PlaybackTime

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Great list of (free!) digital photography guides from Adobe

    John Nack, Adobe’s Photoshop product manager, recently compiled a list of 10 guides, one article, and one Photoshop action commissioned by Adobe. The Role of Working Spaces in Adobe Applications A Raw Workflow in the Real World: The March of the Yellow Penguins Preparing Images for Delivery Digital Image Integrity Calibrating the Digital Darkroom Environment Black and White…

  • Ladies love a man that's a little dangerous

    Dave Winer (who appears to have given up implying that he invented RSS, as long as nobody else can have invented it either) recently made a surprising mention of the movie Idiocracy. Do I dare admit that I’ve seen the great movie Idiocracy? Nahhh. I haven’t seen it. But if I had, I would say the funniest part…

  • Make your Windows apps DieHarder

    The popular interpretation of Moore’s Law is that computing power doubles every 18 months-ish. Happily, RAM and hard drive speeds and capacities follow a similar exponential curve. Yay tech-for-tech’s-sake! Sometimes — okay, rarely — advancements in computing power are dedicated to making the computing experience suck less (see the giant leap to the GUI, and a few…

  • Windows Vista "RC1" release (still) doesn't install on my (ordinary) desktop PC

    I was fine when, after several hours of churning away, Windows Vista Beta 2 decided that it couldn’t install itself. I was a bit surprised, since there’s nothing unusual about my system and I’ve never had a problem installing various flavors of XP, but it was nice that the installer didn’t trash my computer. However,…

  • Interview: Paul Colton, founder of Aptana

    Here’s a PlaybackTime interview (:30-ish) with Paul Colton, the founder of Aptana. [audio:http://playbacktime.com/audio/Paul%20Colton%20interview.mp3] Listen to learn about: * Paul’s pionneering pre-Apatana history * His work with Xamalon, and how Ajax trumps Flash as a runtime philosophy * What Aptana shares and doesn’t share with Eclipse * An emerging JavaScript standard called ScriptDoc, and how it…

  • Aptana: The first Web 2.0 development environment

    Even though I hadn’t really used it in a while, I’ve faithfully upgraded Dreamweaver with each new release. A few weeks ago I dusted it off, thinking that it’d be the perfect tool to start a new project I’m toying with. Ooof. Dreamweaver has made progress over the years, but not enough. It’s slow, has…

  • Cory Doctorow: "OMG DRM is r33ly bad!"

    Ahhh. Another week, another anti-DRM…well, **screed**…by author, blogger, and Disney fetishist enthusiast [Cory Doctorow][Cory]. In _[Apple’s Copy Protection Isn’t Just Bad for Consumers, it’s Bad for Business][Cory article]_ — more honestly titled _How iTunes Screws the Music Industry and the Public_ on his blog — Cory points his blamethrower at Apple and boldly claims that…

  • Overview of popular open-source Ajax toolkits

    InfoWorld’s Peter Wayner wrote an good overview of the most popular open-source toolkits, including a helpful screencast about each. Specifically, he covers: * [Dojo][Dojo] _([screencast][Dojo screencast])_ * [Google Web Toolkit (GWT)][GWT] _([screencast][GWT screencast])_ * [Microsoft Atlas][Atlas] _([screencast][YUI screencast])_ * [Rico][Rico] _([screencast][Rico screencast])_ * [Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)][YUI] _([screencast][YUI screencast])_ * [Zimbra Kabuki Ajax Toolkit][Kabuki]…

  • Thoughts on "Thoughts on MCE beta feedback"

    Matt Goyer, a Program Manger for Microsoft’s Windows Media Center (motto: “Before we were a Vista feature, we were an _entire operating system!”)_ recently posted that he’s frustrated by people who say that Vista’s Media Center capabilities offer no compelling improvements over Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (a.k.a. MCE 2005). In response, Matt posted…

  • Gave my PC a heart/spine transplant

    Ah, the joy of PCs. Mine had been acting up for awhile, randomly freezing at progressively shorter intervals — days at first, hours by the end. For the last few months I’d incrementally ruled out everything but the motherboard and/or CPU. Eventually I arrived at the “acceptance” stage of PC death, and took the requisite…

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