Phorbie.net

This is an actual sign in my doctors office. Someone, somewhere...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:58:43 -0800

This is an actual sign in my doctors office. Someone, somewhere in that office felt the need to put this up. For the good of the public. (Taken with instagram)

Studying before class. #boringphoto (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:16:43 -0800

Studying before class. #boringphoto (Taken with instagram)

Using the iPad as a Light Box

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:28:00 -0800

I can come up with some pretty neat tricks when I’m desperate.

The situation: my Art 120 class homework is due in the morning, I’m exhausted, and I don’t want to have to do too much work before passing out. The project: draw two eggs with a white sheet as a background, with the eggs taking up the majority of the space on a piece of 18” x 24” paper.

The technique:

Step 1: Arrange and photograph eggs.

(I arranged a scene with an IKEA desk lamp, a box, and a sheet. The crappy Targus tripod broke when I went to put it away.)

Step 2: Import photo into a 18” by 24” Photoshop file. Desaturate, add Gaussian blur (to make drawing with graphite easier), and adjust to have both pure black and pure white in the composition.

(before photoshop)

(after photoshop)

Step 3: Export the (gigantic) image to iPad somehow. This is actually more difficult than you might think; both Dropbox and Droplr choked on such a large image, and emailing it didn’t work either. Surprisingly enough, Photo Stream finally did the trick.

Step 4: Prepare supplies. Pull out nice paper, grab pencils, get comfy.

Step 5: Zoom into image to get 1:1 ratio to the paper, center in a distinct portion of the image and align the paper approximately. OR, you can pick a corner, and align your paper’s corner with the screen’s corner and try to get the paper and picture to match up perfectly.

(After this point, I just drew normally, having gotten the shape of the eggs down on paper, as well as a couple marker lines)

Step 6: Lay paper over iPad, turn lights off, and begin to sketch. Note, I used 65lb paper, which is thick enough to not damage the iPads screen when using it as a drawing surface, though I wasn’t drawing super hard lines. Just be cautious.

(After laying the paper down on the iPad, the image comes through perfectly, just make sure to turn your brightness up)

Step 7: When you need to move the image, simply grab a side of the paper to keep it straight, and put a finger on the iPad, moving the paper and image in unison.

And that’s about it. A couple notes though, I only used this technique to grab the size and shape of the eggs (those curves are a bitch). After that, I just used my iPad to eye the image as my reference. Overall, my drawing came out much better than if I tried just drawing a scene set up in front of me. Here is the final drawing (nearly, my wonderful girlfriend finished up the edges for me before class):

A more personal Facebook

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 02:15:24 -0800

WARNING: long worded post about how Facebook should be. Although there are a lot of great ideas in here.

I’ve noticed that over the past few years Facebook has been getting far less personal. You now get this big activity stream, where you just see a name and a tiny picture of the person making a wall post and maybe a couple comments under it, over and over in a huge list. You don’t connect the name to a person maybe as much as you should. This seems much more like anonymous posting to something like Reddit or YouTube than the personal interaction that Facebook is (or at least was) for.

But all is not lost, for this is not just a post in which I merely complain. Nay, I have a novel solution.

While I’m not saying we remove it completely, we first need to hide the activity stream, at least as a link on the bottom of the page or a couple clicks in from the top links.

Instead, as the main view (more or less), we see in full screen, nice large portraits of all our friends. They would be grouped in, conveniently, Groups (so no huge changes there, just a bit of push for more people to use them). They would then be ordered in terms of mutual activity. Thus, the people you communicate and interact with most float up to the top.
Under each of these, you could show a couple bits of activity from the person. Maybe new uploaded pictures and a status update, etc.

Clicking any picture obviously leads to their Timeline and info.

Again, this does not limit or discourage group activity. I feel like this will, however, encourage more one-on-one focus, thus making Facebook more personal.

Comments would slow down from being streams of attempted cleverness or argument or empty praise, and start to become more like an actual conversation.

Maybe a way we can help to make it feel like a conversation is to somehow make the topic (the original status or picture or whatever) and comments stickied, like the chat is.

This change in dynamic would, for me, make it feel more like talking to my friends, than “surfing Facebook”. I don’t want to merely surf and skim over people I care about. But it doesn’t also shove in my face things that I don’t care about (regardless if it’s posted by people I care about or not).

The iPad makes a PERFECT light box. (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:39:07 -0800

The iPad makes a PERFECT light box. (Taken with instagram)

Taken at the Circus Center in San Francisco. They were nice...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:57:44 -0800

Taken at the Circus Center in San Francisco. They were nice enough to give a stranger a tour (and free roam) of the place (Taken with instagram)

My parents’ gift to us for Valentines. So awesome. (Taken...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:54:05 -0800

My parents’ gift to us for Valentines. So awesome. (Taken with instagram)

Happy Valentines. (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:30:43 -0800

Happy Valentines. (Taken with instagram)

-_-

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:26:31 -0800

Tumblr ate my long-winded post about basically nothing. No post for you, I guess.

Finally found the odd looking building that I’ve seen from...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:27:25 -0800

Finally found the odd looking building that I’ve seen from UCSF for years. (Taken with instagram)

nevver: Patriots vs. Giants

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:43:15 -0800

nevver:

Patriots vs. Giants

I keep telling @boxohsoup to stop looking cooler than me and she...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:06:52 -0800

I keep telling @boxohsoup to stop looking cooler than me and she keeps disobeying. (Taken with instagram)

I accidentally the homework. #procrastination (Taken with...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:34:14 -0800

I accidentally the homework. #procrastination (Taken with instagram)

Modern day equivalent of reading the morning paper (Taken with...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:01:34 -0800

Modern day equivalent of reading the morning paper (Taken with instagram)

And candied bacon. (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:03:23 -0800

And candied bacon. (Taken with instagram)

Bacon waffles. Seriously. (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:02:38 -0800

Bacon waffles. Seriously. (Taken with instagram)

Good night. (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:50:35 -0800

Good night. (Taken with instagram)

Friday the 13th has already screwed me over. (Taken with...

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:39:00 -0800

Friday the 13th has already screwed me over. (Taken with instagram)

K'NEX Laptop Stand

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:36:00 -0800

I have on my desk an M-Audio KeyStudio MIDI keyboard, along with my MacBook Pro and a keyboard and mouse. I wanted to build a laptop stand in the style of Griffin’s Elevator or the mStand, so that I can tuck my keyboard underneath my laptop, as well as raise the screen to a more comfortable viewing height. Looking around my garage for some materials to build something akin to this one, I found my box of K’NEX building toys and thought they might work.

In the box I found a flat piece I had built previously, and it would make for a very sturdy back panel for the stand. From there, I constructed the basic shape (a flat-edged C shape, looking at it from the side), and added structural support until it was able to support the relative heaviness of my laptop.

One cool benefit of using K’NEX is that you can add useful bits like cable management and such.

This is how the setup looks overall:

The stand sits on top of the keyboard for extra horizontal support:

The bottom struts sit below the keyboard:

The back is quite sturdy, having almost no give:

The back section is very dense:

I use rubber grippy-stuff (don’t know what the actually name of the stuff is) between the stand and the laptop for both scratch protection and to keep the laptop from sliding off the front:

With the lid closed, the angle is too extreme, but its perfect when open:

So there it is. Hopefully someone will get some inspiration from this and build something useful.

Looks comfy. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:22:40 -0800

Looks comfy. (Taken with instagram)