Jay Robinson

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Big Yellow Fish by Andy Davis

I appreciated these long dark winter nights, but I’m ready for warm sunny days again.

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Chris Robb’s surf art notebook. (Pretty large animated gif. Click through to make it happen.)

Back to the Woods

Nearly four years ago when I began this tumblelog I posted this quote by Columbia Professor of Music Aaron Brown, “Country music is born when the country becomes a nostalgic idea,” and it stuck with me. Partly because I have a deep appreciation for the simple songwriting of country music. Partly because when I post things it’s for my own reflection.

I’ve been recalling the quote more as of late as I notice the woods and forestry-related knick-knackery increasingly represented in today’s popular music and culture. It strikes me that the forest is now a nostalgic idea.

Just as country music fans, salt of the earth types, held on to their music and cherished their way of life while big cities teemed with big ideas, so now do young urbanites ensconced in concrete gravitate to the idea of the forest, while lusting after cabin gallery blogs, and desperately feeling the need to own a hatchet.

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Last Clock for iPad shows you a slice of time with live video scanned to the clock face.

The visual appearance of the Last Clock is highly influenced by what the camera is looking at. The composition, the colour range as well as the focus between the circles is very different depending on the target.

Via CreativeApplications.net.

Shipping Pallet Bookshelf and Bike Rack by Chris Meierling.

Monthly Playlists for 2012

Last year I made monthly playlists of songs in heavy rotation. Really enjoyable to revisit at year’s end. Instant time warp.

— Frank Chimero (@fchimero) January 5, 2012

Really excited to do this in 2012.

(Also, embedded tweets look pretty legit on Tumblr.)

Resizing windows in Mac OS X Lion

Today I discovered that you can resize windows in Mac OS X Lion with the aid of the Option and Shift key, a technique usually reserved for image editing software.

• Hold down the Option key while resizing the edge of a window to move the opposite edge the same distance.
• Hold down the Shift key while resizing a window to maintain the current aspect ratio.

This functionality was added in Lion, though I’m not sure if it’s been there from the start. I am using Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2.

Best of Ben Schwartz Video Playlist →

Ben Schwartz:

In celebration of the premiere of House of Lies this Sunday at 10pm on Showtime, CollegeHumor has released a “Best of Ben Schwartz” Playlist. CH took their favorite twenty one sketches I’ve done for the site over the past five years and served them up on an all you can eat buffet. Get ready for…

Ben Schwartz is hilarious. My favorites are Stay Awake Contest, and Drinking Soda Contest with Amir Blumenfeld.

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My sister, Deverie, and I in 1983.

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hammerandcode:

Moon.

"Commonplacing facilitates reflexive thought."

—

Regarding a “commonplace book”, mentioned in chapter 4 of Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.

In the early 19th century, “gentlemen of letters” often kept a commonplace book, which meant they recorded the interesting ideas and passages of text they encountered in their studies, in order that they could recollect it faster in the future.

This is very much how I use my Tumblr.

Patrick Moberg:

I’ve been experimenting with polyphasic sleep schedules the past week, which is, more or less, taking a bunch of short naps throughout the day rather than all at once.  I think there is a Seinfeld episode where Kramer attempts it, but I couldn’t track it down.

It’s been a cool/bizarre/fun experiment, allowing for a lot of extra hours in the day.  I’ve been listening to the Harry Potter books on tape, and working on 3 big projects.  They’re all hovering around 80% complete, and I can’t wait to finish them up and share.

Going to give this a shot this year. (At some point.)

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The True Size of The Moon, by Tag Savage.

(Source: sexpigeon)

The school of Jay-Z studies →

Jay-Z doesn’t need to be Homer. Or Shakespeare. Or Mark Twain, Beethoven or Wagner. He’s Jay-Z: arguably, the most important figure to come out of the biggest cultural movement of the past 30 years. The merits of the case – for serious intellectual course work focused on the man and his lyrics – stand on their own, without feeble comparisons to more “respectable” members of the academic canon.

QR UX: Some clever ideas for integrating QR readers into Apple iOS.