This my new stock pot.

At around $40, it’s a bargain for the ability to double my stock making power from two chicken carcasses to four, despite it looking maybe one-and-a-half times as big as my old stock pot. This weekend, I put it through it’s paces, and came out with almost four litres of rich chicken stock (3740ml to be precise), or just over double what I used to produce.

Chicken carcasses can take up a lot of room, so to be able to fit a measure of four, I have to either stuff the body cavity with half an onion or chicken wing tips, or cleave the body in two. With a tighter packing of stock ingredients, I can, in theory, get more flavour into the same amount of stock.

The taste from the first run (pictured above) was great!

Anyway…

In preparing for the above task I opened my trusty box of install and backup discs, and cleaned out about 90% of it. Old backup discs of my font collections, installs of OSX Tiger (!) and Leopard, software backups from 2006 (!!), as well as old router software, and data card recovery software.

One thing in this box which is cool are my install discs of DreamWeaver 4 by Macromedia (!!!), Fontographer, and Adobe Design Collection — before the Creative Suites (!!!!).

Cute.

I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom for processing pretty much all the images I shoot for about a year or so. Prior to Lightroom I was using iPhoto (for importing, selecting, and managing) and Photoshop (for processing). I still use iPhoto for managing my photos, but I import and select with Photo Mechanic, and process with Lightroom, and occasionally Photoshop for personal “family” snaps; and Lightroom, and often Photoshop for personal “arty” work.

Sounds complex doesn’t it? That’s because it is.

Since I started with Lightroom I’ve been researching on and off how I can keep iPhoto around for general use (syncing with iPhones, emailing pics to people, etc), but use the tools in Lightroom for most of my editing. I like iPhoto because it is familiar and because all our photos to date — going back years — reside in its database.

More recently I’ve been importing and selecting images with Photo Mechanic, which is fast but a bit clunky, and moving the selects over to Lightroom for editing and export. Once I’ve exported the final edits, I import them into iPhoto and therefore into our long-standing database. But there’s a big problem with this: often I don’t have time (or motivation) to select and edit a series of photos at the time I import them. I want to get them off the card, back them up, and work on them another day. So where do these photos sit?

Now that I have a new Mac on the way, I want to get this all sorted.
I want to simplify my process.

I’ve been researching pretty hard the last couple days to see what others are doing, and I’m not finding many examples of people using both iPhoto and Lightroom; which makes sense seeing they’re both databases.

Most people serious about their photography are using Lightroom (or Aperture) instead of iPhoto. That is, when they want to look up those family photos of that trip to that city, they’ll bust open Lightroom and look them up. But to me it feels as though they’re using Lightroom for the wrong purpose. I see it as an image editing application — like Photoshop — and not a photo management application — like iPhoto. You bring photos into LR, process them, and export them, never to be seen inside of LR again.

But I think I’m wrong.

I dunno.

It’s doing my head in.

Maybe I just need to spend more time in Lightroom’s management area to get comfortable with the idea of having our photos reside there. The more I think about it the more I feel I should to demote iPhoto from being anything more than an repository of edited and finished mid-res JPGs imported from Lightroom, and an easy way to automatically fill our iDevices with our photos¹.

I have a week or so until my Mac arrives. We’ll see what happens…

Update

I’m going to give this a go:

Import all photos from now on into Lightroom for selecting and editing. Once culled and edited, full-sized holiday/family jpgs will be exported into iPhoto via a plugin/extension as the ‘final’ family pics. The original RAW files will be deleted².

More artistic personal work will be kept in the Lightroom database. I haven’t worked out what to do once I’ve worked on an image in Photoshop (which I do with all of my images so far). From Photoshop I export a full-sized JPG for general use, and a small-size JPG for uploading to Flickr. These files live in a separate folder away from Lightroom and are regularly backed up.

Should I bring them back into Lightroom for management and easy searching? Can I bring multi-hundred-megabyte — sometimes gigabyte plus — images back into Lightroom?

Field Notes: Red Blooded from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

Fantastic promo for a Valentine’s day notebook.

I’m
glad
I don’t
need to
remember
what
it was
I bought
at the
fruit
shop.

So, a recipe for happiness:

Ingredients

…from Apple:

• Mac Pro 5,1
• 1x 3.33GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” CPU
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB graphics card
• Cheapest RAM option possible (3GB) (wish you could choose no RAM)
• Cheapest hard drive option possible (1x 1TB SATA II) (same wish as above)

…from OWC:

• 48GB (!!!) RAM (3x 16GB modules)
• 120GB SSD
• NewerTech Voyager Q drive docking station

…from eBay:

• 3x Hitachi Deskstar 3TB hard drives

Method

1. Combine 3x 3TB HDs into a single 9TB drive via RAID 0.
2. Split 9TB drive into 3 volumes: Data (2TB), OS2 (120GB Backup boot drive), Spare (6.8GB for anything I’ve backed up and don’t need to access regularly).
3. Combine 120GB SSD with current 120GB SSD via RAID 0.
4. Bisect 240GB drive into bullshit-fast boot drive (OS1, for running the OS and launching applications) and bullshit-fast scratch disk (for usage by Photoshop, Premiere et al).
5. Reuse current external backup strategy of 1TB Time Machine drive, 2TB data drive, and 2TB data + OS3 drives.

Result (TBC)

Hopefully one of the fastest Macs I could possibly put together, within financial reason.

Contextual reading

• Six months ago, my current Mac Pro turned five.
• Nerding out — parts one, two, and three.
• Macrumors’ Mac Pro buying guide.
• Mac Pro forums which I’ve been reading daily for the last 12 months or so…

Well, Lego Steve Jobs was sent out last week, and at least one person has received theirs so far! So when you receive yours, don’t be shy — send me a pic! It will make me happy :)

This is not a scam :P

Update

While I was typing up this blog post, a couple more have been reported to have arrived :)

For my first Things entry for 2012, I’ll be Tolkien¹ about my black backpack.

I’ve had it now for 13 years. I know this because I received it as a gift from my then-girlfriend’s parents for my 21st birthday. Although I wasn’t expecting a gift from them, when they gave it to me I felt awkward because it was such a plain and utilitarian item. It sort of didn’t seem like a gift at all. But I like to think they could see waaaay into the future with this thing.

I’m petrified of the day I need to replace it. It’s so plain, so bare-bones, so stark, that it’ll be almost impossible to replace.

In today’s backpack climate, everything has extra padding, extra pull cords, extra colours, extra compartments, extra everything. Backpacks these days are extra extreme. They assume I want to look like a rock climber, or mountain biker, or some other adrenaline junkie’s wet dream of a pastime. But I want to boring, non-adrenaline-raising stuff with my backpack, like fill it with undies and socks for a short trip, or carry my shopping home.

This bag does just that — exceptionally well:

• It’s super light. It’s (almost) made from one type of material; a strong, thin, canvas-like plastic. And it’s black. No highlights.
• It has no extra anything. The only padding is in the shoulder straps, where it’s needed. This makes it easy to fold, crumple, or wrap up to fit into another bag if needed.
• The zips are strong. They’ve worked flawlessly for 13 years. 13 years! And they feel great in the fingers because they’re largish, and the metal is ever so slightly rounded. The zips don’t have any rubber, or texture for gripping, cos’ y’know, carrying some groceries doesn’t require a vice like grip.
• The bag’s design is basically a big rectangle. It is not streamlined. I’ll never be caught out stuffing that weirdly-shaped item into that niggly ‘small part’ of the bag. There simply is no small part of the bag.
• The rectangular shape makes it fantastic for packing things because you can easily and quickly visualise your packing ahead of time, resulting in a swift pack when at the supermarket checkout. When packing for a trip, it’s easy to Tetris-pack your clothes to achieve a maximum contents-to-size ratio.
• This backpack has one pocket at the front, roughly the same size as the whole front of the bag. It’s deep enough to fit four one-litre cartons of milk stacked like logs.
• It has a small loop to hang the bag on a hook, which bears the whole weight of a full bag of groceries without any issues. I often carry a full bag around by this loop in the house.

It only has one downside: some of the lining around the zips on the inside of the bag have begun to fray. Occasionally the zipper catches on the frayed fibres and jams up the zipper. It’s easy to unclog it — I’ve probably never spent more than five seconds getting it back to working order. And after 13 years of solid use I can hardly call that a downside.

Which brings me back to replacing this bag. Inevitably it will fray too much and fall apart. What will I do then? Where can you possibly get a backpack of such simplicity and stamina? Indeed, is anything built to last a decade and a half these days?

If you know of a backpack which is similar to what I’ve described above, please let me know me via email or twitter. I’ll be forever grateful :)

My Family, by Smog.

Occasionally I’ll have a severe craving to hear this song. I don’t exactly know why. It’s at the same time dark and funny, but it’s not a dark comedy. There’s a desperation and an honesty to it. It’s super simple. It’s a cross between The Paradise Motel and Swans.

It’s ugly-beautiful.

I’ve gone on a spending spree for indie Mac software. I write this as both an acknowledgement for these hard-working developers, and as a sort of apology.
(And a spontaneous list of Mac software I use and recommend).

Over the last few years, I’ve been slowly purchasing licences for the software I’ve been using a lot. Which is good. But software I’ve used only a handful of times, even if I really needed it at that time, I haven’t purchased licences for, instead relying on licences from friends, or, um, “other sources”. Which is bad. So a few days ago I bought licences for all the applications I use from which they were missing.

This is an extension of my going back to buying music philosophy, where I admit I can afford to pay $10 or $20 for an album, especially because it’s so much easier to buy music on bandcamp or iTunes, not to mention more fulfilling, than getting it from “other sources”. And it feels great!

So I recommend buying indie Mac software.

I can only imagine the amount of work put into designing, building, testing, and releasing these apps, not to mention supporting them (and so far for me, the support by the developers of these apps has been nothing short of awesome). If you use the software, you should try to support the devs.

Indie Mac software list

Top row

• 1password, by AgileBits
• Art Files, by Code Line
• Billings, by Marketcircle
• CandyBar, by Panic
• Coda, by Panic
• Cyberduck, by some peeps (donationware)

Middle row

• Fantastical, by Flexibits
• LaunchBar, by Objective Development
• Little Snitch, by Objective Development
• MarsEdit, by Red Sweater
• NetNewsWire, by Brent Simmons, and now Black Pixel
• Path Finder, by CocoaTech

Bottom row

• Photo Mechanic, by Camera Bits
• Sound Studio, by Felt Tip (Now at version 4, I have version 3)
• SuperDuper!, by Shirt Pocket
• Synergy, by Wincent
• Things, by Cultured Code
• VueScan, by Ed Hamrick

Great news!

The guys at Kickstand Cyclery have put their Yehuda Moon comic books up for pre-order. Which is not that exciting, except that this is the first time volume 1 has been available since the first run sold out (long before I got into it)!

Pre-ordered. Awsm.

Get your arse into (fixed) gear and pre-order your Yehuda Moon comic books now!

Prelude

I’ve recently reinstalled the OS and all software on my MacBook Air. This time I’m going to really try and not install Flash Player. Last time I did this, I eventually folded and installed it, even after trying ClickToFlash.

It was simply easier to have Flash Player installed and not deal with clicking all over the place. Indeed, my new setup has me manually loading any flash pages into Google Chrome which is even less easy (Chrome has a built-in Flash Player of its own).

Which brings me to my first annoyance of my new system; the above dialogue window on domain.com.au. See anything wrong?

Here’s what’s wrong

Firstly, it’s a window, not a HTML/Javascript dialogue. This means I absolutely need to click ‘ok’ or hit my return/enter ket to get rid of it.

Secondly, the webpage in question — domain.com.au — still works without Flash Player. I can still see everything I want to, except, most likely, the ads. I don’t want to see the ads¹ This means the ‘Error’ in the message is not an error at all.

Thirdly, there is no way for me to dismiss this dialogue window for future searching. If you read the message, it’s telling me Flash doesn’t appear to be supported by my browser. Well, thanks. I already new that. In fact, I removed the option to view Flash content by choice, so I don’t need to be told.

But, but…

But what if I wasn’t a web nerd? If I was on a PC I’d likely have Flash Player installed already. On a Mac Flash Player doesn’t come pre-installed, but I would have likely installed it already after seeing an error message/failure to view Flash on another site.

But what if I just bought my Mac and domain.com.au was the first website I visited? In this scenario, I’d be happy to just click the helpful link which points me directly to the Flash Player downlo… oh, wait.

This window appears not when you first visit the site, but when you click through to view details on a property. This happens several to many times in a single session. You do a search for a property in, say, inner Melbourne. The results pages show you hundreds of potential properties of which you’ll likely click through 10 or 20. If that is the scenario, you’d be dismissing the dialogue window 10 or 20 times.

This is not ideal. But it’s the jobs of people like me or Fox to point these things out in the hope that we further the knowledge of good design to the people (and the designers).

And before you ask, yes, I contacted domain.com.au’s technical people about this (and asked for a reply). I’ll post if I hear back.

(The custom Safari icon is from David Lanham’s excellent Flurry icon set/s.)

(tap to bigenise)

This is a special gift given to me by Laura — Not the person, but the band — for my efforts on designing their most recent album cover.

Laura, Twelve Hundred Times. Recommended listening.

Album review on The AU Review.
Album review on musicfeeds.com.au.
Album review on Prog Archives.
Album review on Life Music Media.
Album review on gruodas.net.
Album review on Faster Louder.
Album review on The Dwarf.
Album review on Life Music Media.

Listen/buy on Bandcamp.
Listen/buy on iTunes.

Here’s a teaser image from our New Years Eve beach party in country Victoria.

That’s right, I said beach party.

More images to come soon, but I’ve put this one up because a) I’m heading away to Kuching for Chinese New Year this long weekend, and b) I think it’s rad. (Tap for a large version)

Back in a few days!

Update

All Lego Steve Jobs packages have been mailed!
Keep an eye on your real-time non-virtual
inboxes!

=======

See that?

That’s a bag full of packaged, hand-addressed, multi-stamped, register-mailed, and customs-noticed, Lego Steve Jobses. If you were lucky enough to order one while the going was hot, I’m letting you know I’ll be making the trip to the post office tomorrow to send all Lego Steve Jobses to their respective owners.

THE WATER DRAGON (2012)

Water has a calming effect on the Dragon’s fearless temperament. Water allows the Dragon to re-direct its enthusiasm, and makes him more perceptive of others. These Dragons are better equipped to take a step back to re-evaluate a situation because they understand the art of patience and do not desire the spotlight like other Dragons. Therefore, they make smart decisions and are able to see eye-to-eye with other people. However, their actions can go wrong if they do not research or if they do not finish one project before starting another.

Happy Chinese New Year!

(Image “borrowed” from Carmen-san on Deviant Art.)

UX, where X is a kiss.

Check it out because she knows her sh*t. And I know she knows her sh*t because sometimes I think I know my sh*t, but then I tell her about the sh*t I know, and she replies with the sh*t she knows, which immediately makes me question whether the sh*t I know really is the sh*t, y’know?

If you’re into UX, love stories, and possibly unicorns, UX where X is a kiss is the sh*t you should subscribe to.

This is a graph of my website‘s traffic for last month …and then yesterday.
(click to enlarge)

:D

Related: here’s a cool book I read a while back (in the 90s judging by the cover design).

Lego Steve Jobs has now sold out :(
Thanks to everyone who made a purchase — I’ll be sending your Lego Steve Jobs out shortly. For updates:

• Keep your browser tuned to bartkowalski.com.
• Subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Follow me on Twitter.

Lego Steve Jobs is now Sold out :(

Lego Steve Jobs is available! Order now!.

Lego Steve Jobs will go on sale tomorrow today, around midday MYT (Malaysia time) give or take. There are only 100 of them so stay tuned to know the moment it’s available:

• Keep your browser tuned to bartkowalski.com for an announcement.
• Subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Follow me on Twitter. As soon as the post goes live I’ll tweet it.

Confused? Read this →

The issues I was having with my unlocked and faulty iPhone 4S being replaced with a locked and still faulty iPhone 4S have been resolved. In so far as I can now use my Malaysian SIM card. The annoying buzz during vibrate still exists. We’ll see what Apple’ll do about that from another country (if anything).

1. I don’t have many people commenting, and I feel many comments are more or less ‘approvals’ of the post which could be simply replaced with a ‘like’ button (not that I’d place a like button as a regular action item on my posts). Basically, they’re friends and family saying ‘I agree with what you wrote’. This is not a bad thing — I read all comments and appreciate positive reinforcement of my ideas/opinions/writing (who doesn’t?) — but I think these comments could be made more beneficial to the commenter and myself (more on that in a bit).

   Occasionally I’ll get a great comment with an insightful opinion, but for the most part the comment won’t begin a meaningful conversation, or if there is one, won’t push it further.

2. I’ve come to dislike the extra text snippets under the main article. Visually I find it a bit too disjointed. (Yes, I designed it and only have myself to blame. but it was done more that two years ago and my tastes, as well as my knowledge and understanding of UI and UX, have changed).

About a month ago I read this post by Matt Gemell about turning comments off. It has some strong arguments which I agree with. Point 5 on that post — about the burden of moderation — doesn’t really apply to me because I don’t have a large number of comments coming through (654 comments over 450 posts to date) and the Akismet plugin for WordPress has done an exceptional job in automatically filtering spam. I’m sure Matt gets a flipload more comments (and spam) than I do.

A few days ago I read the follow up to the above-mentioned post. If you don’t have a minute to read it, here’s the gist:

In a nutshell, it was definitely the right move.

I especially love the idea of responding or commenting via your own blog or website. This will not only spread the original idea/opinion/argument further along the interwebs, but it should force a considered response rather than a quick one or two sentences or an “I agree!” comment. You’ll write a response you want your audience to read and appreciate. This is a major benefit over inline blog comments.

Another great benefit is the inadvertent sharing of the original post. If I respond to another writer’s blog post on my blog, my readers will be enticed to read the original post, and get exposure to someone else’s opinions. With inline blog comments, my readers will never know about or see the original post.

This makes complete sense to me, so I’m turning comments off.

I still encourage responses if people have opinions they’d like to share, or thanks they’d like to give for freebies I have on my site (by far the most comments I had were appreciation for my free Billings templates). If you would like to reply/respond to my posts from now on, you can grab the permalink from the footer of each post — denoted by an infinity symbol ‘∞‘ — and link to it on your own blog. Alternatively you can tweet an (admittedly short) response by including @bkpr and I’ll be sure to see it. Finally, if you want to respond only to me you can easily contact me directly to continue the conversation.

Thanks

I want to thank everyone who took the time to leave a comment on my site since I started writing almost two years ago. I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m ungrateful for your comments, because I know the decision to switch comments off can be taken negatively.

Possible Probable glitches

I’m not a developer, but I’ve edited the php WordPress templates myself to switch comments off and to get pages looking how I want them — there are bound to be glitches. If you find something out of whack, please let me know and I’ll try to fix it. Cheers.

Update

Thanks to Fox for letting me know about the comment links in my RSS feed.
Thanks to Chris for letting me know about the comment links in the mobile site.
Thanks to Kirk for letting me know about the comment links on the Archives page.

It pays to have friends who care.

WTF?

Explanation.

I noticed only at this point because the Genius¹ had walked away with my iPhone, and I reached into my left pocket with purposeful and precise muscle memory.

I think the reasoning for this is partly due to repetitive conditioning. I do this so often that it’s almost unconscious, like breathing. I’ve never thought about this act before, I’ve just done it. I know it’s not compulsive because I can easily switch of and forget about virtual socialising when in the company of friends actually socialising.

Another reason for this newly-found muscle memory is perhaps I don’t like looking idle when in surrounded by strangers. Maybe it looks like I have a life if I’m checking my iPhone at the first sign of a period of waiting. This reason seems weird to me because I’m interested in everything, so I usually look at my surrounds and take stuff in. Especially in a place like an official Apple store where technologies, retail concepts, and staffing systems are on the cutting edge. Even in such a highly interesting place, my hand went straight for the pocket. Maybe I’m delegating tasks as if I had separate brains for my head and limbs. Like an octopus.

I presume many people are the same. I often see people virtually socialising when alone. I guess it’s a way to keep occupied when idle, which isn’t being idle at all in theory. Always be doing something — have more gumption (more on that too in a future post).

Tap the image for a
detailed draggable view

I’ve designed a beer label for my Dad: Piwo Neptuna (Neptune Beer). Why? A friend of mine in KL works for a label printer and got me a good deal on 500 labels, professionally printed, die-cut, and finished. Something that may have cost triple the amount back in Oz. And Christmas was nearing.

It was a fun exercise; I’d never done a beer label before. Being an Aussie bloke (and a designer) I have a massive appreciation for the number and variety of beer labels. There are so many styles, shapes, and eras, but I knew I had to design this label with two key elements:

1. It must be slick with lots of detail.
   I knew my Dad would appreciate the more recent design style of embellishment, future-traditional, and slickness, more than a simple, retro, old-skool type of beer label that looked misprinted (despite me liking the second style as a designer).
2. My family being from Gdańsk, it must have a Polish vibe.

Details

Here are the main points/details which you can examine in the detailed view:

• This statue of King Neptune is a landmark of Gdańsk. It has been in the main square for over 500 years. (An interesting note: I actually found a use for the puppet warp tool in Photoshop — changing the orientation of King Neptune’s arm to fit the design. Amazing!)
• The crest in the oval shape at the bottom is from the Gdańsk coat of arms and flag.
• There are tiny maps of Australia and Poland on the sides of the label, with Melbourne and Gdańsk highlighted respectively. These represent the city our family settled in Australia, and the city we came from. Also there are flags of both countries at the bottom.
• Various translations of ‘beer’ from all over the world, including Estonia and Swahili (for fun and interest) Malaysia (where I’m living currently), and of course Poland and Australia.
• The black & white image behind the statue is of the shipping docks in Gdańsk, where my Dad received his training and certification as a Master Welder.
• Behind the word ‘Piwo’ there is a watermark of another famous landmark Żuraw, a medieval port crane over the Motława river, and other riverside buildings.
• Classic red and white design based on the Polish flag, with faux-gold for prestige.

Truth

It was a bit tricky to put together, having been completely created in Illustrator (except for the photographs). Unlike Photoshop (‘s masks), you cannot fudge an item so it can be both in front and behind another item. This led to some clever — but time-consuming — tricks in some parts of the label to achieve this effect. For example, the way the black ribbon both flows in front of and behind the inner gold border, and how the trident sticks over the shield in the middle, but the rest of the statue sits behind it.

Also, I didn’t want to use any opacities or transparency effects, like actual shadows, to avoid rasterisation of otherwise tack-sharp vector graphics. All shadow effects are actually solid shapes, coloured a few shades darker than the ones they sit on top of. This approach added much time and fiddliness to the artwork, but probably wouldn’t've made much difference in the actual printed label. I wanted to overcome the challenge and have a ‘pure’ digital file that I know would print as sharp as possible.

Maybe I have too much time on my hands :P

We made it.

In 1973, Helen was 16 and having a relationship with a girl at school, but they hadn’t come out for a whole load of reasons, most of them to do with it being 1973. “In those days, we were like outcasts, so nobody knew, it was a great secret. A few of my friends were really homophobic. We went to this New Year’s Eve party, where people were all goading each other to kiss. So we did. It was brilliant, everybody was cheering, we were pretending it was a joke. It was probably one of the best kisses I’ve ever had.”

Source: Kissing under mistletoe

Hope you had a rad Christmas.

City of Melbourne logo, in honour of my trip back home over the Christmas period 2011.
Not a bad logo, you can read about it here: Under Consideration.
And proof that it must be good :)