Someone on Twitter last week posted about some unique letterpress prints by Physical Fiction, the artistic duo of Samuel Cox and Justin LaRosa.
They create their unique prints using LEGO and a Vandercook press. The results are awesomingly retro.
I received my “Pop Pop” print today, and stuck it in a frame in my office.
Always an integral part of life, music molds your thoughts and perceptions, and it can define the various stages of your life. So in retrospect, here’s my top ten albums of 2010.
On December 21, Jürgen Schweizer of Cultured Code published State of Sync, Part 1, an attempt to explain why CC has taken so long to put their method of over-the-air syncing into operation, a feature first mentioned on August 11, 2009 in the This is not a Roadmap blog post on CC’s site.
But now I’m using NotifyMe by powerybase. They provide unique iPhone and iPad apps as well a site for viewing your tasks in the browser.
I love Things. I’ve used it since the 0.8.x versions. I’ve bought the OS X and iPhone apps, but I’ve held off on the iPad version. I’ve given CC $60 for their programs.
So why am I ditching Things? Failure to deliver. Jürgen and his team have promised OTA syncing for a year and a half now, and we dedicated users have nothing to show for this promise (oh yeah, except for the cheesy free wallpaper below).
Things shined in organizing your to-dos. Projects, Areas of Responsibility were great methods of organizing to help you get things done. The UI is slick. Adding tasks is easy. Everything was easy to follow, and Things could be as robust or simple as I could make it. But with my usage of portable devices expanding, the lack of OTA syncing caused frustration.
I used to take my MacBook Pro all over the place. Now it stays at home under my monitor dock. Instead, my iPad is my mobile computer. With me everywhere is my iPhone 4. I tried keeping a unified task list between these devices, but I always forgot to sync them at my desk before heading out, so I’d miss and forget about tasks while not at home. It was a headache.
I tried looking at other apps. The Omnifocus suite of apps costs way too much money to test out. Other iPhone/iPad apps felt insufficient in their organization or they were just plain ugly. I skipped over NotifyMe a couple of times before finally purchasing the iPhone app. Man, I was instantly impressed! Setting up OTA syncing was easy and I quickly bought the iPad Control Center app.
I use Todd Ditchendorf’s Fluid app in OS X to create a web-app out of the NotifyMeCloud.com website for easy access to my tasks on my Mac. With these tools, I’m able to quickly create a task from anywhere, set up reminders, and local/cloud notifications that alert my mobile devices.
I think I’ve found the perfect application for my needs.
But if CulturedCode decide to grace their un-satiated audience with this magical OTA syncing method, I will try it and return if it works. And I might even buy the iPad app.
I wantED to believe.
I tinkered around with my site some tonight, and ditched the 2010 web trend of simple Photoshop noise in the background with something a little more complex using the beauty of CSS3. It will probably look best with a Webkit browser as I haven’t finished Mozilla/Opera browser properties yet.
I thought I’d give you a short tutorial. I went into this pretty much blind with only some sample code from Webkit.org’s website.
I decided to tilt the gradient, which (linear, 0 0, 100% 100% achieves. You can play with those numbers to tilt as you please.
The trickiest part was figuring out the correct placement of the color-stop property. I first had just six stripes, but decided 10 would be better. All you have to do is divide 100 (for 100% width of the page) by the number of stripes you want, and place the color-stop at the appropriate spot.
In my case, I placed a color-stop of white at 2% opacity as every other stripe, then left background-color:#ddd8d1 alone for the next stripe.
body {
background-color:#ddd8d1;
background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 100% 100%,
color-stop(.10,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.10,transparent),
color-stop(.20,transparent),
color-stop(.20,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.30,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.30,transparent),
color-stop(.40,transparent),
color-stop(.40,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.50,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.50,transparent),
color-stop(.60,transparent),
color-stop(.60,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.70,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.70,transparent),
color-stop(.80,transparent),
color-stop(.80,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.90,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(.90,transparent),
color-stop(1.0,transparent),
color-stop(1.0,rgba(255,255,255,.2)),
color-stop(1.0,transparent),to(transparent))}
The pattern of opaque and transparent stripes should be self-explanitory. The trickiest part was the last stripe, and getting the last transparent stripe to appear. Before I figured it out, the last stripe wasn’t rendered right.
The main issue (if you call it one) is that the width of the stripes is highly variable, as they depend on the height of your page. The longer the page, the wider the stripes. I don’t mind it, as it gives each page a little personality.
A list of things I’d like to achieve this coming year.