20 cent Apple logo mod

So I decided to hack apart my laptop and give it a bit of color this weekend. I had seen people with custom apple logos on their laptops around the net for a while now. I eventually tracked them back to icolours.ca. They sell quite a few custom filters on their site for only five bucks a pop. That’s not a bad deal, but I figured I could pull off the same look on my own for a fraction of the price.

I had some green and red velum left over from my paper lantern project, so I figured I’d go with the red macintosh look. If you want to go this route Hobby Lobby sells velum for cheap. Usually about 10 - 25 cents a sheet depending on the color and pattern.

Logo with back lighting on

The whole process was pretty easy for my Macbook Pro. All I had to do was remove two small screws and pop off the back of the LCD screen. Once that was done I just taped the cut velum over the clear plastic apple logo and replaced the white filter. I won’t go into detail here, but if you want to try it yourself you can check out these sweet video instructions. Happy logo modding!

Logo with the back lighting turned off

Being sick is boooooring

So, yea, being sick is really boring. There is only so much TV a guy can watch before getting all loopy headed and depressed, right? Right. So I’ve been trying to come up with little projects to keep entertained while not over exerting myself…. you know what that means right? Yea, lots of nerding out on the computer…

Songbird
I decided a little while ago that I’ve had enough with Itunes. I never really liked the interface, and I especially didn’t like that it started deleting my music without telling me. So I did a bit of research and happily discovered Songbird.

Also I discovered I really like Dr. Steel

Songbird is a full featured completely free open source music management application developed by Mozilla. Perfect! I had actually discovered songbird a couple weeks ago, but it wasn’t until my downtime that I had a chance to move my music library over and get it all configured. I’m still getting used to it, but my first impressions are all great. Just like firefox it supports a multitude of awesome plugins, and if you want to change the appearance of the app there are plenty of “feathers” for it too. Feathers, cute huh?

New Dock
I had known it was possible to modify the dock under Leopard for a while, I just hadn’t had the time or motivation to do it. Well… this week I’ve had nothing but time so I figure I should get to it.

Truedock + Power Indicators + Dark Separator

The process was actually much easier than I thought it was going to be. All you need to do is replace the default “scurve”png files in your dock resources directory. You can find all the required info here as well as quite a few pre-made doc images. I ended up mixing and matching to create something that worked for me.

AdBlock Plus + Add-Art
I also installed some new firefox addons… AddBlock plus in conjunction with Add-Art has made for more pleasant web browsing. Addblock plus blocks ads and Add-art replaces them with art. My one complaint has been that so far the “art” is almost more obnoxious than the ads are. I mean, wtf is this?

“this was the worst I’d ever cut up before. I cut open my old appendix wound, stuck pins on the inside of the wound and swallowed a broken light bulb.”

Seriously? I mean, in context I’m sure this is a powerful story… but I really don’t want to see it while checking my Hotmail.

Add-Art cycles the art every 2 weeks, so I’m willing to wait it out and hope the next round of art is more palatable.

Projects Update! Layered Transparent Light Installation complete!

I’m just about finished with the Layered Transparent Light Installation! You can read all about the final steps here.

Fun with wood grain

So here I was trying to get the illusive 3D transform photoshop plug-in working when I accidentally stumbled across a surprisingly simple method for creating realistic wood grain. It seems like all of the online tutorials covering this subject tend to take the long and laborious “Difference Clouds -> Motion Blur -> Liquify” method, or the “Add Noise -> Motion Blur -> Liquify” method, or some such combination of the two. This is great if you’re not in a hurry and have plenty of time to really nail down the right texture, however, I almost never do.

Most of the time I’ll be working with a client peering over my shoulder or lurking nearby, where the pressure is really on to make something respectable looking, but more importantly, to make it fast. When this is the case and I need to come up with a simple texture quickly I would rather not have to fiddle with filter settings to get the right look.

Anyway, as it turns out, you can get a perfectly decent wood grain in no time at all with the “Fibers” filter. All you have to do is…

Create a new layer and draw a selection. In my case I just need a skinny rectangle. Fill this selection with the color of the wood you would like to use. I’m going for a Teak wood look so I’ll chose a deep brown color.

Duplicate this layer and then go to Filter -> Render -> Fibers and use the settings below.

Once you apply the fiber filter all you have to do is change the layer mode to Multiply and you’re done!

I went a step further and created an Action set for this process so now any time I need a wood texture all I have to do is select my desired color and hit the action. Couldn’t possibly be any easier.

Friendly Folding Keychain

So ever since I can remember I have haaaated carrying keychains. They’re way too uncomfortable to keep in your pockets all day, they make it hard to find change when you need it, they scratch up everything around them, be it cell phones, cameras, etc.. and when you really think about it, your standard keychain is really just a terrible design. Why would you subject yourself to that? Well I’ve decided enough is enough and set out to make what I think is a much more friendly and functional keychain. My criteria for this new design are as follows:

- Compact and foldable
- Comfortable in the pocket
- Easy to distinguish from all other possible pocket contents
- Not rough or abrasive
- Aesthetically pleasing
- No jingling!

I found this great little Crank Brothers M5 Tool that was the perfect start. It is designed for cyclists and as such is very lightweight. Not only would it be the perfect housing for my keys, but it also sported a variety of allen wrenches and a philips head screwdriver. Sweet! If that wasn’t motivation enough, it was cheap. I ordered one along with a swanky new Messenger Bag from BackCountry.com.

After all of my goodies arrived in the mail the first step was to take the M5 apart and see what kind of tolerances I would be working with and how everything was going to fit together.

I was pleased to find that my keys fit perfectly so I wouldn’t have to worry about adjusting their lengths. The only part of the keys that really required any modification at all were the little square holes. I imagine there are key blanks out there that have a large enough hole to work right out of the box with no modification at all, but alas, I would have to make my square keys fit a round peg. I grabbed my trusty metal file and went to work.

After I had filed proper size holes into all three keys (2 house keys and one car key) all that was left was to put everything together and admire my work.

I could have just left it at that but I’m picky and didn’t like how much the outside edges of the keys poked out on each side. So, once again, I grabbed my file and went to town re-shaping the exteriors of the key. Normally you would want this wide part on a key to provide proper leverage when turning the lock, but since my keys would be firmly attached to a larger piece this wasn’t a concern.

I filed each key down until it had a nice rounded shape. I also opted to file a little corner into each key so that I could easily flip them out with just the tip of my thumb.

Ta Da! All folded up it measures about 3.5″ x 1.25″ x .75″ For reference, you could fit 2 of them inside the footprint of a credit card. I wanted mine to be as small as possible, but if you didn’t care about a small form factor, or you needed room to accommodate more keys you could always go with the Crank Brothers M-10 which is the same length but twice as fat.

Look how compact and comphy looking this bad boy is! Don’t you just want to slip it into your pocket? Oh yea, that feels niiiiice…

Yak & Yeti on Google Earth!

Ok, so normally I make it a point not to blab about my work too much outside of, well, work… but this was just too cool.

One of the larger projects I’ve had the opportunity to work on in the last year was the Yak & Yeti restaurant in Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We were tasked with the rather daunting job of designing and sourcing all of the theming elements for what was to be the newest addition to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Part of what made this project so interesting for me, other than simply being able to work closely with the people at Disney, was the amount of exposure the final project would receive. One of the aspects I find most frustrating about my job is that I never get to fully appreciate the final product. When designing for a client’s residence or even for a hotel, I rarely get to see the end result, but when it comes to a Disney project this is never the case. Not only has the Yak & Yeti been extensively reviewed and photographed, but now it can be found in Google earth, get this, in 3D!

Disney has gone ahead and modeled their entire park in google earth, so not only can you see the exterior of the building I helped to design, but also most of the smaller details scattered around as well. Fun stuff!

Exterior of the Yak & Yeti Restaurant

Exterior of the Yak & Yeti Restaurant in Google Earth

Rolling Umbrella Cart

Rolling Umbrella Cart in Google Earth

So yea, if you don’t already have Google Earth, you should totally download it. It’s completely free and a lot of fun to play with. If you want to visit the Yak & Yeti in google earth you can find it at:

Latitude: 28°21′30.94″N
Longitude: 81°35′22.32″W

or just open my place-mark here.

Updated Projects! iLED 2.0

I finally got around to updating my totally neglected projects page today. The blog is now totally up to date on my iLED project. Feel free to check out the projects link on the right, or just click here to see the latest (with video!)

Celebrity Robots!

Ok so I just bought this awesome new shirt from The Chop-Shop depicting some of the most famous robots from science fiction, video games, pop-culture, etc…

Buuuut I have a problem. Out of the 51 robots on the shirt I can only identify 22 of them. The 22 robots I recognize are highlited below. Can anybody identify the others? I need haaalp!

*Update*

Yay! Simon has successfully identified:

Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still

Droideka (destroyer droid) from Star Wars I, II, III

*Update*

After a ton of help from Noah we’ve identified all but 7!

Green = Simon
Blue = Noah
Red = Me (I nabbed all the easy ones)

Awesome glasses

Bodum makes some really awesome glass sets. Unlike most design firms out there very few of their products seem to sacrifice function for a neat shape or an “artsy” look. I absolutely love their glasses. As soon as I get some more cashflow I’m going to get the Pavina beer glasses, the sake glass set, and the Marcel tea press.