About Tesla

The Oatmeal comic on Nikola Tesla, here.

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Sabotage


In homage to Adam Yauch, aka MCA. The founder of The Beastie Boys lost the battle with the can­cer he’d been fight­ing the last year and passed away at the young age of 47. Below you can watch the music video for Sabotage, dir­ec­ted by Spike Jonze, one of the greatest hits of The Beastie Boys and one of the best and funny music promos ever. You gotta love the mus­taches and the 70’s cop tv show atmosphere.

Besides his part in one of New York’s most iconic musical acts, Yauch was also a player in inde­pend­ent cinema his film dis­tri­bu­tion endeav­our Oscilloscope Laboratories. Oscilloscope’s most recent film is Lynne Ramsay’s ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, with Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly.
Adam “MCA” Yauch him­self dir­ec­ted ‘Fight For Your Right — Revisited’ not so long ago with a bunch of great act­ors. Watch the trailer and the ‘Make Some Noise’ music video, shot around the same time, here.

Considering his work, I’d say MCA had a lot of fun while cre­at­ing his art.

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The Tourist

Sometimes I come across an idea that fits a medium so well that they can’t be less than great. One of these is ‘The Tourist’ a short hor­ror film two bud­dies of mine are work­ing on. It is a simple short story  about how the fate of a young lib­rar­ian gets ‘con­tam­in­ated’ by a mys­ter­i­ous device he finds in an ancient book.

I began this post by writ­ting that some ideas can’t be less than great. I emphas­ize that by say­ing this film must be made. Truly great hor­ror films are scarce today and this pro­ject drinks from the great leg­acy of the 80s’ cult hor­ror movies — the crude real­ism. The crew is pas­sion­ate about their craft, excel­lent pro­fes­sion­als and… to top it off, they have good taste and itu­ition (not a com­mon thing these days).

The pro­ject is now gath­er­ing crowd fund­ing through the indieGoGO plat­form (sim­ilar to kick­starter but dir­ectly avail­able to the whole world). Read the descrip­tion at their indiegogo page to get a sense of the film.

The offi­cial tumblr page shows the film­mak­ing pro­cess with recent loc­a­tion scout­ing in the beau­ti­ful green moun­tains of Sintra. If you like the genre, help these guys out and you’ll play an import­ant part in reward­ing the short hor­ror format with what will be an award-winning film. Only a few days left on indiegogo.

This pro­ject has to hap­pen. I’ve read the script and I can tell you that this descrip­tion of ‘hor­ror’ by Robert McKee fits it perfectly:

Official links:
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Adobe Creative Cloud and Creative Suite 6 Launch

Today, Adobe launched its Creative Suite 6 soft­ware pack­age and its cloud solu­tion for cre­at­ives. Pre-order is avail­able. Shipping next May 7.

I’ve pos­ted a few videos about some inter­est­ing new fea­tures and the inter­face refresh — check them out: Photoshop CS6, illus­trator CS6, CS6 Production Premium.

You can watch the launch video here. Official product page here.

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Iconatomy: Merged Photos of Past and Present Movie Stars

Iconatomy — a pro­ject named from the words ‘icon’ and ‘ana­tomy’ — con­sists of a series of col­lages that seam­lessly merges two celebrit­ies from two dif­fer­ent eras of film his­tory. It is the cre­ation of George Chamoun, an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. In his own words:

The pic­tures are not morphed in any way. What you see is a col­lage of two dif­fer­ent people in each pic­ture. Did it take me a long time to find the right pic­tures? Hell yes it did! :-)

Interesting exer­cise with amaz­ing res­ults. The image that pairs Natalie Portman with Audrey Hepburn is my favorite.

Pictures at the artist’s tumblr post.

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Apple Hates Brunettes

You just have to read it.

App stores for mobile devices have been great for users. And for developers too, for most part. But once in a while there’s another story that sounds like developers are given the ‘talk to the hand’ treatment. Despite the blog post title, this case encom­passes both Apple’s App Store as well as Google Play (Android apps market).

From the iKamas­utra team blog post:

Apple has cre­ated a set of guidelines that the iKamas­utra team is happy to adhere to. Our prob­lem is not the guidelines, but the mis­taken enforce­ment of them, and the lack of dia­log toward resolv­ing any con­cerns Apple might have. Some of you have asked how you can help, and I think the best way is to tell Apple in your own words why you love the app, and to ask that they recon­sider their decision.

Read the whole art­icle here (don’t worry, it’s safe for work).

Posted in Android, App Store, Apple, Apps, blog coverage, dev, Google, google play, iOS, iOS development, Microsoft, Mobile, software, windows phone | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Introducing David — Prometheus Promo

«I can carry out dir­ect­ives human coun­ter­parts might find dis­tress­ing or unethical.»

Great promo dir­ec­ted by RSA dir­ector Johnny Hardstaff. Really look­ing for­ward to watch Ridley Scott’s Prometheus in movie theaters.

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Pocket (formerly Read It Later)

Pocket is quite a depar­ture from ‘Read it later’*. New visual iden­tity, new web­site, new inter­face design, a promo video — it is more of a scrath-the-past-and-start-over kind of a thing. The dark inter­face gives way to a more fresh, bright, approach that under­stands core cat­egor­ies of online con­tent view­ing: art­icles, videos, images. That is a nice improve­ment as these new sec­tions help sort out dif­fer­ent bits of con­tent. The ‘inline’ pic­tures in the art­icles view is also a nice touch.
Check the web app → and mobile cli­ent apps → (for iOS, Android).

I have used the Read It Later iOS app since it was released (first the free ver­sion and then the paid one). Last year, while I never deleted the RIL app, I star­ted using Instapaper for its sim­pli­city and care­ful design. One of the fea­tures I have always liked on Read It Later was the search fea­ture (a paid fea­ture on Instapaper). I still think Instapaper is more eleg­ant, but ‘search’ and the new ‘item cat­egor­ies’ in Pocket seem an inter­est­ing way to get to saved con­tent.
One ques­tion arises though — as Pocket is now a free app, what’s the scope of its (new) busi­ness model?

Folks at MacStories have a nice piece on the sub­ject and an inter­view with ReadItLater/Pocket founder/creator Nate Weiner.

* For those of you who don’t know: Read It Later (now Pocket) is a ser­vice to ‘book­mark’ webpages for later view­ing (off­line also).

Posted in Android, Apps, blog coverage, Chrome, design, interface design, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPod, media, Mobile, Productivity, Safari, software, Tech, video, web app, Web tech, webdesign | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Adobe CS6 Production Premium — Preview


Speaking of the devil, Adobe opened the gates today and put up a webpage to show what’s new in the new CS6 Production Premium pack­age. Lots of new and tweaked stuff for Premiere, After Effects and more. I think pro­fes­sion­als will have a field day play­ing with new fea­tures like shape/text 3D extrude or 2D layer bend­ing that are built into the new After Effects CS6. Let’s all hope that one of the most import­ant fea­tures in video and audio pro­duc­tion — pre­form­ance — keeps up with all the rest. We’ll know for sure once Adobe releases the final build of the software.

If you’re curi­ous about all the new things bet­ter check them in this set of videos. Meanwhile, watch the video below for a few After Effects CS6 high­lights by Angie Taylor.

Update: video2brain has pos­ted “After Effects CS6: New Features Workshop”, a free video to learn what’s new in the CS6 version.

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Adobe Illustrator CS6 — Pattern Creator

Adobe is act­ively try­ing to build momentum around the release of the CS6 ver­sion of its iconic apps for cre­at­ives. And I think they’re suc­ceed­ing. After the release of Photoshop CS6 beta and a pre­view of the CS6 Production Premium bundle sched­uled to be presen­ted at the NAB 2012, inform­a­tion about other apps is also being released.

This time it’s a video show­ing a bit of the new look of Illustrator CS6 and a very nice new pat­tern cre­ation tool.

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