YouTube player UI enchancements

YouTube has updated the player UI on all videos and it looks good. It is a darker design that helps to keep the controls out of the way for good video viewing.

Screenshot of YouTube player controls

If you use the Chrome web browser, there is an excellent add-on called Turn Off The Lights that effective adds a gray overlay to your whole browser except for the playing video. Good stuff.

Screenshot of Turn Off The Lights in action

Ocean Beach needs help!

Today, this Wednesday July 13th there is California Coastal Commission (CCC) meeting in San Rafael, CA regarding the rock revetments (retaining walls) being permitted and constructed at South Ocean Beach in San Francisco, CA. This is very damaging for the beach and should be stopped, and at the very least should be postponed until for further review. 

Here is a photo of the erosion. This has to be fixed!


I cannot go to the meeting, but Surf Rider Foundation and savethewaves.org have provided an easy way to submitted a letter to the CCC Commisioners stating that the beach and the community it supports deserve long term solutions, not short-sight damage control.


You can read more information, see more photos and find out how you can help at: http://www.savethewaves.org/news/save-sloat-action-alert

Shark Life

Peter Benchley. You may have heard of him because he authored the extremely famous book Jaws, which was made so famous with help from the classic movie of the same name directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown. But I do not want to write about Steven Spielberg and the Jaws crew, or Peter Benchley in regards to his book Jaws. 

What I want to let you all know is how excellent his last book; Shark Life: True Stories about Sharks and the Sea really is. 


This non-fiction book is written so well, and moves at an appetite inducing pace you may feel like you are the shark. If you are even mildly interested in sharks, the ocean, diving, surfing or are just intrigued by things voracious this is the book for you. This is true to life tales of Mr. Benchley's happenings in the ocean of sharks. In cages and out of cages, in deep water and shallow, in rivers and within his memories. 


One of my favorite chapters is #7 titled Six Dangerous Sharks. In  this chapter Peter goes on to name and describe the certain sharks and their characteristics, and then also with a real world examples. This is thrilling reading and I ate it up.
A very important part of this book is that the overall tenure is not Jaws. That is, it is not about the monster from the deep sinking fishing boats, closing beaches, and disrupting economy. Some of the stories are very scary and heart pounding indeed, but this book is about real sharks, what they are, where they are; and how we as human beings relate to them in their environment, and more importantly how we can ensure they remain the alpha predators they need to be.

And to the salient motions that we humans aspire, one of which is that we are the caretakers of all things because we are conscious. I found reading this book showed me that we are not. It made me (said) conscious of the fact that humans have their place. We have an impact yes, but we a merely a piece of the fleece. The perfection of humanity is willful change, we can make a difference because we want to. A shark does not want, a shark is, and its being is extremely different and perpetually thrilling.

This is a great read and I highly recommend it.

I use a Kindle so I get my digital stuff from Amazon. For real books I  shop locally between Half Price Books and Barnes and Noble. Sad to see Bay Books leave Concord, I liked that store.

Links to buy this book:
Amazon • Barnes and Noble • Random House

Blogger fonts

Copying and pasting text into Blogger makes for some odd font behavior. I tried new font settings but it didn't take effect.

Linux Mint Plug (not a review)

First I have to Rant! I tried using Gnome 3 with Ubuntu 11.04 and it was a total disaster and I am hoping they are going to change a lot of their thinking, but seriously; no right-click, or desktop icons in Gnome 3? That is totally stupid design philosophy. Talk about counter intuitive. And counter to Open Software ethics in giving the user full control.

I believe if a design team is going to take away entrenched user methodology it must provide an alternative that makes the previous usage seem old, and worse; as in "how could ever have wanted to right-click before?"

I have always loved Gnome and the whole push to create and develop the best open source user interfaces, but they have really crashed the car with 3.0.

Thankfully there is LINUX MINT which goes out of it's way to make computing a pleasure coming with a very good user interface and an excellent set of default applications. 

For office you have the fantastic LibreOffice, Graphic design is Gimp, music is handled by the up and coming Banshee media player. Default browser is Firefox (so I replaced that with Google Chrome, which blows all other browser so far out of the weeds it is barely a competetion). I really think Pidgin is a great chat client as it works with practically every chat service out there. Setting up is still very discreet with settings, but Facebook for example has a very good help page.

I highly recommend Linux Mint for your desktop. I am going to go make some wallpapers now.

Postings

I have been horrible at keeping this blog current and therefore relevant. What I think makes a blog good is purpose. I need to think about what this blog should be besides random posting about random topics. And if I do decide on randomness, the timeliness of the postings will need to be important.

I like the new Blogger interface, very clean and does not get in the way.

123RF and Spiderpic

This is a great stockphotography site with decent pricing.
Stock Photos from 123RF

Also great is spiderpic.com which is a stock photography search engine.

Woohoo! Chrome 9!!

Google Webstore!

This is so awesome! Check it out now!

Reddhelm

Hard at work on Reddhlem!
Check out www.reddhelm.com