Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 82
October 19, 2012
October 17, 2012
More Things, October 18, 2012
Taken together, it is a relaxed, delightful experience that (if you squint a bit) recalls the Kantian notion of the beautiful: that at its best, and divorced from specific contexts, art excites and enlivens the imagination. But beyond the intellectual satisfaction of the audio-visual spectacle, joy often just creeps up on you.
Walking is different than biking or driving down a street. Heads stuck in smartphones, we miss the humanity of the scenes we pass. Yet using that same technology we can call up with atomic granularity the time and place of a meeting with a dear friend years back. Sometimes those two spaces collide—technology creating an almost psychic, projected awareness of the here and now.
What, then, is new in the new India? People have somewhat more mobility, and correspondingly greater ability to reinvent themselves, constructing identities that tradition has not handed them...thus the promise of mobility, while creating real exit options from desperate situations...also gives rise to despair when the promise is snatched away.
The upshot of many books on writing seems to be: Write, write a lot. When you are done writing a lot, write some more. I wonder if this is always the best route to the creation of something enduring. Am I alone? Or do you find yourself longing to escape from a daily tsunami of words? What if people wrote less and paid attention more?
Place a file name under an image in InDesign
This little trick saved hours off a project today. Full credit goes to this Computer Arts article, which details a ton of options and modifiers on this trick.
All I wanted to do was place the name of the file underneath an image. I mean, that's easy enough to do manually, right? Just copy the file name and paste it under. But I had to do it with nearly 500 items, so the manual route was somewhat out of the question.
[image error]Start out by placing your images wherever you like. For the purposes of this tutorial, I've just taken two jpegs. Next, select whichever images you want to include the name. Then, right-click, find the "Captions" line, and select "generate static caption."
[image error]Selecting "generate static caption" will create a text box undernear the photo displaying the file name. There are loads of options within Caption setup (and, if you follow the tutorial above, with Bridge and metadata), but for most people this is just fine.
[image error]
October 12, 2012
A smartwatch that actually makes sense
First, for a smartwatch to makes sense, it shouldn't just be a smaller iPhone. Instead, it actually needs to be better than the iPhone for the tasks you are going to use it for. You aren't going to write an email on your watch, but you are going to check the weather on it - because that's something you want to do on-the-go. So it needs to be optimized for these simple tasks being executed in a moving environment - in contrast to current smartphone interfaces, which are made for increasingly complex tasks.
I've been so used to concepts coming with a Kickstarter button these days I was kinda shocked when this amazing idea didn't.
October 11, 2012
The Magazine
I’m starting this with a staff of one. I can develop the app, procure and edit the articles, and write occasional articles myself. There’s no venture capital funding, no corporate backer, and very little starting capital. My biggest fixed cost is the up-front design and development of the app, and my biggest recurring cost is paying writers. If it doesn’t turn a profit within two months — just four issues — I’ll shut it down.
Purchased.
More Things, October 11, 2012
When a publisher prints a paper book, that’s it. If the book has errors, the publisher can fix them for the next edition, but the existing copies are out there forever. The Kindle ecosystem is an all-digital, almost-always-connected world, yet it has been designed as if those E Ink bits were made of real ink. That’s bad for more-timely material that might benefit from updates, and it’s especially bad when a fresh ebook edition is rife with errors.
While rehearsing for the film, Andre's thick French accent made many of his lines hard to understand. It's reported that Mandy Patinkin often slapped André in the face to get him to concentrate harder on pronouncing his words.
Learning CAD to do inexpensive, independent 3D printing is going to become the new "learning word processing to do independent desktop publishing," and it's going to happen fast.
First of all, yes, Canadians do talk funny, and in a less dignified manner than in any American region. But this is because Canadians are not accustomed to talking. Canadians generally communicate by means of the McQuiggan, a long strip made of bear hide.
I see slang as the counter-language. At its heart it’s down, it’s dirty, it’s grubby, it’s tart, it’s essentially subversive. It questions and deals with themes like sex, drugs, violence, rudeness, abuse, racism and so on and so forth. Slang is primarily concrete, but the one abstract that underpins it is that of doubt. It seems to me that slang is always doubting.
People can’t be stopped from wanting to change their looks in order to correct what they perceive to be deficiencies in their appearance, but we can do better at laying bare the fallacy of these deficiencies and the social forces behind the aspirations.
In general, James Wood writes about fiction as if it were a boat or a tree house instead of a medium of limitless potential, where words can deform, defy, and reinvigorate space.
