To start, here’s a little bit of backstory: My friends (mainly Kyle Verot and Joel Smith) and I will often use the group chat feature in iMessage for iOS when making plans for an event. The annoying thing is that sometimes they’ll carry on a 2-way conversation with eachother using the same iMessage group chat thread. If you’ve ever had this happen, you know how unpleasant it is when your iPhone won’t stop buzzing and dinging, notifying you of messages that aren’t for you.

In this case, the conversation went was as follows (iPhone scaled up to show annoyance level):

I decided to make good on my threat, launched a useful little app named Keyboard Maestro, and created a quick and short macro:

Note the amount of times the macro is set to repeat…

Keyboard Maestro is a great app for setting all kinds of macros and scripts, but has possibly one of the worst icons I’ve ever seen:

Yuck.

Anyway, with the macro created and assigned a keyboard shortcut, Apples Message beta made its entrance. Keep in mind that switching your phone to airplane mode won’t stop iMessages from coming in, since it’s over the internet.

Damn it feels good to be a gangster.

I’ve been playing around with some new nature photography techniques, both in composition, and colour grading.

Fun stuff.

Like any smooth, glass-like surface, Apple’s Magic Mouse gets grungy. It even gets tiny pit marks in it from months of wear, and these pit marks don’t wipe off with glass cleaner. If you’re anything like me, the feeling of even a slightly dirty Magic Mouse is enough to drive you up the wall. Fear not, however, I have an easy fix to satisfy your grubby hands.

It’s a simple trick I picked up in my Auto Detailing days; use toothpaste.

Toothpaste, much like polishing compound, has a very fine abrasive in it which is perfectly suited to cleaning this sort of surface, and will even remove small scratches.

First, grab a clean rag or paper towel and switch the Magic Mouse off. Then, using only about a half pea size worth of paste, gently polish the plastic surface in a small circular motion. Once you’ve gone over the entire surface a few times, grab a clean rag or microfiber cloth and wipe off the excess haze of paste. The freshly polished mouse might feel a little grippy at first, so if this is the case, just rub it on the palm of your hand for a little while and the oils in your skin will restore a tiny bit of slip to the surface.

I personally clean my Magic Mouse this way once every few months, making it feel new all over again. I hope that helps!

p.s. Please don’t email me saying you got toothpaste inside of your mouse ಠ_ಠ

Click for full size

This is my tribute to Hypercritical, a weekly tech podcast hosted by
John “No ‘Z’” Siracusa and Dan Benjamin.

Specifically 46:50 of Episode #22: I Would Not Build Underground

Subscribe in iTunes

Put this one into the category of “painless purchases”.

If you’re on a Mac (which, for your sake, I hope you are) and understand the benefits of RSS, then reeder is a must-have.

I was introduced to reeder for iOS many moons ago, when I first started spending a significant amount of time online, and I honestly wouldn’t feel right suggesting any other mobile RSS reader to my friends and family (sorry NetNewsWire, but reeder just feels better day after day). Intuitive swipe navigation and animations, along with subtle textures and perfectly formatted typography go a looong way toward giving the iOS app that natural feeling.

Silvio Rizzi has brought much of that feeling to the desktop (or laptop), with the release of reeder for Mac 1.0. The textures, typography, and animations are all there. It also does a great job of taking full advantage of multi-touch gestures, and even allows you to configure them to your own personal tastes. And of course, it integrates perfectly well with all the popular services (Instapaper, Twitter, Facebook, Readability, etc.).

I’ve been happily using the free beta since it’s release, so when the official version came out a few days ago I was no longer able to launch my beta copy. I immediately jumped over to the Mac App Store and bought the full version ($9.99) and to be honest, it felt good contributing to the efforts of a dedicated developer, and loyal contributors. I use this app several times daily, so in my mind it’s easily worth quadruple the price.

So if you’re in the market for a clean, beautiful, and well thought out RSS reader, the choice is pretty easy.

Get it in the Mac App Store here.

Note: As an indication of the care that went into this app, check out the official product page (using Safari), for some super neat-o CSS3 3D transitions.

After a frustrated sigh and a quick Google search, I came across The Unarchiver. It’s a free archive utility that opens pretty much anything (even .EXE installers, on the Mac), and it made quick work of opening my ‘damaged’ .zip file.

To use it, just install it, and forget about it forever. Perfect.

Get it free in the Mac App Store here

What a great show

This is the kind of project I’d kill to be a part of.

Personally, I’m more of a Ferrari guy, but this car (if you can even call it a car) is stunning. Plus, it comes in my colors; orange with blacked out rims.

On to the ad itself. It was created by Philipp und Keuntje, an agency in Hamburg, Germany (of course). I wish I could tell you more about them, but I don’t speak German. I’m working on it.

Personally, I drool over the thought of being able to work with a company like Lamborghini, not just because of the elitism that comes with the territory, but for the incredible amount of creative freedom. Hyper-car makers like Lamborghini and Ferrari don’t really need to advertise themselves to strengthen their brand, their names are universally known. Notice how not once in this ad does it mention anything about the specs of the car? Who cares, right? We know it’s a Lambo, and we know that Lambo’s are powerful, fast, and all-together sexified. No, this ad is about a feeling, and a scary one at that. I’d be terrified to drive this thing.

I love the fact that car makers are turning to this sort of film making. I’ll be posting more like this, I’m sure.

Interesting note: The score, done by DamienDamien (flash) sure does sound a lot like Hans Zimmers “Why so serious” from The Dark Knight score, no? Inspiration, or plagiarism? Either way, it does sound good.