Catching Zebra

is a weblog by Andy Taylor

    Before and After Shots of Joggers

Alice Yoo:


  Last summer, Sacha Goldberger decided he would take on a very interesting project. He assembled a team who helped him create an outdoor studio at Bois de Boulogne, a park located near Paris that’s 2 1/2 times the size of New York’s Central Park. He stopped joggers, asking them for a favor - would they sprint for him and then pose right after for his camera? Many obliged. Out of breath, these joggers showed an overwhelming amount of fatigue on their faces.
  
  Goldberger then asked these same people to come into his professional studio exactly one week later. Using the same light, he asked them to pose the same way they had before.


These are great. Click through and check out the rest.

via John Siracusa

    Before and After Shots of Joggers

    Alice Yoo:

    Last summer, Sacha Goldberger decided he would take on a very interesting project. He assembled a team who helped him create an outdoor studio at Bois de Boulogne, a park located near Paris that’s 2 1/2 times the size of New York’s Central Park. He stopped joggers, asking them for a favor - would they sprint for him and then pose right after for his camera? Many obliged. Out of breath, these joggers showed an overwhelming amount of fatigue on their faces.

    Goldberger then asked these same people to come into his professional studio exactly one week later. Using the same light, he asked them to pose the same way they had before.

    These are great. Click through and check out the rest.

    via John Siracusa

    Safari Omnibar

    Safari Omnibar is a Safari SIMBL plugin that mimics Chrome’s combined URL and search bar.

    I’ve seen a few average attempts at this before, but this works. It works really well.

    I switched from Chrome to Safari when I upgraded to Lion, but I was missing this feature. It just makes sense to have them combined.

    There’s an installer package that installs the plugin and SIMBL. So it’s super simple.

    Adding to the internet

    Justin Kemp makes things that Google can’t find. Like:

    “Plastic six pack holder cat necklace”

    Apple Stoer in Kunming, China

    They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.

    You crazy, China.

    Lamb pasta with mushrooms, anchovies, capers & rosemary.

    Just made this up, cooked it and ate it. So good.

    Ingredients:

    • 350g of lamb chops
    • Spaghetti
    • 8 or so small mushrooms
    • Jar of anchovies (in oil)
    • Jar of capers (in vinegar)
    • Tube of rosemary paste

    Cooking:

    1. Fry mushrooms in butter then put them aside.
    2. Start cooking pasta and frying lamb chops.
    3. Mush up capers and cut up anchovies, then mix them together with the mushrooms. Do this to taste, but use lots.
    4. Once the lamb is cooked, cut it up. Cut the fat off.
    5. Drain the pasta and put it in the frypan.
    6. Mix everything together.
    7. Add olive oil.
    8. Add some oil from the jar of anchovies.
    9. Add some vinegar from the jar of capers.
    10. Add some rosemary paste (go easy, it’s strong.)
    11. Serve.
    [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

    Child Bearing Hips

    Killer new single from The Vasco Era.

    Sid O’Neil:

    ’Child Bearing Hips’ is about wanting to be involved with things that you know are wrong, even if you don’t like what they stand for. Especially when people assume that you are unintelligent because you are not part of it. It usually stems from being at a party in the wrong clothes and people making assumptions about your worth based on this. It frustrates me that I need these people to accept me even though I am directly opposed to this idea. The South Purambite Hall is a hall is in south western Victoria where my parents had their 21st birthday parties and got married, so I guess there is a bit of nostalgia involved, and some of that golden age syndrome wherein we long for the past even though it probably wasn’t much better. The child bearing hips part relates to the fact that I have child-bearing hips. [emphasis added]

    Artist Nick Gentry Paints Portraits on Canvases of Used Floppy Disks

These are excellent. Click through to check out the rest.

via David Kaneda

    Artist Nick Gentry Paints Portraits on Canvases of Used Floppy Disks

    These are excellent. Click through to check out the rest.

    via David Kaneda

    Simple 2D Dock Modification

    I’ve been using this dock modificaton for a couple of years1 now and I thought I’d share it. The default 2D dock2 has a horrible fat white stroke on it. I modified the images so they’re all just 55% transparent black. I also made the separator a simple line instead of the zebra crossing.

    It changes the bottom, left and right 2D docks.

    How to

    1. Download the modified .png’s.

    2. In Finder, navigate to: HD → System → Library → CoreServices → Dock.app3 → Contents → Resources

    3. Backup all the .png’s in the Resources folder that match the file names in the download.

    4. Delete them out of the Resources folder.

    5. Copy the .png’s from the download into the Resources folder.

    6. Open Terminal and type: killall Dock


    1. To the best of my knowledge, these same .png’s work in Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. But backup the originals. 

    2. If you currently have the 3D dock enabled you’ll need to switch to 2D. Open Terminal and type this: defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock 

    3. You’ll need to right click and Show Package Contents

    Lego iPad Stand

    Check out the stand I made for my iPad out of Lego.

    Why coming first does not always mean winning: Malcolm Gladwell on innovation.

    Malcolm Gladwell’s job applications were turned down by 14 advertising agencies in his native Canada. Lucky, because since then he’s busied himself with The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and – today – the best talk so far at Cannes Lions.

    Here’s Malcolm’s talk, recreated from notes in as close to his own words as possible.

    Steve unveils new mothership

    How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code

    This piece by James Somers about Project Euler really resonates. It essentially describes why I failed maths at school, why teaching yourself is sometimes better than learning from someone else and why I can code now. You just need the right problems to solve.

    The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale

    Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother:

    A girl is allowed to be crazy as long as she is equally hot. Thus, if she’s this crazy, she has to be this hot. You want the girl to be above this line. Also known as the ‘Vickie Mendoza Diagonal’. This girl I dated. She played jump rope with that line. She’d shave her head, then lose 10 pounds. She’d stab me with a fork, then get a boob job. [pause] I should give her a call.

    Jeff Atwood:

    Thing is, SSDs are so scorching hot that I’m willing to put up with their craziness. Consider that just in the last two years, their performance has doubled. Doubled! And the latest, fastest SSDs can even saturate existing SATA interfaces; they need brand new 6 Gbps interfaces to fully strut their stuff. No CPU or memory upgrade can come close to touching that kind of real world performance increase.

    Well. Seeing as I now have on and off site backup. It’s probably time to get an SSD.

    via Marc Edwards

    Unnecessary page cruft is being interpreted as damage and routed around with tools like the Readability bookmarklet, Safari’s Reader functionality, and Instapaper. These services exist partly to free up content from having a single endpoint but they also serve to break content free from the shackles of stifling overwrought containers.

    Jeffrey Zeldman

    As of May 10, any organisation that signs up for a new [Google Apps] account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users.

    Ads not good enough?