Christopher Allen

Evocative images of a ripe apple and sunset, cc licensed - Christopher Allen

Tumblr is one of the few sites that lets you point your domain name to their blog service without any additional fee. Combined with its ease of use, and tools like this iPhone app, it is a nice quick entree into blogging. Also useful if you just need a quick free website. - Christopher Allen

"An exotic, private garden level apartment in North Berkeley, California. Spruce Canyon is our name for this Santa Fe/Zen space, undivided and spacious, like a loft at ground level. Spruce Canyon Bed & Breakfast is located one mile north of the UC Berkeley campus (a pleasant walk if you're so inclined), 15 miles from downtown San Francisco (local bus stop with connections to the greater Bay Area and rapid transit just minutes away) and walking distance to magical parks, wonderful shops, cafes, bookstores and excellent restaurants - Christopher Allen

"This manual is revised for use with the 25-10-2009 build of SheepShaver. The build is Universal Binary and will run in Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. We start with the description of a classic setup with all files together in a folder “SheepShaver”. That folder can be anywhere you like, for instance in your Applications folder or in your Home folder. In this setup, with the needed files in the same folder with SheepShaver, no full paths are required for configuration, just file names will work. However, files and folders can be renamed and/or moved to different locations, provided you make sure the file names and/or full paths to the files are entered in SheepShaver preferences. - Christopher Allen

[What about Open Courseware?] "Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare. While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms. - Christopher Allen

"So you have downloaded Basilisk II (Basilisk II w/Audio) or SheepShaver and you are dreaming about Getting your old Mac Software up and running huh? Where to start? where to start? With your modern Mac you start opening up the Emulators and start getting to it only to realize that you need a few things don’t you? - Christopher Allen

"After more experimentation and an inspirational tweet by Kory Westerhold, I came across the magical combination of using TiltShift Generator and Mill Colour. TiltShift Generator is an app that at it’s core gives you tools to simulate the look of tilt-shift photography, but as you experiment with the controls you can easily move beyond the typical “miniature” look that’s synonymous with a tilt-shift lens. What I love about this app is that it helps simulate a stronger depth-of-field than the native “touch to focus” feature gives you and you can also get creative in where that focal point exists. From there the app provides color editing for saturation, brightness, and contrast which, regardless of being only 3 sliders, can dramatically alter the look of your photo. Lastly you have a slider for adding a vignette and then the option to save your photo to the photo library or export (I presume to twitter, but I’ve never used it). - Christopher Allen

"The problem is that what we helped usher in is now creating a bottleneck. So many people are making work and the production costs have been reduced so much, that the volume of work being made can't fit the current release structure. It's overburdening festivals, there's not enough shelf space in retail or rental outlets, and the promise of digital distribution just isn't quite there yet. You have a flood of work, but not enough outlets. - Christopher Allen

"But if somebody isn't out there creating a system wherein independent production can thrive, it will wither...The worst thing that's happened in this community is the death of the independent television producer. We have to make sure that that doesn't happen on what is, right now, a public forum, and not a privately owned forum....Especially with the economic disaster that the last bunch of presidents has left us with, independent film production is shutting down. The film and television industry is finding itself in the position the music industry found itself in [a few years ago]. The difference is they have a chance not to do what the music industry did, which was to ossify and to basically lock themselves in their fortress until they ran out of food. - Christopher Allen

"Troll Touch is the acknowledged leader in touchscreen technology for Apple hardware. We have been touch enabling Macintosh all-in-one desktops, laptops and displays since 1987. Our proprietary, custom designed and manufactured touch sensitive overlays feature PSR-1® or Pressure Sensitive Resistive touchscreen technology and are mounted on either optically clear acrylic or chemically strengthened glass depending on the particular application. It is our ability to incorporate a very thin layer of this touch sensitive material inside or on to the hardware we’re modifying that enables us to do what we do. And since our overlays are analog resistive the customer is afforded maximum latitude in how and where the touchscreen is to be used since activation can be accomplished by any type of soft tipped stylus such as a fingertip, pencil point, eraser or gloved hand. - Christopher Allen

"Mac OS X Server v10.6 introduces the ability to have your HFS+ journal on another drive. The HFS+ journal is heavily used under workloads where files are created, deleted, or when file attributes are changed. Many server workloads have these characteristics. For example, a mail server frequently creates and deletes temporary files in the queue area, and also creates new files containing messages in the user's mailbox directory. These activities create synchronous disk activity, which cause the server to wait until the journal entries are complete. Journaled HFS+ file systems can benefit from placing the journal on either a separate disk, or on a smaller, faster device. - Christopher Allen

"An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise. (PRS revenues in fact break down into 4 categories - Broadcast and Online, Public Performance, Mechanical, International. You can explore this in more detail in this spreadsheet, which contains all our data.) It’s interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ ... - Christopher Allen

"So after probably far too much research, I've come up with the following single register/log in form for Leafy Chat. Log in Sign up The form updates via JavaScript when the user selects a radio button. For the log in form, notice that the submit button says "Log in" and there is a link to retrieve a forgotten password. For the sign up form, the label for the password field prompts the user to "Choose a password" and "Sign up!" while also accepting the terms of service. I like this design because a user can either log in or sign up directly from the homepage and the radio buttons stand out and make the options clear to the user. I love that the page dynamically updates to provide relevant help for the chosen form. Also, the user can easily correct any errors without re-entering their email/password. What do you think? - Christopher Allen

" The Yeti is the most advanced and versatile multi-pattern USB microphone available anywhere. Combining three capsules and four different pattern settings, the Yeti is the ultimate tool for creating amazing recordings, directly to your computer. THX Certified for exceptional sound and performance, the Yeti can capture anything with a clarity & ease unheard of in a USB microphone. The Yeti features Blue's innovative triple capsule array, allowing for recording in stereo or your choice of three unique patterns, including cardioid, omnidirectional, and bidirectional, giving you recording capabilities usually requiring multiple microphones. The Yeti utilizes a high quality analog-to-digital converter to send incredible audio fidelity directly into your computer, a built-in headphone amplifier for zero-latency monitoring, and simple controls for headphone volume, pattern selection, instant mute, and microphone gain located directly on the microphone... - Christopher Allen

"Whether you plan on working in the film industry or just have a passion for all things cinematic, the web is full of resources to help you learn, study and find inspiration for your passion. Here are 100 excellent film sites that will provide you with a range of clips, photos, memorabilia and research archives on everything from amateur productions to big budget Hong Kong blockbusters. - Christopher Allen

[This is the source of those strange little men that I use in my presentations] - Christopher Allen