This is one of the most amazing uses of HTML I’ve seen.  Built by some Google Folks, and the Band Arcade Fire, and combining aspects of HTML5, Google Maps, and amazing cinematography, it is a sign of things to come for the web.  Most amazing is there is no Flash.

Clear your screen, and click on the photo below to join the experience.

Arcade Fire Video

I’m not very good at picking colors.  I see something and know what I like though, and some of the best color schemes I’ve found recently are over at rottencupcakes.com.   Check them every tuesday for a new color palate.  This brown and grey color scheme are the colors for our guest bathroom.  Some call the colors stone and clay, I call them brown and grey.

Guest bathroom color scheme

3 guys in the Gotan Project

OK, they don’t officially call themselves Modern Cafe Music, that’s just the way I first heard the Gotan Project.  I was sitting at my favorite coffee shop in downtown Austin on a Tuesday morning, when I heard this music coming over the speakers.

When I closed my eyes, it was like I was back in Cuba, or Paris, or Mexico City.  And it was no longer 2010, but sometime back in the 50′s.  How do you describe it? Jazz with an electronic beat? Remixed tango?  Cuban Mashup?  The digital beat sounds like a dusty old car just motoring down a brick lined street, while the accordion is your gaze, bouncing along, between pretty girls, flower-boxes, and cafe scenes.

I immediately went home and ordered the Vinyl LP for my collection, and while I wait for it to arrive, I’ve been streaming the songs off their website all week.  To hear what I mean, visit the website, and stream some songs for yourself.  I especially love Tango 3.0.

The Gotan Project website

Focus on the content of a blog, not on the advertising.
The kyeboard command for Safari Reader is Shift-Command-R
I just wish it would go a step farther and make the background completely white, not just faded and transparent.

It’s located exactly where you would find the RSS feed button on the right side of the smart address bar (where you type in URLs)

Website without Safari Reader

Website with Safari Reader

What do I love about it? that I can skip all the flash, and advertisements peppered in an article, and on the sidebars, and just read the content.

Apparently a wind turbine “can look like a 747 on final approach” to a trained military radar analyst. And a field of 100 of them can cause a blackout zone, or appear as storm activity. My solution? build more, just not near any airports.

Read more in the NYT article.

And remember, one turbine (1.5 Megawatt, GE turbine–the normal ones used in a wind farm) will power 400 homes, or 4 large industrial plants, or 20 schools.

Last spring, while attending the Austin outdoor living tour, I had the honor of both meeting the architects and visiting a home of Alterstudio.

What’s so great about their designs?  The way they incorporate light, natural materials, and storage. And clean, clean lines everywhere.

Integrating a modern house with the environment.

Modern Bedroom with clean lines and tons of storage

A clean, simple and white kitchen with wooden cabinets

Modern living room

glass bathroom looking outdoors

I’ve never mined having a bathroom with tons of glass looking outside. Especially with a view like this. How about you?

Some days I don’t want to get dressed

Justine Lai paints self-portraits of herself having sex with every president. via @heycrystal

Yesterday I rediscovered Swiss Miss via Twitter.  A recent Tweet, at the time, mentioned an interview between Dan Benjamin of the Pipeline and Tina.  So I tuned in.  And it changed my life.  You see, a couple of years ago Tina was fed up with all the planning and organizational tools. She, like all of us would get excited about using them but then abandon them due to complexity or downtime, or just because it has a bad interface.  She collaborated with her studio mate Cameron of Fictvie Kin (love the Easter Eggs) and came up with TeuxDeux.  It’s super minimal, white space driven, no clutter design approach to organizing what you need to do.

Much more on his blog