July 2010
5 posts
Relax →
ProLost’s Stu Maschwitz on Bit Depth-, Gear-, Boke-, Resolution-, Frame Rate-, Depth-, and Accessibility-Fetishists. His credo: Don’t complain on any (often minor) technical shortcomings of your movie technology - and simply make a movie.
Zacuto DSLR Shootout (3-epsiodes video) →
Extensive test of recent DSLR Cameras vs. an ARRI Film Camera by rental house Zacuto. Conclusion: DLSRs have way better sensitivity (for example for shooting with available light) and when DSLRs are going start to record in RAW (or in my opinion at least in 10/12bit ProRes), they reach the quality of film in dynamic range, too.
Summarizing article on Creative Cow:...
“In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over...”
– Jeremy Keith cites the design principle “Priority of Constituencies” behind HTML5
June 2010
3 posts
“iMovie for iPhone looks cool, too, although as a cousin to Final Cut, I wish...”
– Mike Morton from WWDC.
May 2010
3 posts
Corporate Identity
A few days ago I had the chance to attended a talk about an experimental social networking project of German T-Mobile. The talk was quite good - except that the slides were very text-heavy. The concepts that were presented were buried somewhere on the wall in extensively small continuous text. It was hard to decide if you should listen or read.
When we started discussing the talk afterwards with...
“1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he’s ever heard of onto C to...”
– James Iry on C++ (among other great comments on other programming languages) [via fms]
April 2010
1 post
ARRI Alexa Digital Film Camera shoots ProRes →
When the ARRI Alexa camera was announced on IBC in September 2009, not all features have been unveiled: Behind the curtains ARRI worked on features for a new “Direct to Edit” workflow that allows to edit compressed footage as it comes from the camera. RED showed that this is an interesting way of working, but realtime playback of R3D files at least in HD is not possible without...
March 2010
5 posts
The floppy icon... →
…slowly becomes a running gag in Office for Mac over the decades [via daringfireball].
Michael Johansson, Sweden →
Great art projects between obsessive-compulsive disorder and 1:1 model kits.
“Ubi pus, ibi evacua.”
– Humanistic commonplace for every day.
February 2010
10 posts
Who is not at home? →
pleaserobme.com has the answer. Nifty website showing the danger of careless internet use (in that case publicly “checking-in” on foursquare.com).
A conversation I have every month or so, too →
Dan Wineman on restaurants’ Flash websites with the usual “PDF of a screenshot of a scan of a Word document printed on a dishtowel”-menu.
Anti-Theft Lunch Bags →
Great fun.
“The Revenge of No More Excuses” →
Canon announces the EOS 550D, now with all movie recording features of her $1000 USD more expensive big sister Canon EOS 7D. Available in March.
WatchUps and downs in digital movie project: “Che and the Digital Cinema Revolution” with Steven Soderbergh. If you skip the first quarter with the firmware problems of RED One, you get a good overview of the workflow with a digital movie camera [via finalcutuser.com].
fuckyeahsubways →
Great collection of subway images from all over the world. If you look at these photos you see why every new DSLR has to have subway sample footage.
January 2010
4 posts
“No, No, No! I Said The Sand Around The Yacht!” →
Again a great case of destruction on the beach (remember the whale?).
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to...”
– Steve Jobs [via Michael Pusateri on the iPad]
December 2009
6 posts
“[At 400 km/h] the tyres will only last for about 15 minutes, which is ok,...”
– James May at top speed in a Bugatti Veyron in BBC’s Top Gear
I almost forgot what YouTube is all about: “Man... →
Please tell me if you have to laugh out loud, too.
“Begin to eat the dust of Baja California”
For the records: The introductory sample in Take California from Propellerheads’ album “Decksandrumsandrockandroll” (still a great 90ies big-beat/breakbeat/trip-hop album by the way) comes from the documentary “Twenty Seven Hours To La Paz” about the legendary Baja 1000 off-road race (at about 3/5 of the video).
WatchGreat skateboard video by Salazar with wonderful images full of tempera powdered paint and flour. Filmed with Panasonic HVX200 with Redrock micro and SGPro adapters and Nikon primes.
With all the current attention to HD-filming DSLRs, you still can make beautiful images with 35mm adapters.
November 2009
3 posts
“Without a concise set of rules to follow we would probably all have to resort to...”
– David Thorne (or the blog character David Thorne) in an email to his son’s teacher on 27b/6.
“Bio-Diversity” →
Music television from the basement →
“From the Basement” shows how music television can be. Intimate live performances of artists such as Beck, Cold War Kids, Eels, Fleet Foxes, Gnarls Barkley, Jose Gonzales, The Kills, P J Harvey, QOTSA, Radiohead, Thom York, White Stripes, and others are recorded without any audience in one of the BBC studios in London, produced by Nigel Godrich. This setup reduces the “music video” to music and...
October 2009
9 posts
“Exactitudes” →
Amazing, massive, photo-sociological work by Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek.
“Animaux” →
Incredible, uncanny work from 2001. Photos by Geoffrey Cottenceau and Romain Rousset.
Crowd-Sourced Star Wars →
Randomly choose a finished scene made by Vimeo users and try to guess when that 15 seconds happen in the original movie. Not always easy, but great fun. Or watch the trailer for a good selection of home-made Star Wars trash.
Comic book grammar and tradition →
Should I ever write comics again, I will have to consult this website to maintain comic grammar standard conformity. Astonishing read - I agree to every line but never thought of this as actual rules.
“Shake it, shake it like a Polaroid”
– Song lyrics our children won’t understand any more
“Dream Product” →
More fun with remote controls.
Monome goes mainstream →
A clone of the open-source-grid-button-interface “Monome” is now commercially available as a controller for the live performance software Ableton Live. Train your fingers, the grid of buttons becomes a real instrument! (watch the video for a live demo)
“Ogori cafe” →
Little story about a fun cafe concept from Japan and the surprised guys from Panic.com running into it.
September 2009
6 posts
Silence on port 22
We are running some Linux-based root servers for our development infrastructure for quite a while and have been constantly annoyed by dictionary- and brute-force-attacks via ssh (up to thousands per day on weekends).
The most important rules to not getting hacked are:
Use good passwords, for every user (login: “test”, password “test”, you know what I mean…).
...