Archive for September, 2005

When Brushed Metal goes bad.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a hilarious post about iTunes 5 and the loss of brushed metal. Special guest star: Aqua interface!


The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme

You will be missed, B.M.

I need a man with a van.


We signed the lease on the new apartment! Hurray! Moving in next week. Unfortunately, I have no idea of how we’re going to actually move any furniture, considering we don’t have a car. Even if we rent a Uhaul, have you ever tried parking on Haight Street? Probably not. I mean, I suppose we could carry a mattress and dresser down four blocks from my old place, but I’m not exactly what you would call… strong.

Today is super busy. Lots of shoots, lots of podcasts (personal and professional) to attend to, many things that need to get taken care of before I move out. Ah me! There need to be more hours in the day. But it’s all very exciting, so expect more updates in the future.

Kill off your enemies.

A few years ago, I downloaded an old-skool Apple emulator so I could play Oregon Trail. It was especially fun, because we made our travel party out of people who we HATED. So then the game would validate my feelings by saying such things as “Dan* has died of dysentery!”

Well, today I came across a great t-shirt. And now I think I need to own it.

*name has been changed to protect my popularity.

Make Google Talk sing.

At work today, Tim did something really clever. He figured out how to make Google Talk become your own streaming internet radio station. We tried it out, and it worked pretty damn well! Here’s the link to Alpha blog, where he wrote out the instructions:

  • Purchase a male-to-male speaker/headphone cable. It should have a 1/8-inch mini headphone jack on each end.
  • Plug one end into the mic-in port on your computer.
  • Plug the other end into your computer’s headphone port. If you want to listen to music as you play it for your listeners (recommended), use a headphone splitter. Jack your headphones into one port of the headphone splitter, the male-to-male cable into the other port, and plug the splitter into your headphone port.
  • Launch iTunes (or any other audio player) and start playing songs.
  • Call up your friends over Google Talk. They’ll hear whatever you’re playing with surprisingly good sound quality.

Spectacular! Oh, and then we played a really great game, where you stream a rap song and try to type the lyrics as they come. It’s a good way to test out the lag factor as well.