Monster Waves… Tricky Lighting… Astounding risk… Timeless Photographs

“The Shorebreak Art of Clark Little” is nothing short of epic. Getting inside, over and under 30-40 foot waves is no small feat, especially with bulky camera equipment, and a goal of finding that perfect angle and lighting condition that makes a perfect shot.

(all images copyright Clark Little, used with permission)

Clark Little is pretty well known today as the foremost shorebreak art photographer (his art has been seen on “Good Morning America”, and featured in a number of glossy magazines all over the world). But as much as we like the fantastic shots of various wave’ innards, we are even more impressed to see him pitched against dangerous, massive amounts of water – violent waves, where you only have a moment to make that shot and to get out of the harm’s way.

With exclusive permission of Clark Little Photography we publish today the rarely-seen photographs of Clark Little heading with his camera into…

Into the Vortex!

(Clark with his camera “inside” and “under” the waves)

Encounter with a Wave (almost alien-like in intensity, if you ask me):

The Result: Out of This World

A glorious, almost Mandelbrot-like complexity is simply striking in this “Glitter” photograph (our favorite):

Unusual, over-saturated colors show up inside crystal clear waves, reflecting kaleidoscopic world around them:

There is also a place for pure abstraction, even psychedelic touches:

This image is titled “The Twelve Disciples” – see if you can spot some faces inside that wave, too:

Here is perhaps his most famous image: the wave’s “mohawk”, an amazingly colorful splash, featured recently inside National Geographicmagazine:

Another singular splash:

Inside the belly of the beast: “The Twister” photograph shows what a violent wave is made of -

Even in the absence of killer monster waves, the shorebreak art can look slightly alien… Here is the little “Frosty” guy:

(all images copyright Clark Little)

The Book! The Ultimate Spectacular Photo Book!

Can’t get the computer screen wide enough and HD TV capable enough to give justice to Clark Little’s slices of glorious wave eye-candy? Well, now you can order his book, a coffee table-sized huge book, in fact arguably a “mother of all coffee table books”: 182 pages, over 100 photographs, 12×12 size, weighing close to 7 pounds.

Make sure you own a coffee table big enough to do this book justice (you might have to move your coffee cup closer to the edge, but then you might be already seating at the edge of your seat – with excitement over Clark Little’s fantastic images).

(Clark Little with Jack Johnson (musician) and Kelly Slater (9-time Surfing World Champion) at book signing)

Some of Clark’s newest images can be seen here… don’t forget to look for his book in your bookstore, or order it online.

(from dark roasted blend)

107 creative business cards

This are some of the most creative business cards you can find in Internet. Enjoy!

Google Docs’ New Upgrades Go Live for Everyone

Google has recently made a slew of changes to their Docs office and productivity suite live for all users and all new documents. From now on, when you create a new spreadsheet, drawing, presentation or text document in Docs, you’ll be using the snazzy new interface and collaboration features as the default.

Two months ago, Google announced some major new features for Google Docs. Users were able to preview these upgrades, which included completely group chat, real-time collaboration tools, and completely redesigned editors for documents, spreadsheets, and drawings.

From now on, anytime you create a new document, you’ll be doing so from the new version of Google Docs. Documents already created using the older editor will remain in that interface, and you’ll soon be able to move those older documents to the new version of Docs, too.

Here’s a little video that highlights some of Docs’ new features:

Enterprise-level users of Google Apps will also see the new default interface soon.

Here’s what the rebuilt Docs looks like, in case you haven’t been testing it out over the past couple months:

This upgraded version becoming Docs’ new default interface comes at just the right time; Microsoft recently announced a Google Docs competitor in Office Web Apps, a web-based suite that includes a text editor/word processor, spreadsheet editor and presentation software.

(from Mashable)

Google Earth: Hiker’s Edition

Google Earth just released a new edition of its desktop app which hikers, runners and cyclists are going to love. They call it Google Earth 5.2. I call it the Hike’s Edition.

One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your hike, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth.

If you collect other data about your trip, such as your heart rate or other body monitoring stats, those can be overlayed as a graph below at the bottom of the screen. I’d love to see an iPhone or Android fitness app that takes advantage of these new capabilities.

Another new feature in Google Earth is the ability to launch a regular Web browser from within the desktop app. Hopefully, that is the first step towards bringing Google Earth completely from the desktop to the Web. Otherwise, it might end up like Second Life.

Below is a video Google Earth product manager Peter Birch made of his bike ride to work.

(from techcrunch)

Twitter adding more advanced location like Foursquare and Gowalla

Twitter announced that will be adding location or places as they call it to twitter.

When you first here about it you think that this will kill foursquare and gowalla, but if you read twitter’s blog you will see that apart from letting people tag specific places they will also allow apps like gowalla’s and foursquare linked to twitter (the big bro) post also specific locations.

In addition to this twitter will allow external apps to access places information through an improved API.

Will this kill Gowalla and Foursquare?

Well they both have a niche: games, major, stuff you leave, photos, tips, so … I don’t think so. It will just make twitter better.Also don’t forget about Google Places:

Annotate web sites and pdf. Keep organized.

Nowadays we spend more time surfing the Internet than sleeping. Some of us work hooked in a browser, searching for information and managing it, and believe me, to keep track of relevant information is not an easy task.

Before we use to have cabinets where we stored our papers, now we have bookmarks, and other internet services. We have moved to have an Internet Explorer browser with favorites that are duplicated and useless as we used to just click favorite and forget about it, then 5 years later realize that we have hundreds of bookmarks in the office computer, different bookmarks at home, in our laptop… basically a useless mess.

The idea of this blog entry is to show a set of tools that can help you be organized in this chaotic Internet so you can be more productive.

If you are a bookmark type of guy, then what you need is synchronization. Be aware that syncronization of bookmarks is different depending on the browser you use.

Google Chrome

In the cases of Google Chrome browser if you have a google account, then all your google chrome browsers bookmarks can be synchronized.

So if you have Google Chome in the office and at home, if you add a new bookmark both will be synchronized. The way it is done is via Google Docs. There is a document there with all your bookmarks.

Firefox

If you are a firefox type of guy then you have several plugins that will allow you to sync your bookmarks between firefoxes and the web. The most notable I would say is xmarks (previously known as foxmarks).

Safari

If you use safari then the best way to sync not just between safaris but also with your iPhone, iPad and so, it is using mobileme.

Browser Independent

Delicious in Safari

Now, if you are not married to a specific browser, then I would recommend Delicious. Delicious is a socialbookmarking but you have plugins for all browsers, so if you see a site you like or want to remember you just click on a button and the beauty is that you can access via web o via another button in your browser (no matter which one), plus it is very powerfull because it let you apply tags to your bookmarks (much better than folders) and decide if you want them public or private.

Delicious in Chrome

Delicious in Firefox

Other tools

Bookmarking is OK but not enough. We have been bookmarking for 20 years now. True that now we have synchronization and tagging, which makes life easier, but there are other tools that allow you to:

1. Highlight parts of text of a website or PDF, add notes and share them. You can comment on a specific website or add some notes.
2. Get a copy of the website offline and make it searchable
3. If you don’t have the time to read something, with the click of a button you can add it to a cue of thing you have to read in your computer, iPhone or wherever when you have time.

This things have different tools.

1.- To annotate on websites and PDFs (which is very usefull) you can use:

a.nnotate, just for PDF. It is the pionner (I think). It is free if you don’t use it a look but it looks great. You upload a pdf and you can highlight stuff and add notes. Share, and so.

Lets annotate I discovered lately. It is also for PDF only and it is not as nice as a.nnote but it is free. In a.nnotate you can select text to be highlighted. In letsannotate you create a box with the mouse. It is good to provide comments on PDFs

Webnotes is by far my favorite, and the one I use. When you see a website click on the bookmark you have to add it to your webnotes and voila, you have the website with a top bar that allows you to highlight text, add post it’s, share it… and then you have an organizer where you can organise your websites and PDFs on folders and see the annotations.

2.- If you would like to have a copy offline of your website, Evernote does a great job. Its competitor Springpad might also do it (I have never tested as I am a devoted Evernote user).

With Evernote, if you see a site you want to remember then you click on the Evernote button in your browers (no matter which one you are using) and then you can access your evernote online or in your desktop sofware. If you want the site as you see it click on SHIFT+ the Evernote button (tip). It will be indexed and you can change the name and tag it as you wish.

3.- If you use twitter in your phone or you see a long article you can not read now, then there are a couple of tools that are great for this:

Instapaper (the one I use) has a bookmark you can have in your browser so you basically add the website you are reading or want to read to the cue of sites to read. The nice thing is that it has an iPhone (I don’t know about Android) app where the sites are transformed in text if you wish.

Readitlater is similiar.

Most of all services I mentioned here are free, and if you want more features, space, etc… then you have a pro payed plan.

Which ones I use?

1. Webnotes. Specially to highlight parts of a website I find interesting.
2. Evernote: not a lot for websites but I take photos of all the incoming mail, books, wine, receipts, etc… so they are indexed.
3. Instapaper: if there is something I want to blog about, or I’m in the iPhone and theres is a link in a tweet that I would like to read later. Very handy.

PadLock and iAlertU protect your iPad, iPod or iPhone and your Mac

PadLock is a software that protects your iPad, iPhone or iPod when they are plugged to your computer.

So imagine that you are at work and you leave your iPhone charging with the USB cable, then this little software will trigger an alarm if someone disconnects your phone.

You can download it here.

This software reminds me a similar one that I use to have on my mac, so when someone removes the power cable, touches the mouse or keyboard or closes the laptop… o even if it is moved!, the software takes a photo sends it via email and triggers an alarm. This one was called iAlertU and you can download it here.

Both are free.

Here PadLock:

Here iAlertU:

CloudApp: sharing files in the cloud elegantly

CloudApp allows you to share images, links, music, videos and files. Here is how it works: choose a file, drag it to the menubar and they take care of the rest. Thy provide you with a short link automatically copied to your clipboard that you can use to share your upload with co-workers and friends.

Additionally you can view, track and delete files right from your menubar.

So, any file, you just click on your define shortcut or drag it to the icon and it is uploaded to the cloud. Another shortcut and you have the link to the file that you can send to your friend/family.

Easy, elegant. Give it a try. It is free.

You can have an online dashboard where you see everything you have uploaded.

Forget emailing big files again. Just send the unique URL ;-)

Here a video I found in youtube showing how it works.

Microsoft Rolls Out Office Web Apps

This newspaper is everywhere!

I don’t know what’s happening but take a look at the photos. Looks like in all films, movies, series are using the same fake newspaper… incredible!!

And there are more!

Power Rangers Zeo

Scrubs 6×16

A texasi láncfrészes

Everybody hates Chris 2×05

Modern Family 1×16

Angel 3×04

Lucky Louie - 1×06

A Murder of Crows

Desperate Housewives - 2×13

No Country For Old Men

iPhone 4 is here

Yesterday at the WWDC Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 4. We were expecting it after all the leaks in internet, from the stolen/lost iPhone 4 prototype in a bar to the ones found in Vietnam. We knew he would probably was going to announce a new iPhone.

From all the videos, photos and rumors we did not know the specifics, and now we do.

The iPhone 4 running iOS 4 (the renamed that), has a retina display with 4 times more pixels per inch than the iPhone 3GS. Pretty astonishing for what I read. The resolution is 960×640. No other phone out there is close to this. It is twice the resolution of an old iPhone, with a contrast ratio of 800:1.  If the nexus one screen with OLED was great but unusable with direct sunlight, this is another story.

I hope once they can scale this technology they port it the macs and iPads. Basically you can not see the pixels… incredible.

The new iPhone has also 2 cameras, a front one for FaceTime (I will explain further down) and a proper one on the back with 5Mpx. Not too many pixels, but a very good sensor that works with low light. The fight for pixels is over, you need good lense and great sensors, and looks like it does have one.

This back camera will have a led (flash) and will allow to take HD videos (720p and 30fps) and they are porting the touch the screen to focus to the video as well, which is great. Also, they have added digital zoom and iMovie to edit your videos with the iPhone like a pro ;-)

There are rumors that iWorks will be also migrated to iOS4.

Continuing with FaceTime basically is the fact that you can use the front camera to have video calls, using wifi only for the time being, and between iphones… using open protocols. I hope in the near future you can use this with skype or qik or ichat or other clients that can be used in a computer. In my case I would love to be able to use an iPhone 4 front camera to chat with my brother (now in Nigeria) or my mum (in Spain) using their computers.

The new iPhone has the expected A4 chip that ships with the iPads and will give the iPhone a great battery life (7h 3G talk, 6h 3G browsing, 10h Wi-Fi, 10h video, 300h standby). I am a bit disappointed that they will have 8, 16 and 32 Gb. I was expecting a 64Gb, but knowing Apple we shouldn’t be surprised if they leave this for Christmas or next release.

It is 24% thinner than the iPhone 3gs, and they claim it is the thinner smart phone.

It has also a 3 axis gyroscope which I bet will be great for those who play with the iPhone.

For the connectivity, it has wifi n (great) and the back of the body is plastic, having steel all around which is used as the antenna, for which we have to suppose that the speeds and coverage will be better/faster.

Well this is basically it. It will launch in the US on the 24 June. Also France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. I think is 18 more countries sometime in July (including Switzerland) and the rest of the world in August.

It comes in black or white, and with a new contract in the US, costs $199 for a 16GB version and $299 for 32GB.

You can see the official announcement here.

iWebcamera: Turn your iPhone into a real webcam

Turn your iPhone into a real webcamera and use it to video chat with your family and friends.
With iWebcamera you can use your iPhone as webcamera in applications like Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Youtube and every other webcamera enabled application.

Features

• Turn your iPhone into a real wireless webcamera.
• Two quality options.
• Instant-Pause mode, stop streaming instantly and resume whenever you want without exiting your host application.
• Plug and Play ready, install the drivers and you are ready to go!
• Built-in manual.
• Beautiful Userinterface fully translated in English and German.
• Compatible with Windows 7, Vista and XP and Apple’s Leopard and Snow Leopard.

iWebcamera requires an iPhone with at least iPhone OS 3.1, a computer connected to the same network and the installation of the iWebcamera drivers.

Chinese Manicure Set

Painted Alive: Boldly Brilliant Body Paintings

Craig Tracy is dedicated to creating surreal moments in time. Without the use of digital manipulation or photographic tricks, he creates dazzling body painting compositions that have elevated this particular type of artistic expression into the realm of fine art. He recently opened a gallery in New Orleans: the first gallery in the world dedicated to fine art body painting images.

Although he’s been an artist his whole life, it took Craig Tracy a number of years to truly find his passion. His first professional art job was airbrushing t-shirts in a shopping mall. This experience gave him the foundation that would later lead him to discover that he could – and should – paint on unusual surfaces.

After college, Tracy went on to become an illustrator. Like many artists, he found the work dreary and depressing. With no artistic freedom and no way to imbue the projects with his own style, he felt trapped. After retiring from illustration and declaring his freedom from stuffy commercial work, he discovered that body painting was the only type of art that truly made sense for him. Starting out painting faces, he progressed to painting bodies and eventually began showing and selling prints of his body paintings in his own gallery.

Since then, Craig Tracy’s work has developed into a full-time passion. His body paintings show the strength and aching fragility of human bodies, juxtaposed perfectly with the fluidity and transience of the pigments in which they are covered. In some paintings, the model blends with the background, creating a stunning illusion. In others, the painted model is the focus of the piece. The above piece (bottom right), named “Butterfly” as a reference to the subtle butterfly disguised as a nose, features a woman as the leopard’s nose bridge. Her bottom forms the big cat’s top lips. The artist took 24 hours to paint the model and backdrop, pausing only for a one-hour nap.

Unlike Emma Hack, an artist who uses body paint to melt models into the background of her paintings, Tracy seems to celebrate the human form present in his work. Rather than hiding the model, he allows the curves and shadows of her body to interact with the entire piece, adding a depth, texture and powerful mystery to the paintings.

In doing this, he travels to a rather artistically dangerous zone. Just how much should the model’s form be allowed to influence the shape and direction of each piece? At what point does the body cross the line between canvas and subject? Each of Tracy’s paintings seem to play with these limits, exploring the human form as both the focus of the painting and an incidental part of it. Between those two extremes are many shades of grey, each of which is explored lovingly by the brush of the artist.

(all images used with permission of Craig Tracy)

The result of his playful and experimental approach to art and his obvious passion for what he does have made Craig Tracy one of the most respected contemporary body painting artists in the world. If you’d like to see more of the artist’s work, Craig Tracy Gallery can be found in New Orleans. It’s the only gallery in the world dedicated to fine art images of body paintings, and it also features videos of the body painting process for those interested in seeing the paintings unfold.

(from weburbanist)

Task Management in the Cloud

I just finished reading the 37signals book reWork. It is a very interesting book that I recommend.

Remember The Milk

If you are one of these guys living in the cloud, using google docs, or zoho, online calendars… then you probably also use online task management tools. Maybe you are happy to use your outlooks todo lists, or you do it in the cloud using Google tasks or remember the milk.

BaseCampHQ

If you work with clients then you are probably looking for a way to manage your tasks, sort of ticketing system but not necessarily for IT projects, a way to organise your work and the work of your team: a project management tool in the cloud. The king up to new has been  37 signal’s star product basecamphq (click here to see the tour).

Now you have other players in the market that do it equaly or better than bascamp and that you should consider:

Assembla

This is the one I use. It is free and I can create a space for each of my clients. They can also create a free account and add tickets or tasks to it, that I can customize in terms of organising the fields, milestones, etc.. (content, newsletter, technic) etc…

I like assemble because I can track the time I spend on a ticket, so at the end of the month I can bill by hours of work if I wish. You can have a wiki, upload files, etc…

Producteev

They just launched version 2. Very very nice. I just opened an account. It is the more social oriented ticketing system. You can add tickets or tasks via IM, email, they have a nice iPhone app… very nice. Simple though. You cannot indent task or add projects but you can have different workspaces add tags and link it to your calendar. It is nice to be able to feed it via IM, email or iPhone.

Screencast Producteev Two from Producteev.com on Vimeo.

Trac

Open source. The king tool for managing your files in a team. Try the demo.

Redmine

This one is an open source solution. Never tried. Demo here.

Teamwork Project Manger

This is a good alternative to bascamp. It is cheaper and here you can see how they say it is better.

Unfuddle

This is good tool to ticketing. This is the one I used when I was working at Shelter Centre and developing the new Drupal site. You can also track time (money) manage your code, etc… They support trac and check ins for code. Assembla does too.

Others:

• http://achievo.org/
• http://www.projectpier.org/
• http://www.springloops.com/
• http://fogcreek.com/FogBugz/
• http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/employee-community
• http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/?lang=en
• http://www.hyperoffice.com/task-manager/
• http://www.myintervals.com/
• http://www.deskaway.com/