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A few things have me tremendously excited lately.

editease

In my continuing quest to become even moderately javascript literate I stumbled onto an amazing plugin that creates a tiny CMS using jquery. Pretty impressive, I love lightweight stuff like this. Crappy name though, needs some work.

RGB Color Profiles

I grew up ignorant of things like color profiles. To this day I’ve never had any instruction in graphic design, and certain things are still rather mysterious. I’ve now crossed RGB color profiles off that list when I found this consise and easy to read post on how to accurately reproduce color when exporting for the web.

The Wisdom of Crowds

No I’m not reading the book. I just heard about the book on a RadioLab podcast, but it sounds great. It’s all about harnessing the power of the masses to make accurate and effective decisions. It’s on my list.

Multi Theft Auto

Gaming took a giant leap forward just a short while ago when some cool dudes got together and built a platform to create a multiplayer version of GTA San Andreas. I can’t wait to form a posse of thugs and cause some damage.

Lou Dorfsman

I’d never heard of Lou Dorfsman until I read this post about his passing, but I recognized his work instantly. A great source of inspiration.

F*cked… graphically, at least.

America Is F*cked…….(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.

Lately I have been busy crossing genres between Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes (which we saw just last week at Element in Victoria) and some podcasts by Erol Alkan and Tiga. Alkan’s Beyond The Wizards Sleeve (link will open up iTunes) was recorded at G-Mex in Manchester and is stuck on repeat for me at the moment. This youtube video of Alkan at Coachella 2008 is pretty unstoppable.

Another brilliant podcast is WNYC’s Radio Lab hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Each show is unique and has an amazing story to tell, but Zoe Keating’s supersonic cello magic (iTunes) is really something to hear.

Lastly, enjoy Dawn Landes playing Young Folks (bluegrass style).

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time getting to know my new acer aspire one and this weekend I finally feel like I’ve reached a major milestone. After grabbing a few scripts from userstyles.org for the firefox stylish addon my web browsing ux is now satisfactory. Among the other addons that have filled the gap left by this tiny, pain-in-the-ass-keyboard are Speed Dial (loads thumbnails of your favorite sites in newly created tabs) and Foxmarks for bookmark syncing. Mostly the tweaks were about cutting down on the amount of typing that has to be done and making the best use of the small screen space available. I’ve also turned auto-hide on, a feature I thought I would never use for any length of time, but it saves a good quarter of and inch of realestate at the bottom of the screen so it had to go.

I’m thinking of switching back to pc’s. In a way it feels like I joined an awesome cult (mac) only to find out that there is another cult (win) across the street that has an indoor pool, robots and all the gravy you can drink. Of course that gravy could kill you and those robots could severe your limbs at any moment, but what’s life without some risk? The latest HP and Dell laptops have serious hardware packed into them that the Macbook Pro just doesn’t cut it when it comes to live video processing. So after reading a lot about what gear other performers use, I’m thinking of taking the plunge and grabbing an HP laptop, something like this one. Lately I’ve been having fun with a little Acer Aspire One (warning: the Aspire One website has really annoying music)., and even loaded up Resolume to see what it could do (sort of a success, but mostly it sucked).