Best 24 ever!

The fourth season of 24 just ended and oh what a season. It's the best 24 I have ever seen, not one dull moment. Some key points/moments that I love about this season are...

• Best villain: Habib Marwan (formerly held by first season's Gaines)
• Tony Almeada's (among others) sudden appearance.
• Chloe and Edgar. This one is aching for a spin-off.
• Mandy the hottie assassin. More screen-time this time.

I can't wait for the next one... If there is a next one.

By the way, the Frank Miller (Sin City) inspired illustration above will be the next topic at the tutorial section. Promise. :-)

Technorati Tags: 24, tv

Vintage Apple TV commercials part 2

This one is the mother lode! There are a lot of old Apple ads in this site that I've never seen before. Thanks to Gary L. Gray for putting this together and providing a both educational and entertaining resource. A definite bookmark-worthy.

Technorati Tags: apple, marketing, video

PS3: My spider sense is tingling

Is it me or Sony is actually using the font from Spiderman as the logotype for Playtation 3? I wonder what happen to their previous logo which is much more edgy and appealing.

Technorati Tags: design, logo, playstation, sony

Mac user's survival tools in a Windows environment

As a creative individual (or team) using a Mac in a Windows dominated environment such as a large corporation setting can be very daunting. Using a Mac as a creative tool is such a great privilege despite your IT's smirk whenever the “M” word is mentioned (nope, I'm not going to touch the perennial mac-windows debate). So it's best to keep ourselves under the radar as possible, move from network neighborhood to network neighborhood right-neighborly as possible to avoid any problems with the IT folks. With each OS X update, mac-windows networking becomes more and more compatible, however it's still not perfect. Below are a couple of freeware tools to help your Mac run smoothly as possible in a Windows environment.

CleanUp SMB mess. Just like the morning after for most young rock bands in a five star hotel, Macs tend to leave a whole lot of mess after you use and save files in a Windows network. These files (“._*” files, .DS_Store files and .Trashes) are used as a way for the Mac OS to remember the icon and file settings, etc. It's invisible to Macs but a big mess in Windows. You can use this small utility to drag and drop a network folder and it will clean up all those junk files. It's best to use this once you are done with that folder. You can go high up the root level to clean the folders (and sub folders), the more files/folder the longer it takes of course.

WInShortcutter. Simply put, this utility makes the Windows' “Shortcut” files executable on Macs. It will even mount a network drive if the shortcut points to it. This is great tool since the less time you spend clicking folders around and use the shortcut links, the less mess (junk files) you have to clean up.

I'll add some more in the future. If you have any recommendations please swing me an email and share your tip.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, network

Tiger feature: Slideshow

Another great addition to Mac OS X is the Slideshow utility found in the contextual menu. This is a perfect tool for any graphic creators and photographer or anyone who wants to make a quick presentation in a slideshow form. Start by selecting several images within a folder and right (ctrl) clicking on the files to invoke the contextual menu. The first image will appear in full screen along with an overlay control panel.

You can control the playback from here. The playback uses a smooth transition (using core image technology) which gives it a nice effect. What I really like is the thumbnail mode which gives you an overview of the files that you are viewing and jump to a particular spot in the slideshow. This happens in real-time with no lag (I'm using a Powerbook 1ghz) and in smooth transition as you jump from image to image.

Give it a try. Pretty soon it will be a part of your efficient workflow instead of opening and using a third party application to do the trick.

Technorati Tags: mac, tiger

It's U2 night!

My girlfriend and I are going to see U2 tonight at the United Center in Chicago. I hope I can sneak in my digital camera just like the last 2001 concert to get some pictures. I love taking concert pictures, it gives you an opportunity to take pictures in a wide color spectrum. To the other concert goers who wish to take pictures, don't use the flash, they are worthless. Go manual and go for slow shutter speed and most important, keep that hand steady... or get an image stabilizer digital camera like I have. Hopefully I can take some decent pictures tonight to post sometime.

Technorati Tags: music, u2

Music videos in iTunes 4.8

With the recent update to iTunes to 4.8, it is now capable of playing movie files right in the iTunes itself. The ads in the iTunes main page music store shows some of the new tracks for sale along with one or more accompanying music videos. I purchased the new Gorillaz and The Shins tracks which sells for $0.99 and $1.98 along with the videos. The videos downloaded just like a regular music tracks however there's a projector icon to indicate which files are the videos. The downloaded videos are in mp4 format and free of any form of DRM as far as I can tell. It doesn't look like you can purchase individual videos at this point, they are more of an "extra" for purchasing a single or an album. I think this is a counter strategy towards the new dualdisc (cd audio/dvd videos) format that is available at the local music stores. Or maybe a testing ground for future form of (hollywood) movie delivery.

Technorati Tags: itunes, mac, video

Bryce 5.5 shipped

Bryce 5.5 shipped and (still, whew!) available for Mac OS X platform...

“Bryce 5.5 adds the DAZ|Studio character plug-in, which lets you load, edit and import any OBJ model into a Bryce scene. Enhanced OpenGL support lets you see texture maps applied to your objects in real-time; you can pan, zoom and rotate the workspace while seeing a full color preview of the objects while you work. Also new to this release is a rendering speed increase of more than 30 percent on average, according to the developer. Bryce Lightning 2.0, a new version of the network render application, improves rendering speed over networks.”

Technorati Tags: 3d, mac

Site update: Resources

The Resources section is now updated. Previously this page were hard coded, with this update I'm now using del.icio.us (Design Links) and allconsuming's (Recommended Reading) technology to dynamically populate the content to this page. This makes it easier since I only need to add and update my tags on the mentioned sites to generate the info via the RSS feed. Only downside is that the page loads a little slower now since it's pulling the RSS feed, a small price to pay for such a low maintenance and self-updating feature.

Technorati Tags: pixelnoise, web

Vintage Apple TV commercials

An archive of Apple's old TV commercial from the 80' and 90's (pre “switch” campaign) are compiled at Uriah.com. Check out the SNL parodies as well for a quick chuckle.

Technorati Tags: apple, marketing, video

Pixelnoise is now Technorati enabled

I just wanted to announce a couple of new additions to the site to enhance your visit and increase visibility out in the blogosphere courtesy of the weblog aggregator, Technorati. The first one is the tags that you see after each post. These tags works in the same way as flickr and del.icio.us tags work, however, instead of photos and links, the tags take you to a list of bloggers who has posting related to the topics specified. The second is the Technorati searchlet found on the right side of the page to search this site for anything specific that might interest you. The search engine is still in beta, hopefully the next iteration will have the search results integrated to the site. If you happen to know any work-around for this please swing me an email. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: pixelnoise, technorati

H.264 = WOW!

Describing this new video codec technology will not do justice. It needs to be seen and experienced. Make sure you already upgraded to Quicktime 7. Sorry, macs only for now.

Technorati Tags: mac, H.264, quicktime

Adobe Creative Suite 2 packaging design

Metadesign reveals their creative process and inspiration on the new packaging design for the Adobe Creative Suite 2. It's interesting that the art was made using xrays by radiography artist Nick Veasey.

"There's a great David Bowie quote that's something like, 'There's no point in being more than 15 minutes ahead of your time.' You can create wild, esoteric stuff, but it will be meaningless because the market won't have caught up to it. You can be so far out that people won't get it, or so far in that it will be boring. The trick is to recreate yourself in commercially masterful ways."

Read more at CreativePro's site...

Technorati Tags: design

Reverting Mail.app's tool bar icon

There's a lot of things to love in the new Mac OS X Tiger (more on these later) but there is one thing that I hate and it sticks like a sore thumb... the Mail.app's toolbar icons. I'm really not digging the lick-able pill look. It violates their own human interface guidelines by creating similar capsule icon shape rather than the icon's distinguishable outline shape. It's a good thing that there is way to revert back to the previous icon style by using the free app Cage Fighter. With the new clean unified titlebar/toolbar window style and last version's icon style combo, it now looks much better.



Update: Even better, Mail Fixer has a theme to make it look more like Safari and Finder buttons, also a free utility. Good stuff...

Technorati Tags: interface, mac