Valhalla Island

Last.fm is an amazing web application used to record and recommend music you listen to. It takes note of the music you listen to in iTunes, then recommends new music to you based on what you seem to like. I’ve been using it for so long that my username there is fightingfriends — the username I used in high school. In two years I’ve scrobbled over 44,000 songs. Anyway, I could write all day about how fantastic the app is but the point is, they made a ball pit. Continue reading →

Dictionary represents everything good about using a Macintosh computer. Focused purpose, a user interface striped back to the bare minimum, fast search and functionality so well implemented that it’s completely invisible and as easy as possible to use. Not a day goes by when I don’t use Dictionary, if I’m writing a post it’s used constantly. Continue reading →

Something I noticed almost as soon as I entered the state of Virginia in the US was the abundance of personalised car license plates. Every second car had one and they were often quite extreme, 6 or 7 alpha characters, something you rarely see in Australia. Later I was informed personalised plates in the majority of US states go for a flat fee of about $30, much, much less than the same in Australia. Continue reading →

Blogging’s been slow around here lately but that’s alright, it ebbs and flows between a flood of posts and not many at all depending on what’s going on around me. It’s been slow recently due to a new place of employment, a photography-based operation on the Gold Coast. We’re working on some really cool stuff that I can’t wait to release and start talking about. Continue reading →

Subversion is fantastic. If you’re working on a group project and not using it you’re insane, if you’re developing a solo project and not using it, you’re crazy. While it’s ideally suited to code, it makes sense to have any kind of project in version control, essays, design mockups, technical documents, theses, anything you can complete to a level and then make revisions to. Continue reading →

It’s always exciting to see an update from Mark Simonson, my very favourite typographer, in my feed reader of any kind. Today that update was the release of his latest typeface, Lakeside and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Continue reading →

Ffffound is image bookmarking. I’d read about it here and there and had some idea of what it was about. It’s an easy site to get caught up in and while there’s some great stuff there’s a greater amount of crap but here’s my favourites from the last hour wasted at ffffound. Continue reading →

Paul Stamatiou, a blogger who’s writing I’ve enjoyed for a long time, published a post yesterday titled How To: 100-inch Uber Theater on a Budget. Here’s a summary of how it’s done:

Buy a cheap projector and screen on Craigslist. Set it up.

That’s what I like to see, no gimmicks, no crazy building your own custom projector out of a microwave and spare plywood — to make home theatre on a budget you just need to buy a cheap home theatre! Genius.

Much of my life is taken thinking about and trying to achieve what I call the ultimate or perfect setup — the ideal arrangement and organisation of the things around me and the systems I use. The ultimate setup does not deal with imaginary amounts of money or technology that doesn’t yet exist, it’s realised solely with the resources available to you. Be it the items you already own or capital you’re willing to invest. Continue reading →

The big news this morning is Micrcosoft’s $42 billion bid for Yahoo coincidently syndicated into Yahoo’s financial news website. This is how I see it. Continue reading →

It’s been a long time since I’ve made or even worked on an existing publicly released WordPress theme. Cut and Dry is a brand new WP 2.3 theme I made a few weekends ago. It’s dark, clean and doesn’t use any images. I remember Matt saying a while ago that dark themes were the most popular on wordpress.com. If dark isn’t your thing changing a few color values in the CSS will flip it. Same goes for the green links, any bright color would look great and is super easily implemented. Continue reading →