American guitar legend Les Paul passed away today. While I haven’t had the pleasure of owning a Les Paul myself, I have worked with musicians who did, and I understand the love. Back in my Midget Farmer days we recorded a song to honor this great man and his legendary guitar. This track was written by guitar demon Danny ‘Bloodspoon’ Grady, who graced us with his presence whenever we played this tribute live. Here’s the studio version that appeared on our album “America’s Place to Waste your Life” released in 1993.
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Here’s a fun tip on creating a fiery looking buddy icon in Adium for OSX.
Take picture in Photo Booth, or directly from Adium’s ImagePicker
Click spiral effect button, then choose the Color Invert filter
Click Set to apply filter
Click your buddy icon, click Choose Icon
Repeat steps 2 – 4 and apply the filters False Color, then Concert
Voila – your buddy icon is red hot!
Typically I’ll take my photos using Photo Booth so I can keep the original, and sometimes I may even use that picture for my dailymugshot. When you walk through these filters, you’ll notice some filters won’t work as well for some photos, so play around with what you use. Sometimes I’ll replace Color Invert with X-Ray, or Concert with Gamma Adjust. It all depends on the picture I choose for a buddy icon. Sometimes I’ll just keep layering until I create some crazy looking buddy icon, go crazy!
Here’s a photo step by step so you can see the final product.
Auto-Tune is clearly the special effect du jour in both hip-hop, and viral videos on the internets. Most people seem to be all up in arms about hip-hoppers overdoing it, but I’m still digging it. Mostly because I only listen to commercial radio when I drive rental cars and therefore control my Auto-Tune ingestion.
While we’re in the “Season of Auto Tune”, here is a collection of auto tune influenced videos that I just love to watch and watch over again. If I missed any classic Auto-Tune action, please send me a link and update the collection.
UPDATE 5.28 : As you probably guessed I’ve been slacking on this, but I’d like to think of it more of just being temporarily roadblocked. I did a little work on the HTML client and added the nice character count and everything, but can’t seem to figure out how to send the Basic Authentication header via Javascript. I tapped into the XmlHttpRequest as well as a JQuery lib, but just couldn’t get it going. As of now my html twitter client does tweet, but you’ll get the login prompt from twitter.com. This is not good IMO which is why I haven’t posted anything yet. I’ve since changed my focus to my AIR Yammer client, and probably adding Twitter support to that. For anybody interested, here’s my latest HTML twitter client in case you’d like to fix it up, or even use it for that matter. If you can make this work, please drop me a note, I’d love to see how you did it.
Having a hard time getting the Basic Authentication header working in JS
UPDATE : When I was first messing with this little form, I didn’t realize I had already authenticated with Twitter and thought the hidden fields were in fact doing their jobs by passing the username and password. Turns out that’s not the case. When you submit this form, the status will be sent, but you will be presented with a username and password dialog from Twitter. After logging, your status will be sent. I know have a goal of figuring out how to make this simple HTML form work with Twitter. Got a feeling I’ll have to do some javascript magic with OAuth. Once I figure this out, this post will be updated with the latest html.
Here’s an easy way to update your Twitter status using a simple HTML form. Be sure to replace { TWITTER USERNAME }and{ TWITTER PASSWORD } with your information prior to using this form.
<form action="http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" method="POST" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded">
<!-- set your Twitter username and password here -->
<input type="hidden" name="user" value="{ TWITTER USERNAME }" />
<input type="hidden" name="pswd" value="{ TWITTER PASSWORD }" />
status <input type="text" name="status" maxlength="140" />
<input type="submit" value=" tweet! " />
</form>
