modifoo · surffoo

Due to a recent mishap all my posts between July and October were wiped off the planet in one swift move. Here comes a recap of the SurfFoos from that period (a selection of the other posts will be published over the coming weeks, some of them slightly altered and updated):

Up next for Apple: the return of the Newton - Might Apple re-enter the PDA market?

10 Brilliant Complete Movies Online - If you have not yet seen 1931’s M by Fritz Lang, here you may do so for free. Though I would recommend a DVD or best a cinema. 9 other great films downloadable as well.

Bullied student tickled pink by schoolmates’ T-shirt campaign - Great campaign by 2 students to defend a fellow student against bullies.

Pixelmator - Today sees the release of Pixelmator 1.0, a graphics editing programme that has many features from Photoshop, with a easier learning curve and a much smaller price tag. Mac OSX only.

Stephen Fry » Device and Desires - Turns out that Stephen Fry is (also) a gadget lover. (If you want to see a good film, take one that has Mr. Fry in it.)

Rainproof your camcorder - How to turn a bottle for detergent into a camera rain coat.

Don’t tell Mom you’re an atheist - How not to bring up your child as a Christian.

Report from IBC - Somehow Shane Ross manages not only to work and post great comments on the Apple Discussions board, it turns out he also has a blog. Here a great personal recap of this year’s IBC (and his experience with the inflight entertainment system).

21 Mac Shareware Applications for Filmmakers - Great list (and a link for Windows soft, too)

QT Movie NoteTaker .5 - Simple (in a positive way) programme to make annotations to video. Free. For Mac and Windows.

A Powerful Opportunity for Filmmakers Everywhere to be Heard - ?Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.?

Bartas Technologies - Transcriva - Great, simple to use Mac tool for transcriptions of video files.

10 Essential Steps to Making the Perfect Pitch - Coined for freelancers.

OffhollywoodCarShoot - Some framegrabs from a Red camera shoot

Editing, Manipulation, and the Kuleshov Effect - In the early 1900?s, a Russian filmmaker by the name of Lev Kuleshov came to the conclusion that two disparate shots edited one after the other are processed ?together? in the minds of the audience.

How to Make a Rain Machine - How to make a “Hollywood rain machine” for less then $50 bucks

The Bourne Ultimatum | Studio Daily - Interview with The Bourne Ultimatum’s Editor Christopher Rouse

Popular Science: Hollywood Physics - If standard physics should apply to standard Hollywood movies, it would, erm, not work. Fun read. (With formulae and all)

Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water - The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Study: G rated films report higher profit and rate of return - To score really big at the box office, Hollywood should be chasing down the (much) younger generation, a new study says.

Second Ally To The Right, And Straight On ‘Til Morning - In his recent speech on Iraq, Bush said “We thank the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq and the many others who are helping that young democracy.” Aside from the US and the United Kingdom, who else is really involved? A list

50 Free Tools to make your iPod Better - and almost 30 problem-specific tips to fix it.

Open water diver’s course and underwater imaginig - Learn to dive and take video underwater at the same time.

See the Differences Between Internet Explorer and Firefox - Showing how the msn homepage looks like in IE and Firefox. Guess which one looks nicer?

Detonationsfilms - Stock footage of explosions, fires, rockets and more, for next-to-nothing.

Solidyne - Digital Power - A new audio mixing console with impressive specs. D816, 10 channels.

Designfruit - Lovely little site with lots of freebies for Photoshop, Illustrator and the likes.

Nike - Leave Nothing - Phantastic TV commercial from Nike

MXL Mic Mate XLR to USB - Plug any pro-grade XLR mic into your computer via USB. Cool idea, and very small form factor. 80 bucks.

Thinking about this war - The war on terror would best be won by marketing, says Seth Godin.

RED arrives - The first hands-on experiences in the wild

Photoshop Secret Shortcuts - 30 undocumented Photoshop shortcuts

Colorgrades for Apple Color - A (slowly) growing list of downloadable settings for Apple’s Color

Yellow Pages in your Pocket - Seth Godin predicts what the rumoured GooglePhone will be like: (Relatively) free, (Relatively) open, Ad supported. And ugly.

What it takes to produce an HD newscast - Please follow us along as our new friend Jack Winter, the Director of Broadcast Operations and Engineering from WFTS ABC 28, shows us what it takes to produce HDTV.

Jack Bauer: Eco-Warrior. Friend of Garofalo. Federal Agent. - If Jack Bauer of 24 suddenly turned eco friendly, here are some scenarios as they might unfold. Hilarious!

Student’s program sends PR chaos in Wiki-scandal - Microsoft tried to cover up the XBOX 360 failure rate; Apple edits Microsoft entries, adding more negative comments about its rival; Microsoft edits Apple entries, adding more negative comments about its rival; in the 9/11 Wikipedia article, the NRA added that “Iraq was involved in 9/11”

Filmmaker’s Tool Kit: Creating a Movie with Web 2.0 - Great article on how the Internet can help you make your film into reality. Lots of useful (and often free) links.

They’re, like, all calm, man - If you ever need to photograph insects, here is a, uhm, unusual trick.

Pearl Izumi Running Shoes - This is one of the best headlines I’ve read in a long while. It’s not trying to be funny or weird or outrageous, it’s just true, in a most surprising and powerful way.

7 Wonders Panoramas - The seven world wonders as 360 degree panoramas.

Martin’s smoothie - My very own smoothie!

Mill Ends Park - The smallest park in the world has a swimming pool for butterflies (with diving board), a miniature Ferris wheel, and statues, and it hosts snail races, weddings, and regular rose plantings.

Eric Staller: Light Drawings - I’ve had posts about Painting with Light before, but Eric Staller takes this to a whole new level. Amazing. Jaw dropping.

The World Without Us - A nice little page explaining on how the world would evolve without humans present. Quick, interesting.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters - A documentary about a School Teacher who challenges a 20-year old world record in Donkey Kong. (And can you spot in the trailer that it was made in Final Cut Pro?)

Apple confirms “Special Event” on September 5th - And everyone expects the new iPods to be revealed. (Hey, maybe we’ll even get a timeline for when the iPhone will come to Scandinavia?)

Direct Marketing has Changed - Not the 40/40/20 Rule Anymore - Douglas Karr comes with some interesting thoughts on how direct marketing has changed with the arrival of e-mail. In times of spamspamspam, 50% of your success depends on having permission from the receiver.

Cicatriz Clothing - Summer 2007 Collection - Very creative example of using video to sell t-shirts.

Mint - Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.

Orbicule | Undercover - Very cool software any MacBook owner should have. If your mac gets stolen, it takes pictures of the thief and sends them to you. Many more useful features.

The Canons of Navarone - More of an evolution than a revolution, the Canon 1Ds mark III is ensuring that Canon is staying top of the dSLR hill for another while to come - with an amazing 21 megapixels from a full-frame CMOS chip.

Mobile Users Turned Off by Advanced Features? - A report finds that mobile telephone users just aren’t showing interest in advanced features such as accessing the Internet or downloading and watching TV on their handset.

The Godfather Pop Art - A picture of the Godfather, made from the script of the film. Amazing technique.

The man who collects Apples - Jeremy Mehrle collects Apple computers — at least 100 at last count

Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme - Very nice, old-school theme for wordpress and Macintosh likers.

DV magazine, which now give away the electronic version of their great publication. Here.

WattWenn - A new Pre-production and Production scheduling tools for Film and TV. The Scheduler makes it easier and faster to schedule and reschedule well. OSX only.

Audio Solutions Column - Great list of articles by Jay Rose, mostly about audio and editing, but should be of interest to anyone working in post.

Audio Solutions: Decapitation - Some nice advice on audio editing non professional speakers.

Descente Infinie - A sound that seems to be getting lower and lower. Indefinetly. Weird.

Some interesting documentaries - Collection of 7 interesting snippets from YouTube, some news stuff, some montages, and some, yes, documentaries.

BBC kicks off sale process for BBC Resources - Whilst the services provided by BBC Resources are vital to the BBC, they do not need to be owned by the BBC anymore. Is it just a question of time before the accountants will be taking over the world?

Top 13 Worst Slogan Translations Ever - Frank Perdue’s chicken slogan, “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken,” was translated into Spanish as “it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.” Many more.

by MartinGems from the Web:

Creating color vignettes using Apple’s Color - Nice tutorial on how to use Apple’s new Color application to single out one segment and desaturate the rest of the image.

Encoding Best Practices for Prerecorded Flash Video - Recommended settings for exporting video to Flash

Metal Storm Gun Fires A Million Bullets Per Minute - Amazing how creative the human mind can become when it comes to destruction. Here’s a Kiwi company that uses the idea behind ink jet printers to deliver up to 1 million bullets a minute, “lethal” or “just for fun”.

Hex Editor | eX-cinder - HexEditor is a Mac OS X utility that allows viewing/manipulating raw data inside files. It can show data using various encodings as integers, floating points, binary, character strings and allows searching for hex/ascii strings. Best of all, it is FREE !

Motion Type - Great collection of animated typographical videos.

11 Super Awesome Photoshop Movie Effects - Tutorial on how to create your own movie poster in Photoshop

How to make a glowing tomato. - Using household chemicals. Just don`t eat it afterwards.

Tools & Utilities for filmmakers - Great resource with script formatting, paperwork and excel sheets for the budding film maker.

CoreMelt Visual Effects - Free plugin for Motion / Final Cut Pro to display a VU meter. Very cool indeed.

Improving the way I deal with a huge email flow - Advice on how to handle the e-mail intake

Nikon’s new full-color RGB sensor - Camera maker Nikon has patented a new design to achieve full colour resolution.

Fair use - Nice run-down on fair use in films.

Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire - in this interview from 1994, Dick Cheney reveals the reasons why invading Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein wouldn’t be a great idea. He also stipulates that “not very many” American soldiers’ lives were worth losing to take out Saddam…

CleVR - Simple and free way of making - and sharing - photographic panoramas

The cameras of the future - Some thoughts on how photography might evolve

iMovie for G4 - how to “fix” iMovie 08 to work on a G4 Mac. (And a fun video about gamers)

The Bad Review Revue: Skanks A Million - Bratz are not just money making dolls, now it is also a movie. One that plainly stinks. Here’s a collection of reviews along the lines of “I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.” — Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE

Web Designer Wall - Design Trends and Tutorials - Phantastic new blog on design and web authoring.

Is this the new iMac keyboard? Why it could be the real deal - The new iMac might be only a week away, and rumors surround a new keyboard system.

When You Absolutely, Positively Should NOT Use Email: A Civilized List - For those of us email addicts who can’t quit cold turkey but are increasing stressed by the size of our inbox each morning, Shipley and Schwalbe offer advice for managing our input and output in this engaging manifesto.

The Personal MBA - Huge list of business-related books, without the need to take an MBA.

The Bright Side of Dark - What if we could save energy using Google? That’s the idea behind Blackle.

Handyjib - Small jibs for small wallets/production budgets. From England.

Automated Music Instruments - Collection of photographs depicting automated (or even self-playing) instruments and robots.

Camera Illusion - Nice illusion - in motion.

Thanks for Fighting in Iraq, Here Is Your Bill - Soldiers are being billed after returning home. One soldier had to pay $700 for damaging his body armour when a bomb blew up next to him. The Bush administration reaching new lows?

Parenting Today - It Has To Be Seen To Be Believed - “Parents are building people from the inside out not from the outside in.”

Stealing Data From an iPhone Is Easy, but Don’t You Dare Use a Ringtone You Didn’t Pay For - The phone has heavy armor to prevent users from doing things that undercut profitable activities, such as loading a free ringtone. There was less protections for things such as reading the iPhone owner’s e-mail and downloading his address book.

How to build your own Arcade System - Step-by-step instructions on how to build you very own Arcade system for about 1500 bucks.

Something is Fishy in Hollywood - Mock-ups of famous film posters, all themed around fish. Great!

Pong on your MacBook using the Sudden Motion Sensor - Play the classic computer game on your MacBook. No joystick needed.

WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts - …make life (i.e. blogging) easier.

Facebook Isn’t Private, and 7 Other Things You Should Know - The Terms of Service of popular Facebook look like a small minefield when examined closely.

HDR Tutorial - Featuring HDR 2.0 - Phantastic hands-on tutorial on how to do HDR photographs, alongside some amazing HDR photography.

History of Olympic posters - Collection of the posters for the Olympic games, 1896 to 2012. Funny that the two most recent ones are the worst. Check out 1968 in Mexico.

iPhone recolored - Add $149 to the iPhone’s price tag, and you can choose your own colour scheme.

Emerging design trends - a few of the design elements that are currently in vogue

Music and Life - A recording by philosopher Alan Watts, set to animation by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Laws of Cat Physics - “A cat will stretch to a distance proportional to the length of the nap just taken.” And more.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back For Your Water - Did you know that water in a microwave can literally explode?

Xyzzy - The Bush administration’s endeavors told as a text based game.

Your Amazon.com Order is Being Prepared for Shipping - Amazon send this to all who pre-ordered the new Harry Potter book? No, not really — but a fun spoof

This Bold House - 5 Architects Who Defy Convention

China’s Massive Dam Changing Weather - Two years before its completion, the world’s largest dam is already changing the local weather. Both modeling and actual meteorological data suggest that the reservoir is cooling its valley, which is causing changes in rainfall

Virtual Egyptian Museum - The Full Collection. Be aware, you might spend hours here

A Domain Name Worth Millions - The Answers Corporation, which runs Answers.com, just announced it has paid $100 million in cash to buy Dictionary.com

Airplane Graveyard - Great HDR photography

Microsoft’s 10 Unluckiest Moments - How unlucky has been Microsoft over the years?

Speed of? - Humorous comparison of the speeds of all from blogs to the government.

Kotoba - Learning Japanese for OSX. (Greetings, Hallvord

)

World’s First Wheelchair Backflip - Aaron Fotherinham may be in a wheelchair, but he doesn’t let that stop him from doing some pretty sweet tricks. Here’s a clip of him doing some wheelchair skating routine, including the world’s first wheelchair backflip.

More thoughts on “Thoughts on Music” - “If DRM is the worst thing you have to deal with in your day-to-day life then you should take a minute to thank God for giving you such a wonderful life.”

Billboard interactif à N.Y - Looks like Adobe has installed an interactive billboard in NY. Amazing (if my rudimentary french is correct…). Music by Kraftwerk, too.

SP-Studio - Create your own South Park character online.

We’re all irrational - Two tips on how to sell more on eBay.

“Thriller” - 1,500+ inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines re-enacting Michael Jackson’s famous music video.

Most Superpowers are available now. - Advances in bionics, transportation, and other technologies have put comic book superheroes a little closer to reality. This collection of videos looks at a few ways we can achieve “super powers”.

Disk drive life depends on… luck - Google tested some 10000 harddrives. If you need another reason why you should really, really run regular backups, read this. Shatters some myths, too.

Final Cut Pro Guide - Description on how to capture HD uncompressed to an oldish G5.

Software to Watch: Pixelmator - Pixelmator (unreleased) might be a Photoshop on a shoe-string. Worth watching out for.

Strandbeest - Amazing moving structures made from wood.

8 Powerful Ways To Add Value To Your Blog - Making a good point about posting frequency. Something I must confess to have violated…

Make Your Blog More Powerful by Optimizing the Signal-to-Noise Ratio - Yet more tips on improving you blog.

Apple Color Testing Part 3 - 720p/60 DVCPro HD - Rendering both in DVCPro HD and ProRes 422(HQ) yielded the same bad, unusable results in image quality. Ouch!

Color Release Notes - Good to read before updating Apple’s Color to 1.01

Pitch a Show - Scott Adams describes how a pitch for a TV reality show works. Funny.

Sources: Apple set to grow iPhone family pre-holidays - Conceived as a scaled back, lower cost alternative to today’s iPhone, the second iteration of the handset is presumed to marry iPod functionality with rudimentary cellular capabilities.

Michael Meyn: iPhone - If you understand German, then you should read this funny not-to-the-point yet-to-the-point critique of the iphone

Easy Mac Micro Maniac - What happens when you put something into the Microwave oven that really should not be there?. Be sure to see the christmas lights!

Polaroid fun

Gaffer

Over 30 things we can learn from Hollywood movies

Fun with Runners

60 second warp to the 1970s

If you ever wondered why some movies are made...

On-set humo(u)r