Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts Reid Beels is a communication design student at PNCA in Portland, Oregon. He enjoys designing for print and the web, writing php code, and taking far too many photographs. Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:39:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 en Accelerator Diagrams http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/accelerator-diagrams/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/accelerator-diagrams/#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:38:34 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/accelerator-diagrams/ For my undergraduate design thesis at PNCA I’m working on explaining particle acceleration through design and interactivity. Using the International Linear Collider as a model, I created diagrams for each step in a collision experiment. They’re intended to help define a visual language for the project and will soon be animated and used as the basis for an interaction prototype. Read on to see them up close.Electron ProductionPositron ProductionDampingAccelerationCollisionDetection

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/accelerator-diagrams/feed/ Welcome to 3.0 http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/welcome-to-30/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/welcome-to-30/#comments Thu, 11 Oct 2007 07:25:55 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/welcome-to-30/ I’ve just launched the new version of this site and it comes with many exciting changes, both in design and under the hood. The front page now acts as more of a portal, aggregating content from the blog, portfolio, flickr and twitter. The portfolio has been completely rebuilt using Django and is much easier for me to update. I’ll be putting together a more complete introduction to the new site once DNS settles down a bit. Stay tuned.

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/10/welcome-to-30/feed/ The New Plazes Makes Me Sad http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/the-new-plazes-makes-me-sad/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/the-new-plazes-makes-me-sad/#comments Thu, 31 May 2007 20:53:56 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/the-new-plazes-makes-me-sad/ I’ve been using Plazes for a while now to track my location as I wander around with my laptop. The concept is really cool. They have a desktop client that figures out your location based on a database of network ids and such. If it doesn’t know about the place where you are, it asks you, and the information is added for anyone else who visits that place.Earlier today, the client asked to be upgraded and I obliged. Moments later, the new interface appeared. The first thing that I noticed was that the window was slightly transparent. There’s no real reason for transparency here, so it struck me as another casualty of Apple making certain UI effects at bit too easy.The interface has been simplified (a lot) from past incarnations of the client, which I see as a good thing. Instead of displaying every possible informational field about a plaze, it now simply shows the name and address of your current location. It seems that the neat little map that used to show up in the client menu has gone away, but it was never all that useful anyway since it was at a pretty wide zoom.Overall, the new interface itself struck me as a bit too web-like for a desktop app.  I’m not entirely against the web-on-desktop thing, but slapping a logo banner across the top of the preferences window seems to be taking it a bit too far. Another interface change that irks me is the fact that the client no longer offers the option to hide its dock icon and that its main window opens automatically on startup. One of the things that I love(d) about plazes was that I didn’t ever have to pay attention to it. The client ran in the background and updated my location whenever I connected to a network. Now, it seems intent on demanding more interaction.This demand seems possibly to be linked to a new field that now appears below the location information. “What are you doing?” it asks. Hmmmm. The combination of status with location is not a bad idea, but it just gives me one more place to update my status information. If Plazes would pull my status information from Twitter and sync it with my location, that would be ideal. I recognize that the two services are competing, and that plazes offers both status and location, but I don’t have any contacts who are actively using plazes for status stuff.Another vanished bit of functionality seems to be Plazes’ tight integration with flickr. It showed up in the days before flickr’s own geocoding feature and allowed you to assign photos to plazes that you had visited.  Since most of my photos are already on flickr, this made it incredibly easy to add photos to plazes as I edited them. Once a photo was associated with a plaze, it would show up as that plaze’s icon. In the new version of the site, photos are still possible, but they have to be uploaded directly to Plazes’ servers. A side effect of this is all of the photos that I spent time linking from flickr to my plazes no longer appear. Poot.Despite these (and a few other) annoyances, I’m still hopeful for Plazes. This is a huge upgrade that they’re pushing out and it makes great strides towards becoming simple enough for the average user to understand. With something this large, It’s completely understandable that there would be bugs that emerge and sacrifices that had to be made. I just hope that the features that brought me to plazes in the first place manage to come back in the coming weeks.

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/the-new-plazes-makes-me-sad/feed/ Transfer Complete http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/transfer-complete/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/transfer-complete/#comments Sun, 06 May 2007 09:02:39 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/transfer-complete/ Ferris Lights
This post is only on the new server. If you see it, the DNS is being friendly.

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/05/transfer-complete/feed/ On Libraries http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/04/on-libraries/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/04/on-libraries/#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2007 09:52:04 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/04/on-libraries/ Ashland Public Library c2001The fifteen branches of the Jackson County Library System closed today due to a lack of funding. I’ve spent countless hours both in the Ashland library and using its vast resources. I’ve known librarians for years who are now without jobs. This closure troubles me greatly.

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/04/on-libraries/feed/ Frankenpower http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/frankenpower/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/frankenpower/#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:05:01 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/frankenpower/ Instructable Screenshot The AC adapter on my Powerbook started shorting out last week but I could usually fiddle with it and get it to work. Yesterday, in the middle of such fiddling, there was a little spark and it started to burn through the casing (and my finger). Having nothing much to lose, and not wanting to shell out $80 for a new adapter, I cracked open the case, cut out the offending section of cable, and spliced it back together.

Everything worked out and now I have a fully functional power cord once again. The electrical tape give it a kind of evil chic look. If anyone else has a similar problem with their power adapter, or if they just want to see how I did it, I put together an instructable of the process.

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/frankenpower/feed/ MacGyver Image Resizing http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/macgyver-image-resizing/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/macgyver-image-resizing/#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2007 06:44:28 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/macgyver-image-resizing/ MacGyver Resizing You’ve got 15 seconds to take a screenshot and resize it for use in a post, a Mac with a clean OS install, and a paper clip. You double click the file on the desktop and up pops your image in Preview. That’s no good, Preview can’t resize images… or can it?

Even though Preview doesn’t seem to allow you to resize an image, it can be done. Just zoom out a few steps or resize the window (Preview will fit the image to the window by default) and fire off a quick command-shift-4. That’s right: take a screenshot of the screenshot. Then, just open the new screenshot (the metascreenshot, if you will), save it in your preferred format, and upload away!

p.s. If you’re a little more patient and want a lot more power, there’s always the incredibly awesome Picnik.

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/03/macgyver-image-resizing/feed/ Text Masks with sIFR3 http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/text-masks-with-sifr3/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/text-masks-with-sifr3/#comments Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:40:17 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/text-masks-with-sifr3/ sIFR Masking, thumbnail I’ve been using sIFR for a while to get pretty typography for my headers on this site. As part of my latest design refresh, I upgraded to the beta of sIFR 3 and discovered something cool in the process. It’s possible to embed an image within the flash movie used by sIFR and use the dynamic text to mask the image, creating some nifty effects. The gradienty text in the header (which displays my current Twitter status) is done using this technique and I’m exploring how it can be used for other fun things. The drawbacks to this is that you have to create a separate flash file for every image you want to mask and that file is also separate from any other sIFR stuff that you happen to be doing. The same effect could be acheived by using server-side tech to generate images (which would be a bit smaller than the flash file), but the ease-of-use and ability to modify the text at runtime makes sIFR masking interesting. If you’re curious as to how to pull it off (even if you’ve never touched flash before), read on.

  1. Set up your font properties as per the sIFR instructions.
  2. Return to Scene 1 by clicking the icon in the upper left of the window.sIFR Masking, part 1
  3. Create a new layer.
  4. Drag your new layer to the bottom of the layer stack.sIFR Masking, part 2
  5. With the new layer selected, paste the image you want to mask. Since the flash movie is enlarged by sIFR, the image you paste should bleed off the right side enough to accomodate whatever text you want to render.Picture 6.png
  6. Right click (or control-click) on the ‘font’ layer and choose ‘Mask’ from the contextual menu.sIFR Masking, part 3
  7. That’s it! Just export your movie and use it like any other sIFR movie.sIFR Masking, part 4
]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/text-masks-with-sifr3/feed/ WordPress 2.1 needs more developer documentation http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/wordpress-21-needs-more-developer-documentation/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/wordpress-21-needs-more-developer-documentation/#comments Fri, 02 Feb 2007 06:41:32 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/wordpress-21-needs-more-developer-documentation/ I installed WordPress 2.1 today, eager to make use of some of the new plugin features only to find that there isn’t really any documentation on them. I’d like to echo the sentiment mentioned here and say that WordPress really does need stronger developer documentation. I want to be able to look to the documentation not to decrypt the innter workings of some new feature, but to get an idea of what is possible.

]]> http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/02/wordpress-21-needs-more-developer-documentation/feed/ There’s a New Streetcar in Town http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/01/theres-a-new-streetcar-in-town/ http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/01/theres-a-new-streetcar-in-town/#comments Sat, 20 Jan 2007 10:14:30 +0000 Reid Beels http://reidbeels.com/posts/2007/01/theres-a-new-streetcar-in-town/ Unbranded

More photos

Driving past the streetcar yards the other day, I spotted a brand new train being loaded on to the tracks. It’s bright green and had a more rounded, bubblelike, nose than the current model. Presumably this is one of the trains that they built the new siding for last year while I was here.

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