D'Arcy Norman, PhD

Recent Posts

garbage photo

Of the photos I've taken, this one has been by far the most published (actually, the entire landfill series has been rather popular). It's been in books, magazines, videos, and a bunch of websites. This morning, I fired up my feed reader, and saw it staring at me again from a post on BoingBoing. Awesome. (although they blurred the photo a little when they resized it, but whatever...)

Screen shot 2010-10-21 at 10.35.44 AM.png

Read More

rob anders is an idiot

My MP for the last 13 years has been [Rob Anders](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Anders). The man is an extremist, and an idiot. But the Conservatives could run a lobotomized chimp and it'd get elected in my riding. This is the buffoon that cast the lone vote to block granting an honorary Canadian citizenship for Nelson Mandela in 2001 - claiming Mandela is a terrorist.

The latest bit of class from this cretin is in response to our recent civic election, where record voter turnout resulted in Naheed Nenshi being elected Mayor.

Read More

ain't no grave

[The Johnny Cash Project](http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com) took the final studio recording made by The Man In Black, and had people contribute hand-drawn frames from a video shot for it, to be compiled into a fan-art video.

Through the Contribute section of the website, you are given 3 frames from the video, and some tools to draw your own version of them.

JohnnyCashChooseFrame.jpg

JohnnyCash-frame-drawn.jpg

johnnycash-frame.jpg

Your drawing(s) are then sent into the pool of available images for the appropriate frames of the video, and can be displayed in the final composition. Drawings can be voted up, or curated by the director.
It's an interesting way to enable multiple submissions for a time-based presentation.

Read More

David Wong: The Future Will Be Ruled by B.S.

A [great article by David Wong](http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s._p1.html), thinking through some of the implications of digital distribution and copyright. Published in that champion of futurism and deep thinking: Cracked.com

> If you want to know what the future looks like, there it is. The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free.
>
> Some of you think I'm about to talk about file sharing and DRM and the evil record labels. But that's just a teaser of what's coming. The world has changed. All the rules we were trained to believe about society from birth until now are about to go out the window.

Read More

sharing freely as an investment

[Shaun Inman](http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman) just retweeted a very concise and insightful [description by Lauren Isaacson](http://twitter.com/#!/TheAdnostic/status/27270610442), on why she shares stuff:

Screen shot 2010-10-13 at 1.49.32 PM.png

Read More

Aperture's Browser view fails with tiny thumbnails

Aperture's pretty handy at managing a bunch of photos into projects etc... I just merged a few projects into a new überproject with sub-albums, and thought I'd broken something. For a minute, I was afraid all of the photo metadata was gone:

aperture-browse-thumbnails.png

GAH! **Version N...** *Oh NOES!*

Turns out, I'd just cranked the thumbnail size way down, and the labelling code kind of barfs on that, displaying the first few characters of the redundant "Version Name:" label before each actual version name. Here's the same view with embiggened thumbnails:

Read More

iPhone camera request

The iPhone camera is good, and especially so in the latest iPhone4 incarnation.

But, the software shutter button sucks. A lot. It works well enough when you're staring into the LCD, but many of the shots I take are without looking at the screen. Meaning it's difficult to hit the shutter button without messing up composition.

2010-10-12 - photo.jpg

In a perfect world, I'd be able to [use one of the hardware buttons](http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/camera-app-gives-the-iphone-the-hardware-shutter-button-it-always-wanted-20100811/) as a shutter release. Failing that, a larger click target would be nice. I regularly accidentally flip into video mode, or switch to the front camera, or open the photo library, when fumbling to hit the button. The handy (and free) [GorillaCam app](http://joby.com/gorillacam/) handles this nicely (and offers some other great features, too), but the native camera app should be a bit more friendly to actually taking pictures in the field.

Read More

four chords

I mentioned on Twitter that I still suck pretty badly at playing my guitar. Scott suggested that I only need to know 2 chords. 2? hah! I know 4! So, Alan pointed out that all you NEED is 4 chords.

If the 4 chords I know are the right 4 chords, I may be ready to start touring. Except for the rest of the whole I-still-suck-at-playing thing. But at least I’m having fun :-)

Read More
Mastodon