via kickstarter.com
Friday, March 4, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
"Pacific.Atlantic" | futurerecordings
We're playing a show with these guys April 1st at the Outland. This is a great new album!
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Motionfield - Northern Lights - (test tube - [tube035])
Runtime: 34'37'' «Swedish born Petter Friberg is a veteran when it comes to electronic dance music. He started producing underground techno back in the late 80's and issued a couple of twelve inches. After that, with partner Martin Frick under the alias Superstereo, he released three EPs of groovy danceable tunes, but after a few years he got into Eno and The Orb and began working in the ambient electronica field. As Motionfield, he has two excellent works published - one on Stadtgruen and another on Autoplate, Thinner's sublabel for ambient grooves. So, it's no less than an honour for test tube to feature his latest and third work, "Northern Lights".
Shorter than an album but a bit longer than an EP - kind of a mini-LP - "Northern Lights" is inspired by the long and bright summers in Scandinavia, the 'midnight sun', which never goes down in that time of year. Naturally, 'Nordic Lights' is a blissful start for this release, shifting between two different layers of ambient, closely reminding of 90's ambient electronica and also of more recent Boards of Canada material. But nature also plays a role in this release: 'Enter the Polar Circle' recycles early Biosphere ice-scapes into a post-millennium Vangelis, Blade Runner era; 'Sounds from a lonely forest', grows from a cold cavern-shaped musical score into a sweet little drone, ripped out from - again - Boards of Canada's best interludes. There are truly promising works here. Other tracks like 'Turning the plate' or 'Depend on me' play more into dark ambient territory, scandinavian flavored. And others yet, are perfect old-school ambient tracks, carrying us fifteen years back. All in all, a perfect release for the nostalgic 90's adolescent inside us all.» - Pedro Leitão
I just wanted to post this; because I love it. Motionfield is so good. There have been several more Motionfield releases since this one, but I always gravitate back to Northern Lights.
http://www.monocromatica.com/netlabel/releases/tube035.htm
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Motionfield
Mud on the car? Blame Texas.
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- Drivers woke to muddy cars. They've been asking the KY3 Storm Team why.
The dirty rain fell across a large part of the Missouri Ozarks on Sunday night and early Monday. A dust storm moved over west Texas late Sunday afternoon and then travelled across the entire Southern Plains and into driveways in the Ozarks.
Rain drops fell through this dust cloud and collected the particles. When the raindrops hit vehicles, the water ran off but quite a lot of the dirt stuck to the cars as water evaporated and deposited its dirty load.
The storm system that brought large hail, big wind and tornado warnings to the region sucked this air into the larger storm circulation.
The image shows the dust cloud over Texas at 4:45 p.m. Sunday.
via ky3.com
Why we skip Photoshop - (37signals)
Why we skip Photoshop Jason F. Jun 03 2008
When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup.
Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop:
- You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Paper isn’t real either, but paper doesn’t have that expectation. A Photoshop mockup is on your screen. If it’s on your screen it should work. You can’t pull down menus in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t enter text into a field in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t click a link in a Photoshop mockup. HTML/CSS, on the other hand, is the real experience.
- Photoshop gives you too many tools to focus on the details. When you use Photoshop you can’t help but pay attention to the details. The alignment, the specific colors, the exact shapes, the little details that may matter eventually but they certainly don’t matter now. The start is about the substance, not about the details. Details are for later.
- The text in Photoshop is not the text on the web. Once you’re looking at a static Photoshop mockup you can’t quickly change the text without going back into Photoshop, changing the text, saving the file, exporting it as a gif/png/jpg, etc. You can’t post it online and tell someone to “reload in 5 seconds” like you can when you quickly edit HTML. You have to say “Give me a few minutes…”. Also, type in Photoshop never seems to be the right size as type in HTML. It just never seems to feel the same. It doesn’t wrap the same, it doesn’t space out the same.
- Photoshop puts the focus on production, not productivity. Photoshop is about building something to look at, but about building something you can use. When you’re just worried about how it’s going to look, you spend too much time on production value. HTML/CSS lets you be productive. You’re constantly moving forward towards something more and more real with every change.
- Photoshop is repeating yourself. Ok, so you’ve spent 3 days on a mockup in Photoshop. Now what? Now I have to make it all over again in HTML/CSS. Wasted time. Just build it in HTML/CSS and spend that extra time iterating, not rebuilding. If you’re not fast enough in HTML/CSS, then spend the time learning how to create in HTML/CSS faster. It’s time well spent.
- Photoshop isn’t collaboration friendly. I sorta touched on this before, but let me hit this point again: HTML/CSS lets you make a change, save, and reload. That’s our collaboration flow. “Here, let me change this. Reload.” These changes take seconds. “Here, let me float this left instead of right. Reload.” Seconds. No selecting a tool, changing a few items around manually, saving, exporting, uploading, giving people the new file name, etc. HTML/CSS is build for rapid iterative prototyping while Photoshop… isn’t.
- Photoshop is awkward. You can’t help but know your way around Photoshop after working in it for 10 years, but I still find it awkward to get simple things done. Working with a pen feels so much more natural to me than going back to the toolbar over and over. A pen can draw anything, but in Photoshop you need to use the text tool to type, the shape tool to draw a shape, the menu bar to adjust this or that, etc.
None of this is to say we think Photoshop is bad or a waste of money or time, but for us we’ve found that going straight into HTML/CSS affords us the best iterative and creative experience. HTML/CSS is real in a way Photoshop will never be.
via 37signals.com
An older article I came across, but food for thought. I'm really not much of a designer, although I can hack up some graphics when I need to. As such, If I don't have a predetermined design available, I usually head straight to HTML/CSS wireframing to put my ideas into a workable environment. Graphical touches come later for me, and with the advent of CSS3, more and more visual accents can be accomplished with stylesheets in newer browsers, anyway. I'm still glad I have friends who can design well.
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