February 2012
3 posts
This was recorded as a demo of the Apogee Jam....
Listen
January 2012
2 posts
Just added Cigar Box Bongos loop to SoundCloud.
My new sounds: Starlings shaking acorns into creek
December 2011
10 posts
MB: Pink mace, Word Atlas for iPad and SPAMbots. →
Mace! And it’s Pink! Awwwwww! What? The Dolce and Gabbana you got as a holiday gift didn’t come with one inside? Sabre Maximum Strength Pepper Spray not only looks fashionable as you nail…
Bring back the brass. →
To me, Christmas ain’t Christmas without a jingling bell, a few horns playing Christmas songs and the clank of coins in a kettle. And sadly, that sound has been gone from my local kettles the…
Gear: Manfrotto MKC3-H01Compact Tripod →
How much tripod do you really need? First time buyers can get caught paying for a professional tripod that’s more than what they require and or wasting money on a cheap, wobbly one. Manfrotto…
Recipe: Pump & Beer Cheese →
Need a recipe to show somebody up at this year’s office holiday party? This one never fails to make you the talk of the festivities. The hardest part is finding the pumpernickel. Grocery…
How to install the Nikon One firmware update. →
Nikon released three firmware upgrades for the Nikon One J1 and V1 zooms: the Nikkor 10-30mm kit zoom that comes with the cameras, the Nikkor 10-100 Power Zoom Lens and the Nikkor…
Nagging Questions: Who was the Marlboro Woman? →
That tough Marlboro Man wasn’t always the mascot for Philip Morris’ cigarette in the pack or box. It was back in 1924 that Marlboro cigarettes first appeared in the US. Since Victorian times,…
MB: Reindogs, the Marlboro Woman, almost chili. →
Reindogs on Parade. This tradition on Cincinnati’s Mt. Adams is pushing it’s third decade. With registrants numbering six hundred, there were about 1,000, including spectator dogs. A few…
Review: iKaossilator for iPad. →
I don’t have the numbers, but the Kaossilator must be Korg’s best selling instrument in their history. The funky, yellow, trackpad-based synth seems an unlikely candidate for that honor,…
MB: Pancho, Lefty, Sima LEDs, iKaossilator →
My Night Blur Experiments on Zaplife. These were shot with Nikon One J1 and the Nikkor 10mm f2.8 Pancake Lens. All shots were handheld with an exposure time of a second. Previews On the smorgasblog this week:
Recipe: Scratch Brownies →
Where do you buy scratch and does it come in a jumbo size? The concept of cooking from scratch tends to strike fear in the hearts of some, but you’d be surprised that many recipes are as…
November 2011
8 posts
Gear: LowePro Case for Nikon One →
The $20 bill is to show scale. It’s not a bribe. When a whole new camera design pops onto the market, finding a case for the body and lenses usually means settling for something bigger…
Review: Posterize for iPad. →
Many photo apps for iPad have a Posterize effect, but I haven’t found a single one that gives you enough control to get a decent result until now. Posterize for iPad is a simple app that…
Recipe: Ice Cream French Toast. →
The idea for this comes from the Gray Goose Inn B&B in Chesterton, Indiana. They make it with croissants and add a little Grand Marinier to the mix. My take is a three-ingredient recipe….
Nagging Questions: Did Robert Johnson sell his... →
It was a cool night on October 26 of 1931 at the junction of US 61 and US 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. A 20-year-old African American man they called Charles Spencer back in Arkansas…
MB: Robert Johnson, the Devil, Posterized photos. →
News. In my Real Job as a pseudo-dogooder they let me write stuff too and one of our articles was published by Mashable. I got a few comments on the “LinkedIn or Out” logo and was asked if…
Recipe: Hot Guac Soup →
*This soup is creamy and rich. And creamy. And rich. The flavor is like a heavily-doctored guacamole, with the cumin and chipotle thrown in add to the heartiness. But being a hot soup, the…
MB: J1 night shoots, Guac soup, Pages tabs. →
Oxymoron police report: King size minis. Must have been written by the same copywriter who came up with Jumbo Shrimp. News A few weeks ago I got an OT comment on a post from Fleur…
Review: Photo Meta inspects your EXIF. →
Every time you take a picture, your camera or iPhone records more than just the image. It records up to 50 settings of EXIF data that’s embedded into each file. This data tells everything…
September 2011
6 posts
iWorkbook: Adding shadows to your web images with... →
When your web page is white and the edges of your photos are too, You get visual confusion that can distract your reader from the content of your post. This looks especially confusing when…
Review: Precise Eraser With Alpha for iPad. →
The PNG image format is not something you use for taking images. But for professional art people, it’s that magic format that makes layouts so simple. Though PNGs are typically six times the…
Gear: SealLine takes your iPhone & iPad... →
Our iPad and iPhone take on more duties that we used to carry a clipboard for. The iPad especially is now commonly seen running specialized business apps in the field, at the worksite and in…
iWorkbook: Remove backgrounds with ideas. →
Pages or Keynote on iPad allow you to effectively crop images with the mask tool, but offer no ability to remove the image from its background (like you can with the Mask With Shape tool…
Review: PhotoShop Express for iPad. →
Gawd! Does this app get a lot of grief. I guess reviewers in the App Store were expecting the full version of PhotoShop for free. PhotoShop Express for iPad is nowhere near that. Forget the…
The Joy of Text. →
It seems like text is here to stay. Typewriters didn’t have emphasis. And then what a joy it was when computers allowed us to make text bold and italic, or both. Then styles were added that gave us…
August 2011
8 posts
iWorkbook: Make iMovie titles in Keynote. →
IPad iMovie’s titles are limited. You’re stuck with the transitions, fonts and sizes in the few themes packages included with iMovie. But the trick below (with the help of Keynote and …
Quick Tip: How to quickly mark photos on iPad. →
Ever have to email, print or delete a bunch of photos in your camera roll? It’s a pain to have to tap each one to mark it. There’s a fast way to mark a whole screen of images. Tap the Share…
Noise Reduction with Twisted Wave. →
For those working with audio on your iPad, TwistedWave continues to expand its toolset and is rapidly becoming the standard for editing audio. As it records and can copy and paste audio…
MB: iPad noise reduction, group mailing, special... →
“Quick: Think of three glowing adjectives about our business to be bound in neon forever.” Edible? Reviews Monday Briefing for the smorgasblog this week:
Noise reduction with…
Review: Motion, the buttonless iPad browser. →
If you search the App Store you’ll currently get almost 600 browsers to compete with iPad Safari. What I find most fascinating is that a key selling point of both the iPhone and iPad was…
iPad iWorkbook: Store iWork documents in the... →
Now that iWork (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) is available free for your iPhone if you already own it for iPad, WebDAV becomes a valuable tool for having your documents sit in the Cloud….
What the world needs now is a $40 ukulele. →
Nope, it’s not an internet scam like iPads for four cents. You can get a very playable ukulele for $40. I found this out when I worked up an idea for a music video that involved some…
MB: $40 ukulele, buttonless browser for iPad. →
This was in front of me yesterday. Now that’s scary. What do you bet there was an instructor in the passenger seat yelling “What, are you trying to kill me!?” News Lion is out for Mac. A…
June 2011
6 posts
Review: Hand notes over to Movable Write. →
The iPad’s built-in keyboard is great for typing, but when in a meeting or while interviewing someone, you need to keep eye contact. So handwriting on the touch screen of the iPad is an obvious…
MB: Ukulele string, Pages links, Movable Write... →
Living proof that conservatives shouldn’t bumperstick and drive. Leave that to the experienced liberals. News. My recent post on Summer of Fleas about ukuleles and the new Eddie Vedder…
“This is a test.
Of Writing Kit.
This tests to see how writing kit works.
...”
– (via Writing Kit)
“This is a test.
Of Writing Kit.
This tests to see how writing kit works.
...”
– (via Writing Kit)
Review: DraftPad puts your text on crack. →
DraftPad for iPad is an interesting beast. Think one screen that can do a billion things with the text you put on it. Kind of a canvas for data. So you write something and you can make it a…
iPad iWorkbook: Grouping items. →
When working with graphics in Pages and Keynote, you can group items so they can be moved and resized together. This makes doing layouts on your iPad an easy task. However, there are a lot…
May 2011
12 posts
The body in her arms. →
Nadja Halilbegovich’s diary of the Bosnian War. The guitar was a gift from her father, Sandi. But really, Nadja had earned it. She had been playing her brother Sani’s old guitar, full of U2…
iPad iWorkbook: Jot sketches in Pages & Keynote. →
One of the limitations of [Pages](http://bit.ly/dM4efh) and [Keynote](http://bit.ly/eLJDIk) on iPad is that you can’t draw sketches within the apps. You can easy move in photos of artwork from…
iPad iWorkbook: Moving shapes between iWork apps. →
The similarities between [Pages](http://bit.ly/dM4efh) and [Keynote](http://bit.ly/eLJDIk) on iPad are immediately obvious. They’re so similar in fact that you can move shapes from one app to…
MB 5.23.11: Highlight with Masque, iWorkbook. →
A T-shirt I found in my T Shirt Store for those parties where your name matters little, but your state of mind matters a lot. News. I recorded my interview with author Nadja Halilbegovich…
iPad iWorkbook: Shadowing letters in Pages and... →
It’s not immediately obvious that you can add shadows to your lettering in [Pages](http://bit.ly/dM4efh) and [Keynote for iPad](http://bit.ly/eLJDIk). While it doesn’t work with inline text, you…
Switching to iPad 2. →
Those of us who are using iPads for work and pleasure can find them in our hands 16 hours a day. So it’s no stretch that we’d already be switching to iPad2 for the boost in speed, video cams and…
MB: 2 todos, upgrading to iPad2, shadow text in... →
A local Mexican restaurant made an addition to the their handicap sign. Or maybe that’s parking only for kangaroos in sombreros. News I’ll be performing some new songs at the Ukelele…