Archive for September, 2007
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Friday, September 14th, 2007
As I mentioned in my last post I just picked up a pair of V-Moda Vibe Duos at the Apple Store with my $100 iPhone store credit. The Vibe Duo’s sound great (almost as good as my Etymotic ER-6’s), are the most comfortable earbuds I’ve ever used, and feature a microphone for making hands-free calls on the iPhone. The Vibe Duos come with three pairs eargels (small, medium, and large) in both white and black for a perfect fit for almost any ear and your choice in colors to accessorize with your outfit should you be so inclined.
The cloth-wrapped cords, metal construction, and extended plug (for easy use with the iPhone’s recessed headphone jack) all add up to a stunning package. The build quality on the Vibe Duos is great and unlike some previous earbuds I’ve owned I’m not in the slightest concerned about breaking them or tearing the cord if they get caught on something.
Sadly they lack the microphone button on the official iPhone earbuds for answering calls and pausing the music, but that’s a small sacrifice for the vastly increased comfort and sound quality. Now that I’ve tried them out I realize it’s well worth the $99 price tag and wish I had bought them earlier!
Consumerist pleasures
Friday, September 14th, 2007As stressful as work has been the last couple of weeks I’m actually having a good couple of days recently. Today is the first day of my 3 day weekend (which was supposed to be a 4 day weekend but things are too busy at work to take the 2nd day off) and I’ve been taking advantage of it to catch up on some tasks around the house and play with my new toys.
Toys you say? Why yes - I’ve been playing the good consumer and picked up a few things in the last couple of days. Yesterday I picked up a Canon EF 20mm f2.8 lens for my camera from a co-worker. It’s a fun lens, but I can tell I have a lot of learning to go with it. I’m so used to using 50mm lenses (both my EG 50mm f1.4 lens and my Lensbabies) that it’s almost a little disorienting to use. Below is the first shot I processed (and my favorite from todays shots), taken at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park.
While out and about I dropped by the Apple Store to claim my $100 store credit for being an iPhone early adopter. I had been looking at the V-Moda Vibe Duo earbuds and with their $99 price tag it worked out to being quite the steal when I factored in the store credit - I paid about $8 out the door once tax was added to the purchase price. I wrote a quick review of the Vibe Duos so check it out!
“Ironwork” by sparktography
links for 2007-09-14
Thursday, September 13th, 2007-
“Snoot” DIY flash hack for speedlight and similar flashes
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Gizmodo points us to a neat office-hack: hiding the beer fridge!
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A guy put a bell jar over the entrance of a beehive and took photos of the bees building honecomb within. Neat!
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A nice modern take on a knife block - complete with blinkenlights!
My Twitter updates for 2007-09-12
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007- Headed home - Red Robin cravings are killing me - I might have to kill them back!
- The car in front of me on 520 literally just CAUGHT ON FIRE!
- My Red Robin craving is vanquished, but as a result I am 100% beached on the couch.
- Watching the TNG finale: All Good Things.
- Poking around some more with Twitter Tools and configuring the del.icio.us auto-poster. Nothing beats automatic display of gradual content.
- See - I wasn’t kidding: the car in front of me on the way home really did CATCH ON FIRE! http://tinyurl.com/yutzlr
- Laying in bed watching bonus content from the Red Dwarf complete collection.
- Showered and dressed but not really awake…
- Feeling surprisingly human again after my second cup of coffee.
- Waiting for the worlds slowest printer…
- Headed to lunch. Mmmmm lunch!
- Writing overly-detailed support guides.
- Cheering our resident iPhone hacker on in his battle for server optimization!
- Driving home… I wonder if the car in front of me will catch fire again?
links for 2007-09-13
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007-
An interesting write-up on iPhone sales. Apple is estimated to sell 18,000-27,000 iPhones PER DAY in the US!
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A collection of 20 reference sources on the internet.
Gradual content creation
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007I’ve been experimenting around with Twitter Tools and the del.icio.us auto-post blogging tool. They make for an easy way to gradually add content to Futurist Now without having to actually sit down and write a full post. The web links from the day that interest me can go through a workflow into my del.icio.us account, and inane babble about my day fits quite nicely into Twitter. I’ve placed both of these into the new infobits category to make it neat and tidy.
Not that I’ll stop writing real content by any means - just an easy way to share things that interest me day to day.
Update 1 week later: It was a great idea while it lasted, but I’ve pulled the twitter and del.icio.us posts as I’ve gotten a surprising amount of negative feedback from my users. Lesson learned.
links for 2007-09-12
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007-
A machine which fixes unhappiness by adding ice cream
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Applying the limitations of Haiku poetry to a GTD like approach to productivity. A little too restrictive for me, but an interesting idea.
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Not interested in paying $0.99 a track for ringtones for the iPhone on the iTunes store? 8 other ways to get custom ringtones onto the iPhone.
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Apple internal developers take on the iPhone hacking community
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According to the article these are undocumented Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. I found a few of them documented in the menus, but still a nice list for quick reference.
Spontaneous car combustion
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
While driving slowly home on 520 today the car in front of me literally CAUGHT ON FIRE! I smelled gasoline and was wondering if my car was leaking when the car in front of me suddenly erupted into a fireball. Luckily the big ball of fire was short lived and it quickly subsided enough for the occupant to escape. A passerby had a fire extinguisher and the fire was mostly out long before I got the opportunity to inch around him fearing for my precious paint-job.
I managed to grab a few snaps with my iPhone while trying to stay out of the way of the people present who seemed much more capable of dealing with a flaming SUV than myself. I’m glad nobody was hurt and I certainly can understand that it sucks for the poor lad who’s car this was - but it’s not every day you get to see a car catch fire!
“Spontaneous car combustion” by sparktography
Twitter Updates for 2007-09-10
Monday, September 10th, 2007- Laying on the couch, devoid of energy. Thank goodness I still have 2 seasons of Red Dwarf left to keep me company. #
- Slogging away at work… #
- Slowly waking up - the 2nd cup of coffee is finally helping. #
- Fighting with localization - it’s tricky how different languages treat word order and lists. Releasing software in 24 languages is a bitch! #
- Rationalizing disparate data sources WITH MAGIC. #
- Experimenting with Alex King’s Twitter Tools for WordPress blogs… #
- I think I have Twitter Tools set to automatically create a daily twitter digest post on my blog. I will find out if it worked later tonight. #