Disclaimer:

For you folks out there that are into tube amps and still spinning vinyl with $10,000 turntables, don’t read this. You’ll just get pissed.

iTunes Match is due for launch any day now, and one of the features of Match – the option to “scale” songs in your library up 256 kbps (if matched) – got me thinking about the whole music resolution issue in general.

Over the past twenty years or so we’ve seen kind of a “dumbing down” of music quality for consumers in general, brought about in no small part by the onset of portable music devices: first the ground-breaking Sony Walkman, then of course the iPod.

Back when I was younger, when we still relied on vinyl, the resolution was there – on the disc – it was a matter of getting it off at a certain resolution. There … Read More »

It’s very interesting to see the resurgence of consumer-grade AI-enabled voice recognition in Siri, the new digital assistant component of the iPhone 4S. In reading the largely positive reviews of the cloud-assisted on-device service I’ve been surprised that there has been no mention of Wildfire – a service I was one of clearly very few people in the U.S. to have used back in the ’90′s. The parallels are many – the primary difference being that Apple seems to have brought the concept to the masses, where before it was an expensive, proprietary solution geared almost exclusively to professionals.

There’s not much information floating around any more about Wildfire. At the time I subscribed to the service – around the early – mid nineties – it was run in the U.S. by Virtuosity. The cost was prohibitive to most – I … Read More »

A Story

While we all knew it was inevitable, the resignation of Steve Jobs was nonetheless a shock to many of us for whom Apple has been a touchstone for much of our life – both personally and professionally. I kind of grew up with Apple.

John Gruber has posted a number of stories from others that depict aspects of Jobs that most of us have never seen – not the gruff, competitive, design-obsessed, CEO, but the personal, often sensitive, funny, real guy that only a small inner circle know.

I’m not in that inner circle, but I have my Steve Jobs story, and I’ve never thought to write it down until I realized it belonged in the domain of these other stories. It’s a story of someone I’ll personally very much miss as the day to day head of Apple.

I … Read More »

Not much down time here lately, but with what little I have I’ve been working out all of the details of round-tripping HD video between a host of tools: Final Cut, After Effects, SoundTrack, Compressor, etc.  Also working with ProRes for transcoding for the first time which is pretty amazing.

This short is one of those tests.  Shot with a Canon 7D using an EFS 17-55 zoom, Manfrotto tripod with fluid head mount. (I’ll put that to use later …;-)

(Update: Wow, lot’s of iPad users out there already … thanks for pointing this out. If you’re here on an iPad, Vimeo has not released the embed code for iPad video playback. Until their new HTML5 version is out – soon they say – click on the Fountain link below. The HTML5 version plays fine from their website … Read More »

If I’m a “bits” guy – ones and zeros – my Dad is an “atoms” guy.  We both spend pretty much every waking hour making stuff, the only difference is I’m digital and he’s analog.

This is the invite to a recent show he curated at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina.  I can’t keep track of where he is anymore – he teaches all over the country; handmade papermaking and book making.  Which is an interesting occupation this day and age.

Artist, Educator, Mentor and (especially) Rascal all define my father.  He’s hard to keep up with, a brilliant thinker, a brilliant maker, and seems to be very popular with other paper and book types.  He’s also, obviously, a huge inspiration to me.  We’re even collaborating on a pitch at the moment.

If you’re in the area, try to drop … Read More »

Maybe it’s just me, but in watching Apple’s predictably beautiful new video guided tours of the iPad I got completely distracted by knees.

Do I have a knee fetish?

But they’re everywhere.  As I watched one video after another (there are about a dozen) it was like “ok, here comes the knee shot …”.  By the fourth video I couldn’t even follow the story it got so self-conscious.

When the “laptop” came out it was pretty cool.  You could kick back on the couch and set the thing in your lap and we all thought how cool we were.  But you could also just as easily set it on a flat surface, tilt the screen just right, and work just as easily: keyboard flat, screen up.

But with the iPad – and the whole tablet thing in general – we’re entering new territory from … Read More »

Our perception of refinement – a product or product category’s ability to incrementally improve – seems to be on some type of accelerated (if not exponential) curve like we’re used to with Moore’s Law in the tech world.

But some products seem to defy wholesale refinement on a fast track – and these objects tend to be what we often call “classics”.

Take the bike seat (or “saddle” as they were first called).  Weird I know, but stay with me.

I ordered a new bike recently to use as a commuter.  It’s somewhat special, and I’ll be writing about it after it comes in (it looks like it may be the first in Marin County, which is interesting given how bike-crazy this place is), but that’s not the focus here.  While waiting, I’ve been researching various components that might improve on the stock. … Read More »

Just came across – and bought – this book by Andrew Zuckerman: Wisdom: With Three New Interviews.

The trailer for the book is worth watching.

Tinariwen at SFJazz Festival – c u there …