Are you into food? Do you have an iPhone? Then you need to download my friend’s free app, Shared Table.
You can use it to keep track of your favorite restaurants but if you log into your Facebook account, you can also use it to share your favorites with your friends.
This is super handy if you, say, go out to eat lunch with the same group of friends a lot. You can also use it to find new places to try out.
And it’s free, so check it out!
I’ve just submitted an update to Mach Dice that includes Custom Backgrounds. I also took the opportunity to resize all the artwork for iPad and Retina displays. And while I was at it, I made a brand new, hi-res icon as well.
The new icon takes advantage of the increased resolution and I finally did something beyond the temp screenshot icon that I had before. It only took three years!
Oh, another thing I noted is that full-screen images can get pretty freaking huge. If the rumors are true and we do get a Retina Display iPad, then a single full screen image is 1536 x 2048, which is around 5 Megabytes. Mach Dice has five full-screen backgrounds so the images alone for an iPad Retina version would be bigger than the original app was. It would also easily put it over the 20 Meg limit for over-the-air downloads, so I’m not sure I’ll support the higher image resolution.
One of Dyson’s favorite bath-time activity is to take a cup of water and pour it over my hands. He’ll just keep on doing this, over and over, in the way that only a two year-old can.
Usually, we’ll sit in the bath until I start to get cold and then I’ll tell him that bath time is over. But the other day, I was just struck by how happy he was to do this simple thing. It wasn’t like the iPad or watching TV. There were no singing dinosaurs or flashing lights. He just liked watching the water. Sometimes he would make me cup my hands, sometimes he would stack them. But he was always watching the water.
It occurred to me that as an adult, I had lost the capacity to appreciate these quiet moments. And at some point, Dyson’s going to grow up and move on to more interesting things than hanging out with his dad. It wouldn’t always be like this. So I decided to try to just … be present.
So I sat with him; long past the point where the water had become tepid, my knees starting to ache, my skin already beyond raisin-stage and starting to approach shar pei. But I didn’t mind. We just sat there playing with the water until he said, “Ok. All done.”
Remember a few weeks ago when I was interviewed as part of an article for Weekly Diamond? It’s out now!
The issue provides an in-depth look at the various Disney companies. But I like the Google translate version of the issue’s headline: “Other side” of Disney Large autopsy world’s strongest brands!
There’s a picture of me on the right side and the caption says something like, “M. Kobayashi of the Effects Department. Employees can attend Pixar University courses in art and professional development, even outside their own discipline, to help broaden their knowledge and skill.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lbT0V5Cs8o
Just a little video about sharing using Dyson’s favorite snack, gummy bunnies.
Since I made the Custom Dice update for Mach Dice, one of the most requested features (by at least two people!) was to have custom backgrounds.
There’s still a bunch of stuff that I need to figure out like: Should I make it an in-app purchase or free? What’s the best way to store the image? How do I deal with different aspect ratios? (Also, it’s a rare night when Dyson lets me work on iPhone stuff so it’s slow going.) But I wanted you guys to know I’m working on it.
My day job is in the visual effects industry, working as a technical director.
It’s incredibly glamorous to work on award winning feature films using state of the art technology. But it’s difficult to explain to people exactly what I do. So I came up with this handy chart.
Do you play Heroquest? I never have, but someone asked me if I could make Heroquest dice for Mach Dice.
It seemed like an interesting challenge so I drew my own version of the icons (with actual pen and paper!), then Photoshopped it a bit to give it a subtle embossed look, and then created the dice in the app using the custom dice feature.
If you’ve got the Mach Dice app, you can download it for free by going to the Custom Dice Gallery on your iOS device. (The app will also automatically take you there when you go to Settings -> Custom Dice -> Download Custom Dice from MachWerx.com.) Enjoy!
We got our kitchen remodeled a while back by The Wright Construction Company, based in Berkeley. It turned out great, but it took a while get a decent picture because we’ve got a kid so it’s usually a mess.
Anyways, we were very happy with how well it turned out. It’s a little hard to see in the picture, but the biggest difference is that they completely took out a couple walls and the unused chimney behind it to create a much bigger corner work area. They also did a bunch of other stuff:
They also played with Dyson a lot so now he’s totally obsessed with tools.
So I saw this trailer a while back and thought to myself, “I bet the Black guy dies”. (Spoiler: he totally does.) Why? Because that’s what happens in these kinds of movies … unless the movie stars, like, Denzel Washington or something.
But why is this so common? As it happens, I had a chance to ask the screenwriter about it and in this particular case, the original script was about three white boys.
But that just begs the question: why is so common in general? I don’t think it’s just straight up racism, I think it’s just that people generally only care about their own issues. And most directors, writers, and producers are white (and male). So all the characters that they really care about are going to be predominantly white (and male). So until there are more minorities and women in film the Black guy will probably die.
Unless he’s Denzel Washington.
