Chris Supranowitz is a researcher at The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester. Along with a number of other spectacular studies (such as quantum optics, trapping of atoms, dark states and entanglement), Chris has decided to look at the relatively boring grooves of a vinyl record using the institute’s electron microscope.

(via djgblog)

But not until December. Can’t wait.

Q: If I were to buy this, how long could I expect to own it before it sells itself again?
A: It is hard to say. Like any commodity it is subject to demand. It could be moments or years. The perpetual state of uncertainty and the instability of ownership are primary components of the work.

(via hn)

Nice interview with Martyn ahead of the release of fabric 50.

The fine folks at Threadless have setup a Flickr account for posting video and photos for the next 364 (minus today) days. For the first day they’ve shot a sped-up video tour of their warehouse. Follow them on Flickr to keep up with their daily, and what hopes to be entertaining, updates.

(via @mike9r)

Bewildering, however, the press coverage of smartphones — driven to hysteria in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone — is almost entirely focused on finding an iPhone killer. It’s the same false-dichotomy we would ridicule if, say, Nissan’s next family five-door were hailed as “the Ford killer.” Ridiculous, right? After all, they’re both essentially just cars.

I couldn’t agree more.

However, I did find the tracklist for a mix CD I made for my wife, Martha, about 7 years ago when we had just started dating, on the hard drive of my old Power Mac 7600/32. Here it is, in all it’s splendor.

Van Morrison – Brand New Day
Red House Painters – Song for a Blue Guitar
Creeper Lagoon – Drop Your Head
Death Cab for Cutie – No Joy in Mudville
Radiohead – The Tourist
The Weakerthans – Left and Leaving
Air – All I Need
The Promise Ring – American Girl
Phantom Planet – Something is Wrong
Pinback – Loro
Jimmy Eat World – Goodbye Sky Harbor

What was the last mix CD you made for someone? Tracklist or STFU.

Be that as it may, it’s time for you folks to suck it up. I have little pity, because the city council ruled to rename my street — N.E. Portland Blvd to N.E. Rosa Parks Way (or RPW for short) — without so much as a phone call. I didn’t have the time or courtesy you enjoyed to build a website or protest; a letter arrived one day in the mail notifying us that the street’s name was changing and I just had to suck it up and deal with it. In our case, it appears that Commissioner Saltzman circumvented city code — whether or not that’s the case, I’m not certain. In the end, despite some annoyances, we survived. You can too. It’s really not as bad as you think, so I encourage you to stop whining and move on. I’m not going to nitpick the arguments made by people opposed to the 39th renaming, I’m just going to offer my perspective based on our experience. I do want to give my condolences to the small businesses along 39th: I can’t calculate the costs for you, since as an individual it’s really more time lost than money, but I hope that the transition is smooth and doesn’t hurt your business. Hey, if you’re clever with marketing I’m sure you can spin this in a positive way.

One both good and bad part to the renaming process is the crossover period, which by city code is 5 years. There will be both 39th Ave and Cesar Chávez Blvd signs up during this period. This is good because you can refer to your address with either street name, but it’s bad because it creates a lot of confusion for people who aren’t familiar with the rename (especially companies, out of town friends and family, and so on). I’d prefer it were shortened to one or two years.

As for your driver’s license, motor vehicle registration, insurance and etc, you should be fine given the transition period. Motor vehicle registration lasts 2 years, and when you renew just include your new street name and the DMV will mail you a sticker for your license. Insurance usually just requires a phone call to your agent or insurer.

Mail, parcels and packages are a separate deal. The USPS are good at handling both street names since your mail person is intimate with your street and neighborhood. UPS, FedEx and the like are another story. The rename to RPW happened around the time of our wedding, and we have family on the east coast who wanted to send gifts. UPS immediately updated their address database, while FedEx lagged. This created confusion for sending packages as they appear to not have room in their address system for two street names (correct me if I’m wrong). A couple times there was an extended delay in receiving a package. Just be aware of this.

Directions for friends and visitors isn’t that bad since you’ll have both street signs in place for 5 years. That should give you and anyone else enough time to get used to the new name, and give Google Maps time to update as well. My advice is to start using the new name as soon as the new signs go up, as you’ll get used to it much quicker. Using both names when giving someone your address only leads to confusion in my experience. At first it bugged me, because I liked the name Portland Blvd, but now I’m used to Rosa Parks Way and it doesn’t matter.

In the end, everything will be fine. Trust me. Now let’s move on to tackling less glamourous and more important issues in this city.

If you are interested in running any of these, I highly recommend you reference this blog post by jwz.

Enjoy!

Props to Tyler and Paul.

Before the server was absolutely obliterated this morning, Caius over at Random Genius had posted a great list of hidden preferences he discovered in Safari 4. Justin Mecham also did a great write-up on his blog. I thought I’d repost them here as well just in case. These commands are all carried out in the Terminal, so if you aren’t comfortable with the command line, then maybe this isn’t for you. If you break your copy of Safari 4 then it’s up to you to fix it.

Some background from what I can remember from Caius’ post, he discovered the following strings in the new Safari binary:

• DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop
• DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign
• DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList
• DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest
• DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle
• DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView
• DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot
• DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites

You can find these yourself if you open up the Terminal and run the following command:
strings /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari | egrep DebugSafari4

Anyhow, on to the hidden prefs! I’m not going to describe these in huge detail, for that I suggest you check out Justin’s excellent blog post.

Disable Tabs on Top:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

Disable the spinner progress indicator / Enable ‘pie’ progress indicator:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO

Disable the new progress indicator / Revert to Safari 3.x blue progress bar:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO

Disable the Smart Address Field:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList -bool NO

Disable Google Suggest in the Smart Address Field:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest -bool NO

Disable CoverFlow in the Bookmarks/History view:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView -bool NO

Disable Top Sites:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool NO

Disable snapshop dimming in Top Sites:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot -bool NO

Obviously to revert any of these settings, specify “-bool YES”.

Props to:
http://swedishcampground.com/safari-4-hidden-preferences
http://observationpoint.org/articles/2009/02/24/hidden-preferences-in-safari-4-public-beta/

Things that I like

1. Tabs across the top.


This is one of my favorite features of Chrome, and I’m glad to see it spread. Metaphorically it makes a lot more sense. It also frees up some window room and puts some of the typically unused title bar space to use.

2. Accessibility. VoiceOver, full-page zoom, and better keyboard navigation. Full-page zoom however can really slow the browser to a crawl. It’s a beta though, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

3. Cutting-edge web standards and technology. CSS and HTML canvas, HTML 5 media (i.e. <video> and <audio> tags) and offline support (client-side SQL), and the new Nitro Engine for Javascript. All big wins here. JavaScript and AJAX-heavy sites feel fast and speedy.

Things I think need improvement

1. New Titlebar/Tab Interface.


Tabs expand to take up the entire width of the window, like a title bar. When you have multiple tabs open, the leftmost tab’s close button is adjacent to the window controls, and is visually messy. For starters, the button is smaller than the window controls, and not aligned vertically with them, so it looks out of place. I’d like the tabs to be a fixed width, similar to Chrome, and for the close button to match the window controls in size and alignment.

On the right-most portion of each tab is a handle for tab manipulation (moving, detaching). This is visually confusing, since it’s identical to window resize handles (commonly found in the lower right-hand corner of a window). I expect that when I grab this with my mouse that I’m going to be resizing something. This is just how I’ve been conditioned over the years using graphical user interfaces, and I’m not the only one. Personally, I think it needs to go, but without it, how will you indicate to users that a tab can be manipulated? A few options come to mind: 1. If the user clicks and holds for 0.5 or 1 seconds on a tab it can then become semi-opaque and float to indicate that it can then be moved or torn off. 2. Require the user to hold a modifier key (like Option or Command) in combination with a mouse click to manipulate tabs. Both aren’t the best options but I think they’re better than the handle.

And lastly on this point, the tab title font is smaller than the ’standard’ 13pt normal Lucida Grande used for window titles across the system, instead going for what looks like 11pt bold Lucida Grande. This should match the system.

2. New Tab Button


The new tab button is positioned in the absolute upper right-hand corner of the window. It reminds me of the new tab button in IE7, except that it actually indicates its behavior without requiring the user to mouse-over the button. I’d prefer either an actual toolbar button. It seems odd to separate this function from the remainder of the toolbar. It also feels odd to move my mouse cursor all the way up to the corner. I can’t complain too heavily, I typically just hit Command-T when I want a new tab.

3. Top Sites.


Really couldn’t care less. Opera has a feature like this, and the IE8 beta too, and I’m just not into it. What I would like to see is something more like Feedly.

4. SSL/https Indicator.


Apple has always paved their own path here. In Safari 3 the lock icon sat in the upper right-hand corner where the new tab button now sits. I’d prefer instead indication in the address bar.

My wishlist

1. Browser session saving. This is one of my favorite Firefox features, and also one that I enjoyed with Glims and Safari 3.x. Easily more important to me than Top Sites or the Cover Flow interface for bookmarks and history.

2. Rounded bottom window corners. This is extremely trivial, but Safari’s square edges at the bottom of the window drive me *insane*, while the Finder, iTunes, iCal, hell even Camino, all have rounded edges on all four window corners. Please, Apple, this seems like an easy one!

3. A Safari Extension framework. Before I could launch and test out Safari 4 I had to remove a few add-ons for Safari which are, essentially, Input Manager hacks. 1Password, Glims and PithHelmet (which uses SIMBL) all caused Safari 4 grief. If Apple had an official framework or API for developing browser extensions (ala Firefox) there would be much rejoicing.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m going to continue to use Safari 4 unless I run into any real show stoppers. Overall I do think it’s a very solid product and I’ll be looking forward to the next beta release with baited breath.

Chris Coda – Take a walk

1. Create a sound file that is 40 seconds in length or shorter. In my case I used Audio Hijack Pro to rip some audio from a Flash music player in my browser, opened it up in Sound Studio, trimmed it to length and applied a nice 4-second fade out at the end.

2. Save the file as a stereo 128kbps AAC (m4a) audio file.

3. Rename the file’s extension to m4r. So if your file is called AwesomeKickAssRingtone.m4a, just rename it to AwesomeKickAssRingtone.m4r.

4. Transfer the file to your iPhone. I really like Air Sharing, which isn’t free, but if your phone is jailbroken and you’ve installed OpenSSH you can use scp.

5. Move the transferred ringtone file to /Library/Ringtones. I used the Mobile Finder app which is available via Cydia to do this.

6. Go into Settings > Sounds > Ringtone and your custom ringtone should be in the list:

That’s it! Enjoy.

Dave 2562 is one of the few dubstep producers that I rate highly. I recently made his acquantance through our mutual friend Craig (aka Monkeytek). Really nice guy and very talented producer.

(Warning: NSFW!) Joe Grand and Zoz Brooks prank Dr. Mike North with the BSODomizer, an inline VGA device that fakes the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” on an unwitting victim, and after a few moments will also display the BGoD, or Blue Goatse of Death, if you set the DIP switches properly. Joe, Zoz and Mike along with Terry Sandin are the hosts of Prototype This, a kick-ass show on the Discovery Channel where they take crazy ideas (six-legged all terrain vehicle, self-parking truck) and put them through 2-weeks of rapid prototyping to see if their ideas can be made reality. Joe Grand is also on the technical advisory board of MAKE Magazine and has co-hosted a few of their Weekend Projects podcasts with Bre Pettis.