blog.stublag.com

Photo

Wed, 30 May 2012 12:24:07 -0500

Office: officially swapped.

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:56:55 -0600

Office: officially swapped.

Video

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 11:12:38 -0500

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Photo

Thu, 19 May 2011 20:59:50 -0500

Turning Left — The Brooks Review

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:24:27 -0500

Turning Left — The Brooks Review:

minimalmac:

I turn left where I would normally turn right. So what if it adds fifteen minutes to my drive, those are going to be fifteen interesting minutes. You are going to pass things you don’t normally see and in turn you are going to excite parts of your mind that we rarely use any more — the parts that help us to navigate.

Trust me, you will see things you never noticed before.

One thing I really enjoy doing while driving is looking as far into the distance as I can, and pick out landmarks you wouldn’t normally see from such a distance. It has the strange effect of Inception-ing mental models of areas you normally inhabit.

All of a sudden you realize just how far you are from somewhere you are used to, and how it relates to where you are at that moment. Doing this also works for seeing how steep/tall hills are that you wouldn’t normally think are that impressive.

somenicethings: Take Five

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:11:28 -0500

somenicethings:

Take Five

These things are awesome.

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:32:00 -0600

These things are awesome.

How to Explain Computers to Normal People

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 22:06:00 -0600

On the car ride across town I came up with a great analogy to explain the technological bottlenecks of upgrading computers. After chewing on it some more, I’ve decided to officially christen it The Hotel Analogy.

The Lobby

The first thing people ask about when upgrading their computer is “should I get more ram?”. In this analogy, RAM is the Lobby of our fictional hotel. It’s where data awkwardly hangs out on uncomfortable furniture when you’re working with it. Getting a bigger lobby only makes sense to a certain extent. One could argue you could never have enough RAM, but we’re not talking about your computer. For most people, an enormous lobby is overkill, expensive and sort of weird.

The Rooms

Hard drives are more like a large block of hotel Rooms than anything else. The speed of elevators can change depending on the format, but the concept remains the same. Everything comes down to getting data in and out of their Rooms. The main variable here is size, and that depends on individual needs. Whether data is coming or going from your hotel, it has to hang out in the Lobby and eventually deal with The Front Desk.

The Front Desk

The most important part of hotels is the Front Desk, or in this case, the Processor. Data entering and leaving your computer has to interact with the Front Desk to get its keys or give them back on the way out. Increasing the amount of people at the front desk can dramatically speed things up. But if your lobby is too small to fit everyone comfortably, continental breakfasts could get violent. Increasing the size of the lobby or the amount of rooms in the hotel has only so much effect on the bottom line.

Computers are a strange, confusing things to many people. Dealing with, and upgrading them can be a lot of work. Hopefully this analogy comes in handy next time someone you know asks about computers. It’ll help.

Audio

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:06:43 -0500

I needed a place to explain to people why great software makes...

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:20:33 -0500

I needed a place to explain to people why great software makes everything better, and my friends can only handle so much of my pestering. Some Nice Things is that place. There you’ll find an infrequently updated list of applications or services that I use and adore on a daily basis. Mostly popular, some weird, all great.

somenicethings:

Simple Note & Notational Velocity

Simple Note was at first an iPhone application, but as since expanded to an entire platform just for taking down text notes. As cliché as it sounds, its elegant simplicity is more than welcome in a world of bloated software. No save button, just notes.

Yeah, this is that song from that annoying Blackberry...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:03:28 -0500

Yeah, this is that song from that annoying Blackberry commercial. Deal with it.

“Killer!”

Grasshopper found in Kaitlins parents garden.

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:49:41 -0500

Grasshopper found in Kaitlins parents garden.

We have a robot here at the office that consists of the back...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:48:48 -0500

We have a robot here at the office that consists of the back half of a bike and motor. Ghost Rider can be controlled remotely, and is used for endurance tests of the Pedal Brain.

It needed a wordmark.

Chester This is the icon for an internal Pedal Brain testing...

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:06:15 -0500

Chester

This is the icon for an internal Pedal Brain testing app, that will be used on all of 3 iPads. The app tests 8 of our units at once, showing a dashboard of the current tests as they happen. The dashboard itself is still being worked out, but I’ll post more as it progresses.

Audio

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:38:27 -0500

Mega Macro After seeing a tutorial about pulling off mega macro...

Tue, 18 May 2010 13:22:39 -0500

Mega Macro

After seeing a tutorial about pulling off mega macro with a DSLR, I had to try it. All you do is turn your kit lens (or any lens for that matter) around and hold it against the body of your camera while taking a photo. Pretty awesome.

Helping Others

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:24:00 -0500

Whenever you stick a group of graduating graphic design seniors into a room, it does not take long for the conversation to steer toward the program’s shortcomings. “They didn’t teach me this!” “They wasted so much time on this!” Over the last few months of ceaseless discussion about these problems, I have actually come to terms with what the program has offered.

When talking to a few friends about how much I help people with web development, it always comes up that this must be a major specific thing. “That would never happen in __________, everyone is out for themselves” they say. Their logic is that I’m crazy for helping so many people that I am in direct competition with in the graphic design world.

To them, I say: Screw it.

Did the program do an awful job of teaching the technologies we will be expected to know? Definitely. Is it the Universities fault that some students feel unprepared? Not at all. To help, I have been trying to get my fellow students over the “internet is too hard” bump and surprisingly, had moderate success.

Since most people do not know where to start, I began by giving out a promotional code for Dreamhost accounts. This promocode gives students an enormous discount on a .com and their first year of hosting from one of the best solutions out there. Hopefully, this becomes the kick in the pants that gets them really motivated to go out and learn something new. At this point I offer a basic run down of what they have gotten themselves into as well as some helpful information for getting their portfolio off the ground. This entire process ranges from a basic explanation of how FTP works, to a full blown tutorial of how HTML & CSS work and interact with each other.

Essentially, all I want to do is help people get over the admittedly daunting first wall of information into web development. Being available to answer the simple questions like “How do I upload files”, to longer discussions about the minutia of CSS has become immensely gratifying.

Over the last year I have learned two things:

Starting communities is easier than I thought it would be.
I’m probably crazy.

Pedal Brain Door Sign

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:37:12 -0500

Over the last week I’ve been in charge of creating a door sign for the new Pedal Brain office. This ended up being much more of an ordeal than I originally intended it to be, but I’m proud of how it turned out.

To begin, I had to model the entire Pedal Brain logo in 3D. Well, actually, I had to learn how to model anything in 3D before slapping together the 3D version. I ended up using Modo to model it after SketchUp produced some less than ideal results. Although modeling the logo in Modo took considerably longer than SketchUp, it produced a much better logo and convinced me to try more things in 3D.

From there, my recently modeled logo headed to our 3D printer. This printer is primarily used for printing out prototypes of our iPhone mount, but I thought it would be great to use it for creating a door sign. The printing process took nearly three hours, but turned out much better than I could have anticipated.

Once printed, I had to stock up on some painting supplies to apply the official Pedal Brain Orange. After a few coats of white the logo was almost ready to go. Applying the orange around the outer edge put my lackluster painting skills to the test, but ended up being fairly easy.

Finally, we spent about 25 minutes trying to remove the door from the hinge with no success. From the stripped screws you could tell the previous renters also tried to get the door off, and quit at the same point. After some careful measuring, it was time for what I referred to as a round of high stakes kerning.

Several hours of work, one menacing bottle of super glue.

Brand Dilution

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:16:00 -0600

Hey man, look. I’m glad you’re trying out the whole blogging thing, really.

You began a huge campaign over the last week wherein you’re letting the world in on 40 snippets of mostly great design advice. I’m enjoying it, truly. But hey – quick note: Consolidate! You’ve got your personal brand all over the place and it’s become really, really confusing to handle. It’s the internet equivalent of repeatedly moving your primetime TV show to a different time slot on different networks.

Lets get down to it: for the love of god, stop using Cargo Collective as your blogging platform. It is not one. Pick a (real) blogging platform and stick with it. As of this writing you’ve got the “Lent Marathon” running on a Tumblr blog, iframe’d into an increasingly long Cargo Collective entry.

While this is a little bit deceptive (who uses iframes anymore, anyway), its mostly just confusing. I’ve got your feed coming in through my Tumblr dashboard, and that seems to work alright. I also subscribe to your old & busted RSS feed, which you seem to be migrating your posts back to. I mentioned this to you a while back, but your posts are still coming through in my RSS reader as enormous walls of text.

I realize that this may be a small use case (RSS readers and all), but I’m trying to look out for you, man. Down the road, when you want to show your kids your 32 totally hilarious blog posts about design ideas, wouldn’t it be great if they were in some sort of reasonable format?

With love, your friend, Paul.

Target Field + Fog (via stublag)

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:43:20 -0600

Target Field + Fog

(via stublag)