Shared by Matt
Nice colors

Lovin’ these illustrations by Micah Lidberg.

submitted by bemmu to pics [link] [104 comments]

Photo nicked from here..

Firefox with Greasemonkey (and other browsers): The Helvetireader theme for Google Reader strips away the bells and whistles and offers a minimal interface redesign for keyboard shortcut users. Install Helvetireader in Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension, Opera, a Chromium nightly build, or Safari with Greasekit. With Helvetireader enabled, GReader uses red and black Helvetica font and white background with a light gray gradient. Especially suited to work in Reader as a Fluid or Prism standalone app, Helvetireader is a free download.

Haniboi's Key of Rock! Made to standard key sizing, you can bring it in and get it cut to match whatever you'd like... your music studio key, perhaps? An original design from Haniboi featuring embossed detailing, the Key of Rock complies with Yale’s standards, An original design from Haniboi featuring embossed detailing, the Key of Rock complies with Yale’s standards,

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

Shared by Matt
See the entire set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umlaut555/sets/72157594493262160/

Upon my flickr travels I found a pretty sick photo set from this dude.  It is his archived collection of late 70’s to early 80’s metal shows, ticket stubs, backstage passes, flyers and just awesome awesome photos in general.

You can see the entire set HERE.

ENJOY!

We received so many page views and comments about Tsuboi’s Stand Umbrella, we thought high time to review it. 100% was gracious enough to send us one and it’s probably the classiest, cutest umbrella I’ve seen. Class and uber cuteness - is that even possible?

It’s a simple design. Imagine a typical umbrella made with high grade plastic and metal, oh and a little tripod foot too. Like its moniker indicates, the tripod foot stands the umbrella up. You might be thinking, “well that’s easy” but it’s not. And umbrella doesn’t have its weight evenly distributed from its center of gravity. I mean there’s a giant handle leaning to one side! The brilliance is in the engineering. Tsuboi and 100% made countless molds to determine how the support structure could attain perfect balance.

Aside from that, it operates just like any other umbrella. Push up to unfurl the super strong membrane and reverse to close. Standing under a hose to test what I call the “dryness factor - how dry I remain” scored the Stand Umbrella a perfect 10. It opens up to a huge wing-like mass making sure no drop hits you.

 

What we liked:

• Minimal and clean. Comes in white and black.
• High grade ABS plastic and aluminum construction.
• Super lightweight.
• Affordable - 4,200 Yen or $41 U.S. dollars.

What could be improved:

• Nothing

Designer: Hironao Tsuboi for 100%

 

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With the release of Google Chrome I see blogs and articles blaming the Flash Player for poor performance and somehow linking this to the fact that it is not open source. Time to clarify a few bits. I'll start with classic comments:

"Flash hogs my CPU!"

1. HTML != Flash

HTML is a static document format. Flash (TM) content is in its core a classic multimedia format and most Flash content is still purely passive media.

What does that mean? When rendering HTML pages CPU usage only peaks for a very short of amount of time, essentially one single frame in Flash terms. After that almost no resources apart from memory are required. If you do not interact with the HTML page at all, no CPU time is required.

How does Flash compare? Most animated Flash content like rich media advertisement continues to use CPU resources to drive animation, video and/or sound. As opposed to static HTML which has exactly 1 frame, Flash content can have an infinite amount of frames which are played back over time.

Flash is great to provide experiences you could not get otherwise. Animation, video and sound are functions the browser does not (yet) provide, or at least they are not used to the same extend yet by designers. Once the browser will be used to play the same type of multimedia content you will face the same resource usage issues. It takes CPU cycles to decode video, sound and render animation. This is just a fact of life, we are however improving how much is used release after release, something benchmarks can back up.

So, there is a fundamental difference in media type. HTML is static, Flash is not. To put it in terms you might be able to understand:

If you take a picture and print it out you use energy only once and then can continue to view the picture forever without consuming any further energy. If you record a movie you will need some form of machine to play it back which will continue consume energy in form of a projector. The Flash Player is a projector.

"You are so full of it, AJAX does not hog my CPU!"

2. AJAX != Flash, but when done correctly AJAX can be the same as Flash

In most practical instances AJAX is used to drive RIAs. Examples include Gmail, Google Maps and many others. One fundamental property of good applications is that they only respond to either network activity or user input. Peak CPU usage is limited to these events. In general, if you do not touch the browser page no CPU time is required.

Compare this again to Flash animations, video and sound which in many cases remain passive experiences with no requirement for external events to drive the content. This will obviously use CPU resources continuously.

Now, it is perfectly possible to implement a Flash RIA application (that usually means using Flex) which uses the same or even less peak CPU than a AJAX RIA and only responds to network and user input. Flash is a flexible multiple paradigm platform, it depends on what the designer/programmer wanted to do. Unfortunately we at Adobe tend to see of a lot of RIAs which do not follow that principle and add lots of moving sugar to their applications which do little to improve actual usability.

Following good coding practices Flash can yield equivalent or better results than AJAX for many types of RIAs. Another benefit is that writing RIAs in Flash is truly cross browser as there is one Flash Player implementation only.

"Bull, SVG and Canvas show that it can be done better"

3. SVG/Canvas != Flash

Have you ever seen SVG or the canvas tag being used to implement anything else than static (1-frame) content? Have you ever seen rich media advertisement done using SVG or the Canvas tag? I mean not some demo page but actual deployed content. If so you will realize that the same resource usage issues apply.

"You are clueless, why does Flash suck up CPU time when it is on a hidden tab?"

4. Easy shortcuts do not work

Believe it or not but we and the browser vendors have tried to disable/pause/stop Flash content when a tab is hidden. The results were disastrous user experience wise to say the least. Disabling Flash to get any benefit CPU resource wise means the following:

• Sound will have to stop
• Any network transfer will have to stop
• ActionScript execution will have to stop

Each one of these affect CPU resource usage and would affect user experience if we would turn it off. However the Flash Player does not render anything if it is on a hidden tab, we only execute the operations mentioned in the above list.

There is one exception to the rendering optimization: WMODE. If you use WMODE the Flash Player has no way of knowing if it is hidden or not and will continue to do a full render. Do not use WMODE. Unfortunately lots of rich media advertisement I see out there continues to enable this for no apparent reason.

"Flash sucks!"

5. You can help to educate web designers so common mistakes are not made

Huge help would be to adopt strict policies especially for rich media advertisement. I like the rules Google has put forward for Flash ads. Quoting:

"Animation Length: Animated ads are restricted to a maximum of 15 seconds (at a 15-20 fps frame rate), after which point they must remain static. These ads must also comply with the other animation policies."

Personally I would go even further and request the following:

• After the animation has played no CPU resources should be used, ActionScript should be on a stop() command.
• Mouse tracking or other event handling is not allowed unless you activate the banner with a mouse click.
• DO NOT USE WMODE UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TRANSPARENCY! I can't stress that enough. Given the architecture of plugins there is no way for the Flash Player to know if Flash content is on a hidden tab or not and disable rendering properly. If you use WMODE the Flash Player will continue to suck up CPU cycles as if the tab was visible. In addition WMODE is much slower than the normal mode.

These simple rules would address almost all the complaints we hear about. Adobe has unfortunately only limited influence on what content gets deployed, in this case it is really up to the community to balk at the web sites putting up content which impacts user experience negatively.

--------------------

Like with any powerful technology it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot and with the ease of use of Flash that is unfortunately too common.

Despite of that we are working with all browser vendors to improve performance and user experience whenever possible. There are differences between browsers and our goal is to close this gap once and for all. We are for example looking forward to work together with Google to improve Flash performance in Google Chrome.

On our (Adobe) side we are also looking forward to improve Flash performance further. Flash Player 10 for instance is making the first steps towards hardware accelerated rendering which will provide a huge boost in rendering performance. On the scripting side Tamarin-tracing will improve scripting performance dramatically. This is work we share with the Mozilla foundation which will use the same core libraries under the TaceMonkey project. The latest benchmarks are quite remarkable.

I doubt they teach much of this in today's classroom, but maybe I'm wrong. I remember having to do this back in high school, and although it's a tedious process, the results are nice.

Learn to write like an architect

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Have you ever poked someone? Given a gift of a jeweled tiara? If you know what we are talking about, then you will appreciate this video by the comedy crew 'Idiots of Ants'. Love it or hate it, Facebook is a big part of a lot of peoples lives. While we have only recently started using Facebook, we have also quickly realized why so many of our friends are addicted.

We just hope that social networking behavior doesn't become real networking behavior or else we are in for some awkward encounters.

-via Gearfuse

Mixxx is an impressive-looking, fully free and open source DJ package for Mac (Intel only), Windows, and Linux. (It’s also the featured DJ tool on the Indamixx, Linux-based ultra mobile PC – mine just arrived, so hands-on is coming soon.)

Adam Davison from the Mixxx development team points out some juicy features in the new 1.6.0 release, out yesterday:

We now support vinyl control with Serato, Traktor, and FinalScratch vinyl, as well as Serato CD. This means that you can use vinyl control to drive your mixes without having to buy expensive software or branded soundcards. We also have greatly improved support for MIDI controllers such as the Hercules Mk2 and RMX.

Other features:

• MP3, OGG, WAV, FLAC support
• The usual DJ stuff: dual waveform display, pitch-independent time stretch (key lock), BPM detection
• Crossfader curve control
• Adjustable EQ shapes
• Wave recording
• Multichannel playback and capture support
• Multi-core CPU support, GPU-accelerated OpenGL graphics display

And unlike some open source music tools, it’s got a polished website with lots of documentation. High performance could be a big draw, particularly on Linux. I’ll let you know how it works coupled with a custom Linux distribution, mobile device, and touchscreen on the Indamixx. (Personally, I like the idea of keeping a DJ mix ready to go on a portable or older machine, alongside the usual live laptop set.)

Stay tuned.

Mixxx: Free DJ Software

Mixxx blog

[Note: as reader bliss kindly pointed out, Mixxx has three X’s, Indamixx has two X’s; quit with all these extra letters, already!]