Petra by Night
June 29, 2007 – 10:03 pm
This was a long exposure of the fantastic Petra By Night Tour along the Siq to the Treasury (the bedouin guides entertain you with music and tea).
Spread this number
May 1, 2007 – 8:50 pm09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I’ll be upset, but surprised, if I’m asked to remove this post because, apparently, you can copyright a number. If that’s the case, should I go for 1? Actually I think 0 is more in my line.
Djay from algoriddim - How to become an OS X iTunes Djay in your bedroom
May 1, 2007 – 2:19 pmDjay from algoriddim.com is an awesome piece of software. It plugs into your itunes library and lets you spin and mix on two virtual record decks.
The application is intuitive and easy, and the best facsimile I’ve ever seen of actually spinning the wheels of steel on a computer. Combined with the fact that it’s free this is a brilliant application to play around with and to have up and running at parties.
Key features:
- drag and drop straight onto the ‘decks’ from a searchable list of your itunes library;
- manually tap out the bpm of your tracks and have djay automatically adjust the tempo of either playing track to the other;
- cue points which let you specify three points of a record and jump back to them at the click of a button;
- independent tempo and pitch adjustments - alter the pitch without affecting the tempo, or use both together to get a different tempo and the original pitch;
- crossfader automation, independently affecting tempo, pitch, eq and pan;
- easy recording of your masterpiece mixes.
- pre cueing (if you have a multi-channel sound card or a USB iMic) to listen to one track on your headphones while playing the other through the speakers.
All in all an excellent application which takes seconds to start having fun with and offers enough features to let you lose yourself in the mix.
Found at MacApper
Most people are depressed for no good reason at all
April 28, 2007 – 5:45 pmI can agree with the violent acres post on depression but I do think it misses some very obvious points. I believe that, especially in rich countries like America, one has vastly more freedom and power over one’s life than elsewhere. The fact that relatively few seem to understand this, and talk about being “pressured into living a life they would have never chosen for themselves” is, to my mind, ridiculous.
In a society like America, that pressure is entirely in one’s own mind - which suggests to me that it is in fact ‘broken’ even though the fix is unlikely to come from the kind of drugs a doctor will prescribe. Almost nowhere is one more ‘free’ to make one’s own choices - whether that is throwing out the TV or taking a pay cut to do something more fulfilling.
It seems that we as a species can very easily fall victims to our own success. Once we remove the real struggle for comfortable survival, and therefore the deep satisfaction of overcoming it, we start wanting to invent new problems for ourselves and yet become too lazy to do anything about it.
I suppose I do agree with the post’s author, but I’m just a bit more preachy.
The Best Freeware Icon Editor
April 24, 2007 – 10:22 pmIcoFX is the best freeware icon editor for Windows.
Aside from some really crap, not-worth-mentioning, alternatives like GoldIcon, this is really it when you want a freeware icon editor that you can, apparently, use commercially.
Bonus: IcoFX is also available in an alternative zero-install portable app format.
I Took The 2007 A List Apart Survey
April 24, 2007 – 4:26 pm
Zach Lipton is a human being
April 20, 2007 – 2:28 pmZach Lipton, a blogger over at Mozillazine, shows himself to be a real human being in his post - The World Is Not Flat. His description of the difference between the reporting on the VA Tech shootings and the ongoing violence ni Baghdad demonstrates an all-too-rare awareness of the world beyond the mass media.
It’s also worth noting that the comments (3 at the time of writing) range from blazé - “that’s how news work” (sic) - to downright ignorant - “there’s a war on there” (it’s not a ‘war’, it is a military occupation).
Well done, Zach, and remember that you carry your own values and it’s never worth letting them go just because other people don’t always measure up.
Implementing the Zend Framework for complex projects and pages
April 19, 2007 – 11:24 pmPádraic Brady has posted a synopsis of a discussion about the Zend Framework. The approach taken is excellent with real-world usage of the Zend code.
I have long been a fan of the concept behind the Zend Framework - which fits with my understanding of ’small pieces loosely joined’ - but have been wary of implementing it on anything too large without seeing someone else do the same.
Shortest way to create an XHR in Javascript
April 18, 2007 – 5:47 pmNicolas Faugout has a very neat, and tiny, method for creating an XHR object in different browsers:
if (!XMLHttpRequest) {
window.XMLHttpRequest = function() {
return new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');
}
}
// ....
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
Via Ajaxian
Microsoft Silverlight vs Adobe Flash and Windows Media Player vs Adobe Media Player
April 16, 2007 – 7:23 pmFor years now I’ve heard tell of ‘Sparkle’, Microsoft’s supposed alternative to the Flash player / platform. At the time of this writing you can find search results on mcrosoft.com about sparkle, but few of those pages exist, and none of the actual product links. I’m guessing, but I think that their new product Silverlight is the same thing rebranded, and is certainly being touted as a smackdown-style competitor to Flash.
Adobe isn’t resting on its laurels, though - Mashable also reports that Adobe’s new Media Player is a direct competitor to Windows Media Player.
I can’t really see either platform having too much success in the short term since Flash not only has player-ubiquity on it’s side, but a huge developer-base; while in the media player world I still suspect a huge number of users don’t even know what one is, let alone why you would go and install another one and go through all the file- and mime-type hassles that entails.
Update:Techcrunch has quite a bit more information about the silverlight platform … and it actually sounds quite nice, although I’m not convinced that it will be that great for designers (not that I am one …)