January 2008
All entries and daily links from January 2008.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
- Picturing Harvey Milk (SF Chronicle)
While Gus Van Sant shoots a film about Harvey Milk in the Castro, the Chronicle looks at how transforming the neighborhood for a movie set has brought back memories of the times.
- $1 image stabilizer for any camera (video)
Simple, portable, and brilliant idea to steady your camera when taking photos.
Happy Birthday Lego Brick
Monday, January 28, 2008 at 4:01pm 0 comments
Today is the 50th birthday of the Lego brick, those studded building blocks which as a kid I made nearly everything else out of.
We didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid, but I got creative and made other toys out of Lego so I was happy whenever I could get more bricks, even if we could only afford them second hand at a garage sale. My mom regrets not having taken photographs of them now because I made some damned good Lego versions of Transformers, Star Wars and Robotech.
- MacBook Paper (YouTube video)
A cute parody of the MacBook Air mimicking the envelope commercial that's running now and featuring the song "New Soul" by Yael Naïm.
Monday, January 28, 2008
- Film crew descends on Castro (BAR)
"The buzz in the city's gay community over filming of a biopic on the late Supervisor Harvey Milk, the country's first out gay man elected to office, was palpable."
Monday, January 21, 2008
- Interface design and the iPhone (Edward Tufte)
Edward Tufte on the goods and the bads of the iPhone's user interface
- Grand green vision for Parkmerced (SF Chronicle)
Built following WWII with car culture in mind, the new owners of the low density tract of houses plan a transformation in a model new-urbanist neighborhood generating it's own power and even rerouting Muni Metro to serve the neigbourhood better.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
- NASA photographs unseen side of Mercury (NPR)
The Messenger space probe photographed never before seen parts of Mercury on it's first pass of the planet.
- Yahoo helping OpenID simplify web log-ins (SF Chronicle)
Following the OpenID dev camp we hosted last weekend at Six Apart, Yahoo! announced it will start testing OpenID at the end of the month. OpenID lets you sign into a site you haven't registered with by entering a web address (URL) that is uniquely yours (often your profile or blog, jamison.vox.com) and instead of signing in directly to the site you're visiting, you get shuttled to the site that provided you that URL to sign in their (vox.com in my example) to confirm that URL really is yours. Once you've signed in to your OpenID provider, you get sent back to the site you wanted to sign in to, but now it's confirmed that's who you are and you didn't have to give the site your email or password (all you did was give them your URL that was public anyway) making it safe, secure and lets you skip registration (though the site doesn't know anything about you now and might ask)
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
- Muni's Vintage Streetcar Artist (Telstar Logistics)
Meet Carole Gilbert and the paint crew that keeps San Francisco's historic streetcar fleet looking beautiful.
The iPhone's Back Story
Monday, January 14, 2008 at 5:01pm 0 comments
Wired has a good piece on how the iPhone came to be which starts by telling us only months before it was announced, "it wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable."
I love stories like this because what we see from Apple are almost always elegantly design and high quality, but behind the scenes it might have been a complete disaster getting there. Or another question I always wonder is what more was originally going to be included but had to be cut for one reason or another.
Friday, January 11, 2008
- Macworld blogger lunch and schmoozefest (Upcoming)
Do you blog? Will you be in San Francisco for MacWorld? Hang out with A-List bloggers like me and Jason Shellen. OK, maybe just Shellen. Cable Susser of Panic has a link to get a free floor pass if you're in need
- Plan B 3.0 - an environmental call to action (NPR)
Interview with environmentalist Lester Brown on reversing the trends in the climate crisis.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
- Important save Hangar One meeting (Telstar Logistics)
Cleanup costs for the massive hanger located at NASA AMES could spell the end for the historic structure built originally for the Naval blimp USS Macon and where I got to see a moon rock.
Trimming the Trolley
Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 7:01am 0 comments
I'd meant to post this earlier, but never got around to it. For Christmas each year, Market Street Railway volunteers decorate one of the historic streetcars of the F-Market & Wharves line. This year we decorated a tram from Milan which Muni had just finished repairing and repainted from the orange livery it arrived in (orange Milan streetcars are a fixture on San Francisco's Market Street) to an older color scheme, this two-tone green.
You can see how it turned out in these photos from Telstar Logistics, I secured that garland damn tight too, only two bows came off during the month it was decorated.
Neighborhood (Power Out)
Saturday, January 5, 2008 at 11:01am 0 comments
This has been a great way to start the new year. The San Francisco Bay Area got hit by the worst storm in years and even then I don't remember another storm knocking down so many trees. Walking to the grocery store during a break in the rain I had to walk in the street not once, but twice to get around trees completely blocking the sidewalk.
Coming home I was worried I wouldn't have power when I saw Muni trains like this one, stuck without power, dotting Church Street as far as I could see.
I'm definitely not going cycling this weekend.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
- 2007's 50 Most Loathsome Americans (The Beast)
Check out number 9. How accurate is it for you?
- Science Channel's New Brand (Brand New)
I'm glad they've ditched the logo of a full color Earth (so we'd know it was a Discovery owned channel) orbiting the word science in favor of something that looks like a chemical symbol.
