A couple of weeks ago, me and my good friend of the internets, Jasper Tandy, submitted a couple of photographs to try and get featured in Burst Magazine for Issue 6 which had the title ‘Photography’.

We both got informed last week that we’d both got in and today the magazine was released. Head over to Burst Magazine’s site to download the PDF!

So stoked! Thanks Burst

It’s to long to put the whole post out, so if you’re interested in anyway, you can click through and read on :)

Bad: Neglect

I feel that i have completely neglected my blog and also my personal site over the past few months. I hardly ever have the time to give it the focus, patience and effort it needs to function as my site. This annoys me. I’ve been doing quite a lot of new work recently but because i’ve been non stop with everything, i’ve not even added it to my portfolio.

Things have to change and fast. With all my blogging time being spent on Deaf Pigeon, and getting that site running smoothly. This site/blog has suffered drastically. I’ve had to remove my Scrapbook of findings because it was ruining the dashboard of my wordpress install and making it damn near impossible to even find an original post, which really got on my nerves. If you still want to see these images you can go here.

Bad: Xbox

I don’t spend that much time on my xbox. It’s generally been used to play either MW2, Black Ops or Medal Of Honor. I’ve never played the campaign’s on any of these games as they were purely LIVE based entertainment for me when i was gaming with friends. Unfortunately, i switched it on the other day and i had the red ring of death and couldn’t do anything about it. The funny thing is… i don’t even miss it. The one thing that i do miss is the streaming of music, films and photos from my Macbook Pro via Connect360. Other than that, not having a working console is just another thing out of my life that can distract me from being outside in the fresh air when i have free time.

It’s more like a bad and good point if i’m honest.

Good: Deaf Pigeon

Now for the good stuff. Deaf Pigeon is my fixed gear blog, i’ve been running it for nearly a year now, and i love it. The site looks lovely, the blog is fresh and always changing, i’ve just had some t-shirts and stickers made up that you can buy. I’m really happy with how they came out.

I’m organising an alleycat for the summer (to coincide with my 23rd birthday), i’m getting to meet loads of new people within the scene, and all in all, i’m feeling like 2011 so far has been an amazing year for Deaf Pigeon. We’re on the twitter (@deafpigeon) and we’re on facebook aswell now. Follow us, like us, grab the RSS, come to the race, buy stuff… do all of them, it’s up to you :)

Good: PRJCTGRZLY

PRJCTGRZLY/Learn Love, is something that i’ve been part of since the first zine that i created for it. It’s now grown to having some clothing available, stickers, and currently planning out content and design for the second zine. This is a properly cool concept, and i love being part of it. It’s taking off in a big way and if you’re anyway inclined towards postive messaging and fresh design, you need to go check them out.

But first you can have a look at the newest video, showing off the spring line of clothing.

You can read loads more about them and get in touch with the guys over on their site. www.prjctgrzly.co.uk. I definitely recommend it :)

Good: Yachts.

Since the end of my old band ‘Pencil In’, i’ve been lucky enough to create a new band with 2 of my very good mates, which has turned out to be amazing. Totally different in every way and definitely the way i wanted to go musically.

We’re called ‘Yachts’, and we’re a three piece. We’ve currently only played 2 gigs and i’m super stoked to announce that we’re main support for Enemies, who are one of my favourite and one of my main inspirations as a drummer. That’s going down on the 19th April at The Mad Ferret in Preston town. If you’re about… i hope to see you there. As far as i’m aware, it’s £4 in.

As of right now, we don’t have any kind of information/photo/music/etc. online. We’re planning on getting into the studio on the 8th April to record as much as we can and as soon as that’s down, we’ll be making a facebook, bandcamp, etc… exciting! :)

Good: Bike

With the weather in Preston being pretty dire at best, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve had some sun and some warmth to go ride in. Last night was the best so far this year. 3 of us covered 30 miles in a trip over to Rufford and back. Sun was beating down, awesome roads, awesome company. I couldn’t have wished for it to have been any different. I’m now nursing a set of jelly legs and a stiff back, but that should be gone shortly… i hope!

I’ve also acquired a new bike. A lovely vintage Raleigh Ti. I blogged about this on Deaf Pigeon a while back when i got it. It’s a very different setup to my main bike and it’s taking some getting used to, but i think i’m making progress with it. Click through the link below to see more detail photo’s of it.

WARNING: Very long blog post ;)

CSS3, HTML5 and Typography

Maybe about a week ago, after a few weeks/months of using Museo, i just started to dislike the look of my site and i even started to doubt myself using Myriad as my body font. Originally, i used Helvetica as the main body font, but this quickly becomes very boring and similar. I decided to switch this right back to the beginning of my personal site (which, when i checked, has been live for nearly 6 years!). This site, as of writing this, is using Lucida Grande as the main body font, but with Helvetica as the heading font on some pages (sometimes Lucida in a large size looks a little weird).

As for the HTML5 side of my site. I use my site as a sort of testing ground for new HTML5 elements that i am learning how to use. There’s no better place to learn things than in a real world situation in my opinion.

When i first built my site in HTML5, i didn’t really know what i was properly doing, so it was all a big learning curve. Now, i feel like i’ve learnt a lot more, so i rebuilt most of the pages, the biggest change being my Portfolio and About page. These 2 pages are by no means equal in importance. My portfolio is obviously the most important page on my site and i’ve never ever had a page that i was 100% happy with to display my work. This has changed. I now *LOVE* my portfolio page. The work on there is 10 times what it used to be and the way it’s presented on the page is now exactly how i wanted it in the first place, but never knew how to do it. The about page is now a lot tidier and easier to read thanks to the columned layout and smaller picture that was originally taking away from the text.

There is still so much for me to learn with regards to CSS3 and HTML5 and i will be striving to build a lot more sites using them.

New Work

I’ve been pretty busy recently with some awesome new clients and few properly brilliant projects. One being PRJCTGRZLY which i am completely stoked about. This should be dropping early next week along with my very first iPhone app hopefully :) so very excited about this. You can see all the new work that i’ve been producing on my Portfolio but I’ve also included some of it below for you all to have a look at.

Empty

As you may have seen below, there is no comments form anymore. This is a personal decision based on a conversation that i had with one of my good friends Jasper (who also removed comments from his blog – check it out, it’s beautiful).

I’ve always hated captcha’s on blog comment forms and i could never be bothered to go and block spam comments on my blog (i was always too busy doing other more important things), so every morning i would open my inbox to see the best part of 200+ spam comment email notifications sat in a little folder, annoying me! Mixed in with all the spam, i would maybe find 4 real comments. So i decided to get rid. Sorry, that’s not the only reason, one of the other reasons is that it kind of looked a bit cluttered having a comments form on every blog post i put out.

Forms aren’t exactly the prettiest of things anyway, especially when you encounter the cross browser styling problems. I know this is changing quickly and if i put the effort in, i could have a beautiful looking comments form, but this really isn’t high on my priority list. Maybe in the future i will sit down and completely redo the blog template, but right now, i love my blog design and it will definitely be staying.

Fixed Gear

The EP is called ‘When All That’s Left Is All That’s Left Behind’ and there are 4 tracks on it:
1. I Blaspheme
2. The Subtle Transition
3. Excess To Impress
4. Back And To The Left

There’s a little video for your eyes aswell:

The previews of them are available on our Myspace or Last.fm or our new site http://pencilin.co.uk. You can follow us on Twitter.

I’ve not designed and built anything for myself to stretch my wings for a long while, so i decided to put together a new blog dedicated to all things fixed gear, the main reason for this is because of my new found hobby obsession with fixie’s.

The internets is awash with awesome Fixed Gear Companies / blogs / photos / videos / clothing etc… and i wanted a place (other than my RSS) to keep a bunch of the stuff that i like. So i created ‘Deaf Pigeon‘… My very own fixed gear ‘blog’. It’s more of a resource for me to keep stuff that i like relating to fixed gear bikes and riding.

It’s only in it’s infancy at the moment, but i’ve already got 2 other authors (not including myself) who update the blog with things that they find online aswell. If you want to join in, just get in touch and i’ll sort you out with a login!

There is a page with a big bunch of links on there aswell so that it’s easy to keep track of fixed gear companies and other sites that are online. Also a really good what to keep track of local fixed gear rides and events.

I’ve already started to pool a selection of my favorite fixed gear bikes, this way i can look back over the bikes that have inspired mine. If you’ve got a photo of your bike and you want it put on there then don’t hesitate to send it over!

Check it out here…

Deaf Pigeon

He has also linked straight to my Javascript, Images and RSS feed. The entirity of the slideshow on my homepage has been copied directly with the addition of a <h1> above it.

The triple column box underneath has also been ripped from my site and the header is more or less the same, bar some CSS styling changes.

I don’t mind people using my site as inspiration, after all, i was featured on the CSS Awards and other reputable web design blogs and galleries, but when you completely steal my code and images, but not even steal them properly, HOTLINK them!! i get a little bit annoyed!!

Look at my code, take bits if you want, expand on it and make it your own!! I’m still learning, but i will never just go onto someone else’s site and ‘CMD+C’ – ‘CMD+V’ an entire html document!!

If you want to know how i built my site, then please ask me! Don’t just go and completely rip the entirety of my site off, change some basic CSS and then pass it off as your own!

Also… if you’re going to Hotlink one of my images, don’t expect it to not get changed! ;)

I was due and upgrade from O2, so i jumped at this chance and went to get my brand new, shiny, iPhone 3GS, 16Gb in white. I don’t know what i did with a black 8Gb 3G all this time. The white one is just something else… its so much more!! Love it. Now if only i actually had some time to play with it?!! Grrrr!

Everything with my new iPhone was going swimmingly, right up until i realised that there wasn’t a jailbreak for the firmware version 3.1.3 yet! It was at that point that i lost a little bit of my excitement for my 3GS :( Definitely not happy about having to use the standard iPhone interface. Its not ugly, not by a long way, but i need my custom theme/icons back and fast. Hopefully the awesome guys over at iPhone Dev Blog will have a working jailbreak very soon.

There really isn’t any other reason for me to jailbreak my iPhone apart from themes and icons now that i’ve got a 3GS. The only reasons that i’ve previously jailbroken were to install a video camera for my 3G, which of course the 3GS has as standard now (thank god), A YouTube video downloader so that i could watch some video’s without having to wait for it to stream everytime and finally, an advanced ‘Settings’ app which allowed for certain icons to be hidden from the springboard amongst other functionality, which again, was only so that i could keep my springboard looking clean and tidy.

I mean standard apps such as ‘Stocks’, ‘Compass’ and ‘Voice Memo’s’ are just cluttering up my springboard… i don’t want them on my iPhone, i’ve used them all once, just to see what they’re about, and then found myself looking for the ‘x’ in the top left of the icon to try and delete it. With the apps that i’ve just listed, this can’t happen as standard, so using my jailbroken 3G, i used to just hide them and that’d be it. A nice, clean, tidy and perfectly happy iPhone…. Never again, or not for the time being at least, will i be able to have my sexy icons and third party apps back… i’ll have to wait until a crash has been found by the iPhone Dev Guys, within the new firmware before i can jailbreak again.

Have a look at these screenshots below. The one one the left is my perfectly jailbroken 3G and the one on the right is my standard 3GS… Now which one looks better?

Obviously there are some app differences on the homescreen but the main difference is the icons and the general look and feel of my iPhone. I usually love Apple and their icons, but i think they really could have allowed for the customisation side of the iPhone. One of the best things about a Mac is how good icons look on your desktop and within Finder. I think that Apple have definatly missed an opportunity with not allowing for certain user customisation. Its a bit annoying to say the least.

That said, i still love the iPhone. I think as a piece of hardware, its absolutely stunning and the 3GS is amazing to have.

Anyone want to recommend me any new apps out recently?

THE INCREDIBLE SPONGE CAKE!!!

On the back of the ‘C M Y Kake’, we decided to make another cake… It was decided that we would create an Incredible Hulk cake this week. It has turned into a challenge for us to decide what type of cake to make next.

Fortunately, this time, the dye actually worked unlike our previous cakey experiment and we ended up with the perfect green sponge and black icing hair. Plus we also used a very tasty, vanilla buttercream filling between the layers instead of jam.

The Incredible Hulk cake was very, very tasty in comparison to our C M Y Kake, because we didn’t pile a litre of food colouring into it :) and i’ll take a punt at saying that our cake was tastier than this dude aswell ;)

We’re thinking maybe a Wonder Woman or an ‘Iron Man‘ cake next time? Who knows? Any Idea’s?

I must also state that this product is in no way related to or endorsed by Marvel ;) Just thought it best that i clear my arse.

Here’s my little office setup at the moment… Loving the new wireless Apple keyboard and Magic Mouse. So much better than the other wireless mice that i’ve had. The main bonus for me is that i can use the Magic Mouse on my shiny IKEA desk without a mouse mat, or something to put it on. This obviously makes for a nicer work area, not having some monstrous cutting mat or magazine sat on the surface constantly.

Can’t not have some kind of sweets in or on your desk, so i went for the original and best ‘Uncle Joes Mint Balls’. They’re legendary. If you’re even anywhere that you can pick some up, i definitely recommend doing so. You’ll never look back i can promise you that.

I’ve been on a mad spree of making home made cakes over the past month or so and me and the missus decided to make an ode to design in sponge cake format. A CMYK sponge cake :)

It wasn’t exactly very difficult to make, but it was definitely a lot harder than a straight up sponge cake, the pictures below kind of give that away, but it was properly good fun.

What we did was basically split a normal sponge cake mixture into 4 separate bowls and added Blue, Pink, Yellow and Black food colouring to each one, gave each a quick mix and then put each bowls worth of mixture into a cake tin and baked in the oven, as usual. We then put each layer on cake on top of each other, with a properly big helping of raspberry jam to hold them together and finished it off with a thick dusting of icing sugar…

Here are the results of our CMYK sponge cake experiment.

Lovely :)

It was a shame that the pink dye didn’t actually colour the sponge, and that the blue wasn’t exactly vivid, but as a bit of fun, i think it worked pretty well. Next time i try something like this i will have to remember to use some more dye with the blue and pink.

Oh and by the way, the amount of E numbers in that cake was unbelievable, it wasn’t for anyone a little bit health conscious… but it tasted pretty good.

What kind of cake should i try next? i was tempted by making an ‘Incredible Hulk‘ cake ;)