tylerball

Ever since the explosion of blogging, there has been the blogroll. I am annoyed by blogrolls. There’s nothing less enticing than a long list of blog titles running half the page with no explanation. If I were reading a blog about shoes, then perhaps I may expect to find other blogs about shoes. However, if a writer has more than one interest they run into a problem.

My only solution to this is to write a post listing my usual Google Reader haunts and why I like them, sorted into rough categories.

Internet and Technology

Daring Fireball
I use a lot of Apple products. John Gruber is the best way to keep up with the company and hilarious attempts by journalists to qualify their success and predict their downfall.

Hicksdesign – Journal
The personal blog of John Hicks, a web design kung-fu master. Also subscribe to his and John Oxton’s Rissington Podcast, despensing design, cheese and crackers advice in a distinctly hilarious, British, lo-fi format.

The Official Google Blog
Along with the Gmail Blog, these keep me on top of all the wonderful things Google does, from new products to zany antics.

The Setup
I’m such a nerd that I want to hear what other nerds use to go about their nerdery.

Waxy
To say the least; Andy Baio is an internet enthusiast. You’re going to get linked to all his posts by everybody else, so you might as well subscribe.

Kottke.org
Jason Kottke is connoisseur of the internet. All you need for downtime during your lunch break.

Textism
Dean Allen created the first version of Textpattern

Creative Things

Ryan Kent
A multitalented dude that I have the honour of calling a friend, Ryan makes robots, draws cartoons and makes some very compelling digital photo works.

Ironic Sans
David Friedman is a photographer, but he has all kinds of ideas about everything.

43 Folders
If you call yourself productive, Merlin Mann will call you a liar. Indispensable advice on making the most of yourself in regards to creative work. Total man-crush.

Adam Varga
A founder of the wonderful but defunct Dailysonic, a ‘podcast’ that tried to do everything when nobody knew what a podcast was. I hope they try again someday, but for now I’ll enjoy Adam’s occasional posts and his work on Musebin.

Bearskinrug
Since seeing his sketchbook in high school, I’ve been in love with Kevin Cornell’s illustrations and sense of humour.

Images

Abstract City
Christopher Niemann rips apart everything you knew about newspaper coloumns in a format that could only exist on the internet. Brings new meaning to the word illustrator.

Lens Blog
In the few short weeks since it has launched, Lens has become my favourite blog about photography. It shows that the best way to make the photograph more meaningful in the digital age is to surround it with context. Compare it to a lazier effort.

The Big Picture
A middle ground between Lens and the WSJ Picture Blog. The difference is its exhaustive coverage of a single topic, something not attainable from any other source.

Strobist
David Hobby went from a photojournalist at the Baltimore Sun to the guru of the grassroots budget off-camera lighting movement with a few useful tutorials. Entire companies specializing in speciality flash equipment are in business because of him. A must if you want to learn how to light.

The Online Photographer
Michael Johnston writes some very in-depth things about photographic topics and established an engaged readership. Some of its a little finicky for me but I like that he’s not afraid to speak his mind.

What’s The Jackanory?
With a site title that I don’t really understand, Andrew Hetherington is a bit of a character. He provides insight into his commercial photographer life and a great video series on other photographer’s studios.

While Seated
A nice little photographic look into the very busy photojournalist Michael David Murphy.

Music

Ryan Gruss
Mr. Gruss is a really talented drummer who decided to channel his output into a drumming blog. Mostly he distributes loops in a wide variety of genres. What makes it interesting is his sense of humour, experience and knowledge that will rub off on anybody interested in music. I’m not even a drummer.

Sleevage
Album covers are pretty under-appreciated. Sleevage explores the meanings, creation stories and personal anecdotes related to the art.

No Age – No More R&R
The weblog of No Age, one of my favourite bands. It consists of photo tour diaries, youtube videos of awesome things and general rad-ness.

Culture (or perhaps ‘Miscellaneous’)

The Blog of Young America
Jesse Thorn, public radio extraordinaire and host of The Sound of Young America shows off his internet finds. He dresses way too impeccably to have bad taste.

Mon Blog Francais
Grant McLaughlin is a close friend but also a bilingual tour guide stationed overseas in France at the Juno Beach Centre. He is also a great writer, able to add some flair to the most mundane of subjects.

Penny Arcade
I play video games about once in a blue moon but Gabe and Tycho are such a good creative team that everything they do is funny and beautiful to anybody. Holy shit can that Gabe draw now, eh?

Street Boners and TV Carnage
Gavin McInnes left Vice Magazine almost two years ago after they partnered with MTV for VBS and started Street Boners, the more specific and less circusy update to his former Dos and Don’ts. This site thrives on offending people, and who knew that would be so fun? Most certainly NSFW.

Nerdboyfriend
A simple photographic guide to being someone’s ‘nerdboyfriend.’

I know what you’re thinking: That’s a shitload of sites to read all the time, and it is, but I have ways of filtering it. I use headlines to see whether I’ll be interested in the content, like a newspaper, and if not I just tap the down arrow key to move to the next item in Reader. With some of these feeds I read less than half of what is posted. The nature of “link-blogging” these days means that the source doesn’t get in the way of the commentary. Also, these sites vary greatly in the frequency of posting.

Good high-output bloggers like Kottke and Gruber are careful to provide a description of each link so a devoted reader doesn’t spend their time clicking things that say “This is awesome” and “wow, check this out.” However, I find myself skipping over certain types of posts from different feeds. Google Reader will really become powerful if they introduce content filters to weed out unwanted content.

Well, that’s pretty much what I do when I have a few minutes to check out some stuff on the internet.

I’m somewhat of a digital pack-rat. At least, since my experiences with hard drive failure in the past. In my early days of digital photography I would frequently skip over dark or blurry frames and not import them into my computer. They would then be lost after the next application of the format button. Over the years I have realised this is not such a good idea. In fact, Sports Illustrated shooters are told to never use their delete button and keep everything.¹ The tiny little LCDs on the back of cameras these days are liars, and may hide something great in a photo you may not notice until you get it into Photoshop.

Today, storage is cheap. Magnetic Hard drives are under a dollar per 10 gigabytes, which makes them practically disposable. Now I never delete anything, I just buy another drive. And with Spotlight I find buying more storage is much less time consuming and cost-effective than trying to think about what happened to that file you may have deleted long ago.

In light of this, instead of deleting these blurry frames, I’ve been throwing them in a folder called “errors” and put a selection of them on Flickr. Some of them are awful blobs of darkness, while others shot off the hip contain some interesting compositional ideas.

An old art teacher used to tell me that the bad pages in a sketchbook are as important and useful as the good ones. The camera is a sketchbook, and so it should be treated just like its paper equivalent.

You can see the entire collection of errors here.

¹ Discussed in the last bit of this video. ↩

Talking about the iPhone these days is like talking about politics. It seems everyone wants something that is very silly to either be attached to or hidden inside its plastic case. These theories fail to take into account the recent history of Apple’s industrial design.

Take for example, the device the iPhone’s principles of design are largely derived from: the iPod. Since its introduction, Apple’s only goal was to refine it’s design into the most simplest, quality music player it could be. After experimenting with controls over a few versions, they settled on the click wheel. Many years later, the click wheel is still there and it’s still the best control scheme for a music player with physical “buttons”.

This emphasis on refinement is what drives Apple. So, what part of the iPhone hardware needs refining? I think some things are obvious: like more memory, magentometer and faster processors, but that’s not what people talk about. They’re talking about features.

The Touchscreen?

Regardless of whether the iPhone was the first phone with a touchscreen, it was the device to make the touch interface a fad, part of the vernacular and a standard feature in smartphones. Within a year of its release every major cellphone manufacturer had a phone with a touch screen. Maybe this was inevitable, but to be honest, when my college peers talk about phones and touchscreens, they are talking about the iPhone.

For a first try, they did pretty well. It’s more accurate and faster to type on than I thought it would be. The screen is one of the most expensive components so I don’t see OLED happening in this version, but it may happen farther down the line.

The Size?

Nobody wants an iPhone nano. The iPhone is already pretty damn small, and if it was any smaller web-browsing and video watching would be severely effected. I find an iPhone in horizontal mode the perfect format for reading the average-sized paragraph at arms length. A smaller screen would necessitate the use of the ugly “mobile” versions of most websites. Like a Blackberry.

When people talk about the “iPhone Nano” they’re really talking about a cheaper iPhone. This is understandable. I could see Apple increasing the storage in the next version, but keeping an 8-gigabyte model to see at a lower price point.

The Camera?

Will everyone stop putting large expectations on cell phone cameras please? Despite years of pinhole-style camera phone optics, this design hasn’t shown much improvement. The only phones taking nice pictures are the ones outfitted with auto-focus, retractable lenses like those found on point and shoot cameras.

The only way to fit something like this into the iPhone’s form factor is to not fit it at all, and either make it thicker or add a hump, like on the Samsung Memoir. I’m not sure Apple would be willing to abandon their form-factor to do this, and also introduce moving, breakable parts into the iPhone.

Maybe Apple will pull off an engineering feat and put something spectacular into that quarter-inch hole, but realistically it will probably only be a megapixel bumb.

Video?

Despite the technical challenges of phone optics, video is an inevitability, but only if Apple puts a fast enough processor in the phone to make it work nicely. Also, they’re only going to look like every blurry, slow frame-rate iSight video with terrible sound.

Video editing isn’t going to happen on the phone. There will just be seamless integration with iMovie like there is with iPhoto. Although, I’m sure there will be an “app for that”.

What about my FM Radio/Backlit Apple Logo/Taser/Slap-Chop?

No. There’s no need for any more radios in this thing. Bluetooth, Wi-fi and the dock connector is already an encapsulating trio of standards for communicating with external devices.

Conclusion.

Since Steve Jobs came back to Apple, the company has been a taste-maker rather than a company that tries to address every single feature request. The iPhone is already a lowest common denominator in terms of simplicity and I don’t see it changing very much unless a new technology warrants it. Mainly, I think the design is anchored on the method of human input. It won’t get any bigger unless the obesity problem gets out of hand, and it won’t get any smaller unless it can communicate telepathically.

I didn’t talk much about software, but trust me, that will be addressed.

It has yet to be proven that you can ‘reboot a franchise’ and completely impress Tyler Ball. Star Trek was very visually satisfying, and I applaud the art directors for making it look slick and the editors for keeping the flow. So why is it that only those who twiddle knobs and draw things the only ones still showing up with talent in the realm of the Hollywood Blockbuster?

I know I shouldn’t expect much from an action film in the writing department, given their recent track record. What happened to the stoic, reserved quality of the science-fiction heyday¹ when you could demonstrate the values of friendship, bravery and leadership to the viewers without punching them in the face with it?

But no, our Spocks and Batmen must exist in a vacuum, where laughable lines are delivered without any of the smirk of a Bond or a Tarantino. Hell, even Bond has turned up turned up his sarcasm in recent years so his audiences can be in on the joke. Instead, in our theatre we had laughter at its once iconic dialogue. Is that the goal of the franchise reboot? To make a mockery of the source material? I’m no more a Trekkie any more than an Olympic swimmer, but I get the feeling they take their favourite fiction pretty seriously.

Sure, the original Trek was very cheesy, but I get the feeling the styrofoam aliens and camera-shake photon hits were what everyone loved about the show. In the context of a multi-million dollar, shiny, serious production, this dialog is silly. I found myself longing for some imperfection I could associate these defined characters with, for some lovable puppets instead of the hideous uncanny valley nurses and bar-goers in the film. Hell, they could’ve just kept it 60’s with the human equivalent.

Well, thank Kahn for Simon Pegg, whose gentle unfurling into Scotty on Hoth was welcome. He displayed the sort of experienced nonchalant-ness I expected from his character, contrasting nicely from the silly grimaces on everybody else’s face.

I realise I’m definitely ignoring TNG as a source of inluence, but when I was in my formative years², I had way too many Legos on the floor to be captivated by that shit. To me that show was ever-furrowed exchanges between Data and Worf, Riker entangled in Troi’s spandex and Picard ordering shit from the bar. I swear they weren’t even on the Bridge for a quarter of the show, just a lot of conversations over plexiglass tableware. Correct my if I’m wrong, because I got my Levar Burton from Reading Rainbow. Also, this movie didn’t concern these characters despite how much better/worse or influential TNG is to the creators of this film.

I blame the holes in this film on two things. Firstly, J.J. Abrams is an over-hyped conceptualizer. I seem to enjoy his concepts³ but his directing style seems to centre on handsome people gritting their teeth at each other. I’ve never been trapped on a fucked-up island, been a spy, ran from Cthulhu or whatever the hell Fringe is. However, I’m not convinced people in those situations use that much enunciation.

Secondly, and more importantly, is that movie studios don’t reboot franchises to drastically redefine genres. They do it to make money for godsakes. J.J. Abrams has proven to be pretty good at making money these past few years, and he was the right choice. You would have thought that he could have made something interesting out of all his conceptualizing.

2 prosthetic Spock ears out of 5, Bilbo Baggins.

–––

¹ Think Alien, Blade Runner, the first two Star Wars films. ↩

² Like, 6 when it ended. ↩

³ Lost is an example where the concept–at least for the first bit–outweighed the outcome. ↩

After much trial and tribulation, this is my new home on the world wide web. Fuelled by Steam Whistle and CSS, this site has finally come to life.

In designing this site, the most important thing was the integration of my photography into a content management system that would allow for syndication and flexibility. Despite a few bugs and hair pulling, I believe I’ve found a solution. We will see how long this lasts.

Please subscribe to the feed to keep up with my latest photos.