Lenticular Business Cards Are Awesome

Yup, I'm totally blown away!

Wow, I just received my new lenticular business cards from The Mines Press (Visit MinesPress.com | follow @theminespress on Twitter) and they look fantastic! A few months ago, I was incredibly lucky and won a set of business cards after entering in a contest on one of my favorite blogs WebExpedition18. I strongly advise you to add their RSS feed, read their articles, and follow @colaja and the other writers and contributers to help you stay on top of all the latest and greatest webdesign trends.

Go on, follow those links in another tab right now... I'll wait here :)

Not "Just Another Surfin' Safari..."

I was doing my daily web surfing and regular reading a few months ago when I stumbled on the WebExpedition18 special giveaway post. I actually just commented and tweated the "Win Attractive Lenticular Business Cards from The Mines Press Inc." post because I thought the cards were super cool. Suffice to say that I was pleasantly surprised about winning the contest — and I am even more surprised at how cool the cards really are after they arrived at my door! Another plus is that he cards arrived more than two weeks before they were scheduled to ship. Extra nice... The cards are absolutely beautiful and the level of quality is stellar. They're double-sided, and incorporate multiple images which are revealed as you view the cards from different angles.

An American Dream Come True

The Mines Press is a family owned company located in New York and has been in business for more than 76 years. The company was started in 1933 during 'The Great Depression' and has grown to more than 130 employees. Yup, they are an example of 'The American Dream' come true and an inspiration in these difficult times... I followed the tips and recommendations on how to make use of the lenticular technology, and I think I was able to leverage it to get really nice results. Their customer service is fantastic, and the high quality of their work is outstanding. That said, if you're looking to stand out from the crowd, I encourage you to visit The Mines Press and have them handle all your future printing needs.

A bit about branding and Identity

These cards are a perfect fit for my brand. My design goals were to support and extend my web presence by matching the 'active', 'alive', and 'playful' nature of my current branding efforts and online identity. Yeah, the lenticular technology is incredibly cool and geeky but more importantly, it also adds a bit of sophistication and an active, lively and techy feel to my otherwise basic business cards.

LINKS:

· Lenticular business cards example & information »

· Read WebExpedition18 »

A few photos of my business cards

Here are a few photos of my new cards... It's tricky to photograph lenticular cards because they change depending on the angle at which you view them. I did my best to capture them in the photos, but it wasn't easy — you need to see and hold them to really appreciate 'em. They have a truly unique feel, and they're definitely unforgettable.

Google Voice In Your Gmail Inbox (Screenshots)

If you haven't heard the news just yet, Google has rolled-out the ability to make Google Voice calls directly from your Gmail account (among other things).  I gave it a try and it looks more than just promising.  Why not get your geek on and check it out for yourself?  Or, check out the links and some screenshots below to get a better idea of what it's all about...

The rates are posted for international calls and they're competitive, if not insanely low.  Calls in the U.S. and Canada are free in 2010.

Get The Sauce From The Source

• Get more info on the official Google Voice blog.


• Watch videos on Google voice and video chat.

A Few Screen Scraps

Cool: MouseGlove | Next-gen mouse

Not your average input device; this interesting open source project aims to make human-computer interaction easier.

MouseGlove is an open source project for a new generation of mouse. The goal of this project is to provide an open source hardware and software stimulating new developers to improve the usability of computers through new interfaces.

MouseGlove is a new kind of interface born for helping people affected by disabilities who cannot use common interfaces such as mouse and keyboard. MouseGlobe offers a natural way to move the screen pointer, click and drag objects. Each action is natural as using your hands to keep, move and touch real objects on a desktop.

http://mouseglove.sourceforge.net/

Posted via web from ptamaro | posterous

Cool Tool: flickrSlider - Embed flickr Slideshows In Just Few Seconds...

Do you have a flickr account yet? Want to easily share your flickr photos with the world from your website or blog? Well, now you can in just a few seconds using the flickrSlidr slideshow tool!

This free service couldn't be easier to use... all you need to do is enter a URL address for a user, photo set, or group -- and then add some tags, and set the slideshow dimensions and a few properties (height, width, preview and favorite's) and the slideshow will be created for you. You can even set create your flickr slideshow in "Standards Compliance Mode" which will make it more accessible. All you need to do next is copy-n-paste the code it generates into your website or blog post and enjoy... Cool, huh?

The tool is free and super-easy to use, so why not check it out?

•  Make your own flickrSlidr slideshow now!

Here's a flickrSlidr slideshow I just created of some of the desktop wallpaper I've made...

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Quick Tech Tip:If the flickrSlidr you just created doesn't fit well in your blog or you want to change the size of your flickrSlidr, all you need to do is edit the height and width attributes of the object (in pixels of course). It seems like the best aspect ratio is 1:1 so I set mine here to 410x410 pixels so it would fit nicely and not get cut off at the right edge.

Posted via email from ptamaro's posterous

I am Now Publishing on AddsYou.com

AddsYou is a social publishing network (still in Alpha) that pays authors for their written works. Not all the features are complete, but the core of AddsYou is up and running and can be extensively tested.

The AddsYou mission is to be the most visited and lucrative user-generated content site on the Internet contributing to the creation of a world-wide database of knowledge sharing as much revenue as possible with our best contributing users.

It’s a community full of fun and passionate authors that are hungry for writing, sharing, and interacting with other authors with similar interests. What do you know? Share your knowledge today!

Content on AddsYou is published by people like you from all around the world. AddsYou lets you publish just about anything you like online. Many authors publish their school papers, how-to's, news articles, journal entries, reviews, tips, poems, research reports, short stories, tech talk, e-books, ezines, etc… Be creative and more importantly, have fun!

Have fun publishing and make sure to send them feedback!

Find out more: www.addsyou.com
Get your FREE account now, it's super cool!
username=MjAwOC0xMi0wNSAwODo1MDowNQ==

Cool Tool: MeetInBetween.Us

"Okay, I'll meet you half-way there..."
Simple problem, simple (yet sophisticated) solution. I was doing my morning surfing and reading tweets on my Twitter [Follow me @ptamaro] and I saw a tweet by @kyleplacy with the URL for MeetInBetween.Us and decided to check it out. I'm really glad I did because this is a really helpful app that takes two locations and finds a central location to meet, and presents you with places to meet by category.

How does it work?
For example, I want to meet my friend from Providence, RI for coffee next week so I type that location in and then type Boston, MA as my second location. I'm presented with Sharon, MA as the central location and categories like food, coffee, bar, hotel, mall, etc. and then it gives you places to meet based on the topic you choose. Simple, huh? It also gives you directions on how to get there from each starting location. In addition. it gives you a a nice short link to the map and location so you can share it with the other person.

Results, plain and simple.
How about coffee at the Starbucks at 5 Post Office Sq #5 in Sharon, MA on Wednesday evening around eight? Let me know if that works for you, either way... I'll have a Triple Espresso with one sugar please! :-D

My First Posterous Post

I don't have a lot of time at the moment (I'm actually eating my lunch), but I figured I should really give Posterous a post and get an idea of how it works since it's been a few days since I first signed-up. I got the link from Graham in a tweet (follow imjustcreative, you'll learn stuff).

Wow! Posterous is really awesome. What a brilliant idea...

Posterous — The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.

The user interface is really simple yet sophisticated and intuitive — this app begs to be used, I just wish I had something worthwhile to post and more time to mess around with it. Post Videos, MP3s, photos, random ramblings you want to get out of your head — no setup or signup — whatever you send 'em they'll just gobble it up and post it for you.

I'm just minutes into it, and I love it already! This is a good example of a great User Experience. It's just that simple. :-)

» Get yours at www.posterous.com

Posted by email from ptamaro's posterous

Google Shines On With Chrome

Google just released their new "One box for everything" browser called Chrome. The name is a direct reference to the term used to describe a desktop software application's interface elements. The name also implies "shiny and new" which it definitely is. The current beta is only available for Windows users, and unfortunately the Mac and Linux versions are not out yet and it's not clear when they'll hit the street.

Do We Need Another Browser, But Why?
Google's goal and concept for Chrome was that, "spend much of our time working inside a browser" and the "web gets better with more options and innovation." They also wanted to "completely rethink the browser" and create "a modern platform for web pages and applications." Let's see what develops in the near future, but so far things are impressive.

It's Got That Creamy Goodness
All the code is open source, and they've "used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox" and under the hood they built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine which should keep even extremely complex web apps in control. That said, Chrome is blazing FAST! It's also CSS3 capable, so users will have a better overall experience. The interface is kinda Microsoft Vista looking and very simple which makes it easy to use since there are only a limited number of features so far. Some of the features are: DNS pre-fetching, gears, phishing & malware protection, dynamic tabs, and "incognito mode" (ala Safari?). There's also a cool little feature called "Task Manager" where you type about:memory in the location bar to see the current memory usage for your browsers... Looks like Firefox is a RAM hog with all my Add-ons, extensions and plugins installed. You can see the full list of features and video explanations on their features page.

Give Google Chrome a try...
Download Google Chrome »

Geeky Stuff &mdash Get Your Geek On
Here are some fun things you can do already, remember this is just an initial beta release! I'm sure the folks at Google have lots of cool stuff on the way.

• Highlight some text or page elements and right-mouse-click and choose "Inspect element" to see a developer inspector (Firebug-like) which allows you to see the DOM and mess with it, and you can dock/un-dock to the window or view it in a tab, and do some other nifty things... [This is an awesome feature]


• Type about:memory in the location bar to see your memory use.


• Find more helpful info on GChrome here or get more GChrome developer info here.


• Type about:version in the location to get your current installed version of GChrome.


• Or, check the version "About Google Chrome" from the wrench menu, and it'll even tell you if your installed version is up to date.

Or make your Firefox new and shiny with this:
Chromifox 1.0rc2 Theme

...another blatant rip-off of another default theme from another great open source web browser! This time, the target is Google Chrome, or more specifically Chromium, the open source project behind it. The clean lines, slick layout, and compact style of Chromium were the points of inspiration for this theme. Chromifox offers a coat of Chrome for Firefox.

Search better than Google?

If you're looking for something cool on the internet these days, you'll probably use a search engine. You've also probably used all the big well-known search engines out there, but now there's another player in the space, cuil (pronounced "cool"). Developed by former Google engineers, and self described as "the world's biggest search engine", cuil boasts an index that spans over 120 Billion pages (Search 121,617,892,992 web pages).

Cuil's results are neatly presented in columns, very relevant to your search terms, and based on actual content not popularity. At the moment, there are no ads to get in your way either. If you value your privacy, cuil believes "that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach" so they "don’t collect data about you and your habits" which is very refreshing.

Its features include relevant drill-down suggestions, roll-over definitions for additional information, tabbed choices, and logical search suggestions.

Its name is an old Irish word for knowledge, and if you still haven't found what you're looking for — then give cuil a try »

Cool Tool: VectorMagic

A few weeks ago, my co-worker DH sent me an IM "Have you seen this?" with the URL for Stanford's Vector Magic Online Bitmap to Vector Project. I was busy when he sent it and only just gave the site a quick visit, a bookmark and figured I'd visit again and blog it when I had more time.

Wow, this is an extremely cool tool! In a nutshell, The site converts bitmap images to vector art for you. It's an "online auto-tracer" built using Adobe's Flex2. To use it, just upload your image or photo, and the tool will create vectors for you. You can then save your vector art to EPS, SVG, or PNG format. You can use VectorMagic to process your image and then tweak the results as needed as well, this keeps all the heavy processing on their end, and you can focus on the fun stuff! Vectors are scalable because they are "geometric primitives" made-up of points, lines, curves and polygons — whereas raster graphics are a "map of pixels" (hence the name "Bit Map", or BMP). Vector files are also smaller in file size, and they can be scaled without a loss of quality. Find out more info on vector graphics on Wikipedia.

Here's an example of my first VectorMagic output. I took my avatar and ran it through their tool and got great results. Then I was able to play around with the SVG output to size my avatar as needed. I have the original Photoshop file so I can do that anyway, but this machine is getting old and slow, so it's nice to have a backup option. They also make it really easy to share your results to help spread the good word (you can play with my vectors made by VectorMagic, but my artwork is ©2006ptamaro so don't use it for your own purposes).

Also, if you don't have the original artwork in a vector format you won't be able to get good results if you need to change any of the elements, colors or size. In this case, you can vectorize the rastered artwork and then use the vectors to make the changes you need. Have fun, and let me know what you think of it!

    » Visit VectorMagic

Cool Tool: Ping-O-Matic!

Got a blog? Want to let the community know when you've updated it? Problem solved in just a few clicks and you're done in seconds if you use Ping-O-Matic!

Just drop your blog title, URL, and RSS feed into their form, check the services you want to ping and off it goes. What are they up to and why is it free?

"Why go to all the trouble of setting up a free system that sends out over a hundred thousand pings a day? To play with all the data of course!"

Cool, huh? It's fast and FREE, so give it a try.

Apollo has landed, again...

Apollo - From Adobe Labs

"Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s."

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Apollo enables developers to create applications that combine the benefits of web applications – network and user connectivity, rich media content, ease of development, and broad reach – with the strengths of desktop applications – application interactions, local resource access, personal settings, powerful functionality, and rich interactive experiences.

Apollo enables familiar application interaction models, including drag-and-drop support, rich clipboard access, and desktop and system shortcuts. Furthermore, Apollo applications run as regular applications, and do not have to run within another application or shell (as web applications do by running within the browser).

>> labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo

>> labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo

Bugatti Veyron at top speed

Bugatti Veyron at top speed
Uploaded by Flabber

The Bugatti Veyron tested to see if it really can do 407 km/h.
Earlier today the F-Man sent me this link, and it's totally worth the watch. Give it a spin, but hang-on!

Duration: 07:42
Taken: 04 February 2007
Location: London, United Kingdom

More at http://www.flabber.nl

Very Cool Site of the Day

THE AD GENERATOR

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

The ad generator was created by Alexis Lloyd as a component of an MFA thesis project in the Design and Technology department at Parsons The New School for Design.

Cool Product Design Post #63

Here's a great way to start the day...

Roll yourself out of bed (rub eyes, scratch stuff, yawn, etc.) and take a stroll to the bread-box, then the counter and feed a few slices to your Rollertoaster

"...2006 Red Dot Award-winning design not only toasts bread, but it also allows the user to watch the slice magically transform before their eyes—from cold and squishy to hot 'n crispy!"

More info: www.jarengoh.com

...add butter, jam to taste. Make coffee. Then, take a slow stroll to the dining room and open the Bloomframe balcony.

"With one push on a button the balcony opens smoothly within 15 seconds. On the few square meters which are generated two persons can enjoy breakfast in the open air."

More info: Hofman Dujardin

...grab a comfy chair, a table if necessary -- and enjoy! No hurries or worries.

Just a thought.

Cool Stuff Reviews - Products & Services: ScrapBlog, Verizon, and DirecTV

ScrapBlog is Scrap-a-licious!
This ScrapBlog tool is just amazing. You can assemble artwork, photos, or anything else into slideshows and mess with this little gem for hours. Flash 9 required, but worth the upgrade.

You can set permissions, create an rss feed, blast emails to share with contacts. Tools include crop, add link, edit photo, shadow, grid and more. The Scrapblog application also comes with some backgrounds, stickers, text, frames, and shapes -- and you can add more as you need them. Just get some photos and get started!

• Check out a scrapblog of some of my work
  
  
• http://www.scrapblog.com
  Sign up, and make your own!
  

Verizon Quick Review:
By the way I switched my ISP to Verizon in August and its great. I get 15Mbs. bandwidth via fiber and its fast -- this old machine can't really take full advantage of it though. The install was free, but they had to put the dish on my roof rather than the side of the house to get the best angle to the satellite. I'll check it when I clean the gutters in the Fall and Spring. So far, I'm really happy with the service and it's a little cheaper than my previous ISP.

• my Verizon site

DirecTV Quick Review:
I also get DirecTV and its really good, unless the weather's rotten. I'm not as impressed about the NFL Sunday Ticket as I thought I'd be because it seems like I'm not getting as many games as I should (sometimes the games are "not in my area" or something). Having
the "mix" channels is cool too because you get to see small screens of the most popular channels being watched for several categories: Kids Mix, Sports Mix, and the News Mix for example. You can switch the audio for the screen you want to listen to, and select the channel from there.

Rockin' Around the Clockr...

Clockr uses random digit images from Flickr to display the current time.
Click on a number to change the image, doubleclick it to view the full image. Use the mouse wheel to cycle through.

Clockr
  http://www.quasimondo.com/clockr.php

Mario Klingemann's weblog is definitely read-worthy, check it out for more information and more mondo-cool stuff...
QuasiMondo: Almost Home
 http://www.quasimondo.com/

More Mega-Web2.0

I just stumbled across this one go2web20.net -- it's a really nice amalgamation of Web2.0 sites. I have a handful of other ones from the other day, but they're bookmarked on my work laptop (I know, I'm working to get my del.icio.us account going again, I'm actually working on the 500+ bookmarks I just sucked into it right now). I will get to it though, and hopefully have something worthy of posting.

In the meantime, open your ears, and put your wallet back in your pocket -- check out jamendo
"On jamendo, the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses. In a nutshell, they allow you to download, remix and share their music freely. It's a "Some rights reserved" agreement, perfectly suited for the new century.

These new rules make jamendo able to use the new powerful means of digital distribution like Peer-to-Peer networks such as BitTorrent or eMule to legally distribute albums at near-zero cost...

On jamendo you can freely download music from all genres, write your own reviews, and participate..."

Sites Worthy of a Peek

SitePal + your web site = Very cool.
SitePal... allows you to create a wide-array of animated speaking characters, which can be added to your website for a variety of applications. You've got a friend at SitePal!

Helpful web tools are at Centricle.com. Delve into the interactive browser rules support matrix, word & character counter that would even impress Sesame Street's Count von Count, favelets galore, a bitchin' regular expression tool and a text wrapper that would get respect from even the most Gangsta developer in you -- just to name a few.

CSS Mania - A showcase offering more than 400 screenshots a month. Looking for CSS design inspiration?

LifeClever - Tips for design and life.

DESIGN SOJOURN - How to do good design and create clever products!

MyHeritage face recognition technology discovers which celebrities you look like...

Make: technology on your time. A wordless pancake recipe, and lots of other cool projects...

Jackson Pollock (jacksonpollock.org) by Miltos Manetas, original flash animation by Michal Migurski. Cool Flash stuff...

    * Here's an interesting little tidbit: a longtime family friend, neighbor, and amazing artist, Harold Lehman knew Pollock well. Check out Pictures In Motion, Harold's daughter Lisa's site if you need help getting your message across.

EasyPrototype - Make Your Designs Understood the First Time.
EasyPrototype is software that lets anyone create instant interactive prototypes from hand-drawn or electronic images without programming.