bitdepth

All the World is Green

I’m always amazed when everything starts growing in the spring. A world that was grey suddenly starts turning green and everything seems to grow. The Annapolis Valley is a fertile land filled with apple orchards and farms. At the end of May is the Apple Blossom Festival when the apple blossoms appear on the trees. The back yard explodes with growth and the grass shoots up from the ground and the leaves on the trees emerge overnight and form lovely green walls. Spring is also when the school year comes to an end with the summer and the possibilities of travel and lighter clothes and warmth. The days are longer and the sunlight is always so wonderful as it wakes you up in the morning and lingers into the early evening. Spring is the time of renewal, of change and of growth. It’s beautiful.

May 31, 2008 spring

Circular Logic: 6 Loops in Wolfville

I’ve always liked using things in ways that they weren’t intended and in 2003 for the Digital Dialogues exhibition I made an animation with a digital still camera. I went to 6 places in Wolfville, took a picture, took a step to the right, and repeated the process almost 1000 times. The video is silent and just over 3 minutes long.

Formats available:Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by ChrisCampbell with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

May 29, 2008 animation, art, film, video

Back to the Coffee Future

Things seemed to be good for me, coffee-wise. I had just replaced the drip coffee maker with a glass carafe and heating element with one that I found on sale that had a thermal carafe. It’s a lot more efficient and it only uses electricity while it’s brewing the coffee and the coffee stays warm in the carafe for hours. It’s stainless steel and worked great.
But (you knew there had to be a “but”, didn’t you), yesterday morning the a tiny bit of plastic fell off and the “pause and serve” function didn’t work. That would be a bit of pain, but I could always wait a few minutes to get my coffee. I checked out the coffee maker and how the carafe and filter basket fit together and I realized that it wouldn’t work at all. It was permanently paused, so there would be no serving of coffee. So I had to take it back and I figured out why I was able to get such a good deal on it since I think that it probably happened before. So then I started to look for another coffee maker with a thermal carafe and couldn’t find anything.
Yesterday morning I made coffee with a drip coffee maker that I’ve had for a while that doesn’t boil the water, but it just holds a filter over a carafe and you boil the water and pour it in the basket. It worked fine and I started thinking that maybe another coffee maker that may stop working soon after I bought it may not be the best way to go. I stopped into the Just Us! Cafe to get a coffee (since I hadn’t had enough without a large carafe filled with coffee) and I saw a selection of French press coffee makers and I started to think that maybe simpler was better. So for half the cost of the coffee maker that I returned, I picked up a French press (I actually have one that is about 15 years old, I think, but the filter needs to be replaced) and now I’m boiling water to pour into the French press. Instead of making a big pot full of coffee, I’ll make a smaller pot (or two if I need more) and fill my travel mug and thermos for the day. That’s what I did over a decade ago, and that’s what I’ll be doing again. I guess I don’t need a coffee maker that I can control over the web with a cell phone or a higher-tech solution. Hot water, coffee grounds, glass and patience work just fine.

May 26, 2008 coffee, tools

Right Tool For Many Jobs

For most of my life I’ve had a multi-tool that I’ve kept with me to fix and open things. The only ones that I’ve had used are Leatherman tools and I’ve had three of them. The first one was a Pocket Survival Tool, which was the basic one with pliers, wire cutters, a knife, can/bottle opener, awl, a screwdriver and file. That one was stolen along with a camera in a bag that I had. So I replaced it with the Pocket Survival Tool II, which added some scissors in addition to everything else. They also had a ruler along the side if you folded the tools flat. I still have that one, but I thought it was time to get a new one and I chose the very cool Skeletool.
The first big difference in the Skeletool is the design. No longer is it straight, but it is very curvy and it has holes in it which greatly reduce the weight. It has a beautiful look to it and it is much more ergonomically designed as well. When it is open and being used in the plier mode it’s very comfortable. It also opens with a satisfying click, so it feels much more solid. There is a knife blade that opens without needing to unfold the tool, which is handy as well. There isn’t a can opener, but there is a very nifty bottle opener that next to a carabiner that allows you to hook the tool onto a strap or ring. The spring-loaded carabiner also holds onto the bottle cap after you open something!
Instead of a set of screwdrivers that fold out, now there is a screwdriver bit in one of the legs of the tool, and you can swap it out for different bits. There is a set of many bits that you can get, and one double-sided bit can be in use with another one in the leg, so you’ll have two options for adjusting screws.
A removable clip lets you keep the tool on your belt, but I’m not really that guy who always has a bunch of tools on his belt. It’s always in my bag when I’m going somewhere though. What impresses me about the tool is that it has less stuff than my previous tool and is lighter, but it feels a lot sturdier. It’s a great design along with an intelligent reduction in the complexity of a tool.

May 25, 2008 multitool, skeletool

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In the late 70s Harrison Ford was mainly Han Solo to me. He’d been in other films, but it just seemed as if that’s who’d he be. George Lucas was on a roll with a dark sequel to Star Wars in The Empire Strikes Back. Steven Spielberg seemed to be in a bit of slump after the big-budget 1941. But then the announcement came out about Raiders of the Lost Ark starring Ford with Lucas and Spielberg involved and I was 14 and very excited about it. I hadn’t seen the serials that were the inspiration, but I really wanted to see a fun summer movie. From the very start of Raiders of the Lost Ark I loved it.
Some people are a bit perplexed by the excitement and glee anticipating the new Indiana Jones film, and if you know the context, I think it’s a bit easier to understand. The first film came out before E.T., Ghostbusters, Time Bandits, and in the same summer as the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only with Roger Moore as Bond. Other summer movies from 1981 were Cannonball Run, Superman II, Stripes, Endless Love, Outland, and Escape from New York. Raiders of the Lost Ark managed to balance the excitement, the fun and the attitude that we were watching a film with a more old-fashioned style of filmmaking that relied on a lot of solid stunts and cinematography to tell a story. Continue…

May 24, 2008 film, history, review

It’s the Little Things That Count

Now that I’m safely back on my MacBook Pro with just about everything set up, I have to say that it made me again realize how much of a creature of habit I am and how small changes can make a big difference. Sometimes we come to rely upon something so much that it starts to fade into the background and we don’t realize what we’re missing until it isn’t there anymore.
While the applications that I missed the most came to mind right away, there were some things that jumped out in unexpected ways. I found myself constantly using the keyboard shortcut for the fantastic Mac utility called Quicksilver, which is an application launcher that has dramatically increased my productivity. At a basic level Quicksilver lets you use a keyboard shortcut and launch an application by starting to type the name of the application. The power of Quicksilver is that it creates a catalog of just about everything on your hard drive and you can then combine things together. You can select a file and then move it somewhere else while never touching the mouse.
Things become even more interesting when you do things like add the Social Bookmarks plugin which gives me access to all of my del.icio.us bookmarks. So I just need to start typing and Quicksilver searches through the bookmarks and then I just hit return and go to the web site. All of the files on my hard drive can be included in the index as well, so I can find a file I need and open it up (or copy it or open it with a different application). Even fancier things are possible such as starting and stopping iTunes while it’s playing or playing a specific track. I can even adjust the volume on my MacBook Pro or do things like restart the computer or look a list of recent documents that I had open in Pages, for instance.
I first found out about Quicksilver thanks to Merlin Mann and his 43 Folders site. It was a bit confusing for me at first, but the more I used it, the more I came to depend on it. Quicksilver also keeps track of what you’re doing, so it knows that when I start to type something and then choose what comes up that it’s more likely that I’ll choose that same thing again when I type the same letters. So I only have to type “f” to have Firefox come up, but “fl” will let me launch my web browser and go to Flickr. Quicksilver is incredibly configurable and simple, so you can make it look different and make it do just about anything you want in any way you want. It’s been in beta for a few years and now it’s probably the thing I use the most that I never think about.