretty awesome! If you have a swimming pool you can use it to peek into your neighbor’s yards… Careful during the dangerous dock landings!
Clavilux 2000 – Generative Music Visualization Instrument
I really like these sound/music visualizations, anything that can unify the senses through visualization seems like a good idea to me. The Clavilux 2000 seems really well executed, I bet it would look great even if I was just playing random notes! I wonder if kids would be able to learn faster if they were watching this as they played… It seems like it would give them a deeper understanding if they could always associate music they were playing with visual cues.
for more info: jonasheuer.de
Welcome to the real world of digital video
This video contains a string of clips showing off some of the digital compositing work from special effects company Stargate Studios. It’s not too often I find a video that really amazes me anymore, but this one definitely merits a blog post.
I feel like I would be completely fooled by every single one of the shots in this video, but that’s not really the point. It’s more about how this video makes it look so… freaking easy to deceive the human eye. The feeling I get from this video is the same as watching a master magician – despite knowing how the trick is done, he’s so smooth that it’s pointless trying to catch him in the act, to the point where he can make it blatantly obvious that he’s tricking you and it somehow feels natural to go along with it.
Android phone first impressions
I got a new android phone a few days ago! It’s the motorola droid from Verizon wireless.
My favorite app right now is ConnectBot, an SSH client. Using my phone to remote control servers is awesome! I started a transfer at work, then checked the status and did a mount and reboot from my couch at home!
I’m typing on Wordpress 1.01 for Android right now. It seems to work really well and I like the interface, but it’s really hard to type on this keyboard… It takes me almost 5 minutes for one paragraph. I like the keyboard from my lost blackberry curve a lot more; even though the keys were smaller, they were a lot easier to distinguish by touch, making typing a lot faster. I’m kind of getting the hang of this one now, but it’s still super slow and I’m burning up my battery by having the backlight on the whole time.
That’s it for now, I’ll look for some new apps to write about for next time.
-Jason
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New blog layout goes live for Dance avec Chantoli
I just finished a new redesign for one of my favorite clients, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. I’ve had the project on hold for several weeks now due to computer issues, but I finally got everything working and created this new layout.
Tools Used:
http://www.colorschemedesigner.com/ – this is a high quality free web app for finding complementary colors to use in web color schemes. It works great! Flash-based, sorry iPad users.
http://pixlr.com/editor/ – a great online editor, almost as good as photoshop. I use it to resize and save images for web use. Like the color scheme designer, this is a Flash-based web app, so iPad users are once again left out in the cold.
http://winscp.net/ – a free FTP/SFTP/SSH file transfer client. I use this to edit css stylesheets directly on my server. I have dreamweaver included in my CS4 trial, but I think for simple tasks, it’s best to just know what you’re doing and use a basic text editor.
http://themeshaper.com/thematic/ – this is the Wordpress theme framework that I used to edit the layout of the blog. It’s really modular and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to customize their own blog.
I also would not have been able to do this without my trusty Photoshop tools – I’m now using Adobe CS4 Master Collection trial edition. My favorites: custom brushes, select/feather tool, magnetic lasso, gaussian blur filter, drop shadow, outer glow. I love how, after learning to use a few of these tools, I can help others to create something that they can be really happy with, especially in so short a time.
http://comingupforair.net/2008/01/rss-icons/ – I found these ridiculously cute RSS icons, which I used to emphasize the RSS subscribe link on Dance avec Chantoli. The artist is Matt Forsythe from Montreal. I really like his illustrative style, if you like it too then you can check out his web comic at http://comingupforair.net/ojingogo and his full portfolio at http://comingupforair.net/gallery.
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