This blog has moved! I'll put a redirect here eventually but for now, head over to AndyAffleck.com and check it out! The new blog has comments too (for now, anyway) and a temporary new look (until I design a new one). If you visit this site in a newsreader, the feed URL will have changed as well. Surf on over and use the Subscribe link in the sidebar.
I still love this design but I'm also sick of it. So, it's either being retired or at least put away for awhile.
See you at the new domain!
This blog has moved! I'll put a redirect here eventually but for now, head over to AndyAffleck.com and check it out! The new blog has comments too (for now, anyway) and a temporary new look (until I design a new one). If you visit this site in a newsreader, the feed URL will have changed as well. Surf on over and use the Subscribe link in the sidebar.
I still love this design but I'm also sick of it. So, it's either being retired or at least put away for awhile.
See you at the new domain!
I got an iPhone. I got swept up in the hype and did what I swore I would not do: I got a 1.0 device. I knew full well that 2.0 would be far better and that by getting 1.0, I would not be able to get 2.0. But on the other hand, while the very first iPod was not at all compelling to me (I didn't get an iPod until the 3rd generation), the iPhone is a very compelling first generation device. And in the two weeks I've had it, I have come to depend on it. It's my grocery list, it gives me directions to get places, it lets me take pictures when I don't have my camera with me, it's my iPod, I watch movies on it, I watch TV shows on it, I find myself watching YouTube on it, something I never did before, I show off photographs on it, I follow stocks on it (why on why did I not buy Apple when it was $12/share?), I surf on it... oh, and I also use it as a phone!
A lot of people have complained about the AT&T part of things but I was already in an AT&T contract so I had no qualms about that particular move. I firmly believe that all of the cellular providers are fundamentally evil so I really don't see the downside of this one versus that one.
I've even submitted my first hint to MacOSXHints...
A few blogs and podcasts have made my iPhone experience that much better. They are as follows:
Technorati Tags: iPhone
Some of the books that Take Control publishes (not mine, in this case) are being heavily discounted this month. Details may be found here. I highly recommend all titles, not just my own! I have found these books to be incredibly useful in many different situations.
Technorati Tags: Macintosh, MacOSX, TakeControl
HoudahSpot (I haven't yet actually seen anything explaining the name yet) does what Spotlight (in Tiger) doesn't: presents powerful searching in an understandable interface. To use Spotlight to do the same thing, you must learn arcane strings. I've done it in the past and had mixed results. With HoudahSpot, I was able to put together some of the more complicated searches I've tried in the past in a fraction of the time and they work. Also the searches are live so you can refine (or unrefine, if you go too far) to really zero in on what you need. All in all, I'm impressed.
NOTE: If you’re seeing this on June 16, 2006 head over to MacZOT, you might be able to get a Free copy of HoudahSpot
Search easily in Tiger, Mac OS X, with HoudahSpot
I just realized that I never posted a note that I updated my e-book, Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac. This new edition covers GarageBand 3 and talks about enhanced podcaasting and cleans up a lot of small things that needed cleaning. (UPDATE: I did post it. Just two entries below this one. Clearly I am not on my blogging a-game right now.)
Along with the release of the updated book, I have launched a new podcast companion, Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac: The Podcast, to the book to help flesh out concepts in the book. Subscribe in iTunes to Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac.
Technorati Tags: Podcasting, TakeControlBooks, MacOS X, GarageBand, Mac, Writing
John Siracusa on the Fifth Birthday of MacOS X: Five years of Mac OS X
This is hysterical (and echoes so much of what I have seen on various comment threads/discussion boards): How Conservatives Argue: A Case Study
Technorati Tags: politics
If you're excited about the idea of creating your very own podcast but need help getting started or working efficiently, you can now hop on the podcasting bandwagon with the start-to-finish guidance in our latest ebook, "Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac."
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/podcasting-mac.html>
Written by long-time podcaster Andy Williams Affleck, "Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac" leads you along the path to podcasting success from beginning to end. Andy starts by helping you think about your topic, format, and polish; assemble the best audio gear; and understand the pros and cons of recording in four popular programs - Audio Hijack Pro, GarageBand, Audacity, and SoundStudio. You'll find step-by-step directions for how to record in each of those programs, along with instructions on how to edit your recording by mixing in additional audio and eliminating any awkward bits. Andy also explains how (and why) to encode and tag your podcast file. Finally, he discusses how to choose a podcast publishing tool, offers essential advice about bandwidth costs, and gives you seven ways to promote your podcast.
The ebook is available on its own for $10 or in a $17.50 bundle with "Take Control of Recording in GarageBand."
Book Details:
"Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac" by Andy Williams Affleck
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/podcasting-mac.html>
PDF format, 70 pages, free 19-page sample available
Publication date: December 1, 2005
Price: $10
ISBN: 1-933671-06-8
Ordering Info
-------------
To order, visit the Take Control Web site and click the Buy button, or just click the link below.
At the end of the order process, click the Download button to
download the Zip archive that contains the PDF of the book. If you
have any trouble, check out our Ordering Tips at:
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/faq.html#ordering0>
Technorati Tags: books, iTunes, Mac, Macintosh, MacOSX, podcast, podcasting, TakeControl, puppy
I've posted about these in the past but back then it was a very manual process. Now, Jim Heid has posted an Automator action to create these on the fly. Here is one I did for our vacation to Rhode Island and Fire Island last summer.
Tom's Hardware Guide Columns: The Browser Wars are hereby Over!
You have been put on notice: the browser wars are over. Moz doesn't matter. IE is irrelevant. Opera is doing a swan song. Why? In a word, iTunes. And the implications for everyone from Web publishers to you, the hyper-clocked tricked-out geek, are enormous. In fact, being the hyper geek means you can cash in on this trend now. You heard it here first.
A very interesting take on browsers, iTunes, etc. One quibble though, he claims that people get upset with Microsoft extends a standard but not when Apple does. There has been a good amount of anger at Apple for how they extended RSS without opening up what they were doing to public comment and only releasing it when it was a fait accompli.
Technorati Tags: iTunes, podcasting, broswers
My latest article for TidBITS has been published: TidBITS: Apple Releases iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting Support. In it, I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly about Apple's support for Podcasting in the latest iTunes.
Technorati Tags: iTunes, Apple, podcasting
Joe Clark's presentation from this year's @Media conference in London: Zoom the Web: The problem of giant fonts. Joe has excellent ideas and this doesn't disappoint. It's nice to see that he confirms and idea we've had for improving the alternative style sheets for DisabilityInfo.gov (that of going to a single column layout from three which does not work at all well with large font layouts). Luckily, with CSS, this is easily done. Try doing that with a table-based site.
Technorati Tags: accessibility, @media
It's Liquid Design Advocacy Day!
These really have me thinking. I just completed a site design which was fixed and centered and there's no turning back there, but I will strongly consider this for the next go 'round. For me, it's purely aesthetic. I just like the way fixed looks. I like lots of white space on either side framing the side on larger screens. And, I admit, it's also easier on me as the designer (except for the part where IE/Win doesn't support min-width). Anyway, something to think about...
I have been having a lot of trouble lately with noise on my audio in on my 15" 1.25GHz PowerBook. I use a Griffin iMic for audio-in as the built-in line-in port has never worked and I could never part with my laptop long enough to get it fixed (though, I really should). I figured out that I could switch to the right USB port from the left and eliminate the problem but today both ports began showing the problem. So, I did some googling and found this post on Accelerate Your Mac:
News Archive for March 8th, 2004 in which it was suggested I check out Apple's Audio/MIDI Setup utility. I did and, sure enough, the USB port had gotten itself set to 1ch-16bit instead of 2ch-16bit. Changing it back fixed the problem.
UPDATE: the culprit was Audacity. When I ran it, I changed some setting so that iMic was mono instead of stereo. This changed the port the iMic was plugged into to 1ch-8bit and left it like that forever more. Setting Audacity to stereo fixes the problem. Of course, my headset has only the one microphone so setting it to mono was a fairly obvious (to me, at least) choice. Now I know better. I generally record in stereo and mix down afterwards anyway.
AIRTIGHT - Flickr Related Tag Browser is one of the most interesting web applications I have seen in some time. Very elegant and simple. I have been losing a lot of time with this tonight. Which reminds me... I have pictures to upload from our trip to Boston and environs last week.
limon :: by Laura Lemay :: tags, tags, tags, and marsedit: A very cool AppleScript for use with MarsEdit to put tags in blog entries. I'm trying it out here for the first time.
Hey! It works!
Giles Turnbull writes an excellent overview of implementing the Getting Things Done system on the mac called Getting Things Done with Your Mac.
I've been working through this system and bending my laptop and my personal habits and getting new tools and testing testing testing testing. I plan to say more about it here in the not too distant future. But I still want to finalize some of how I do things and commit to what I use and how I use it. I'm still double-using some things to make sure that A is really better than B and so forth.
I did a dumb thing and blew away my DNS info for raggedcastle.com for a few days. But we're back and no worse for the wear. Hopefully no email bounced. If it did, resend.
RI Secretary of State announces RSSonate:
"RSSonate (pronounced ‘resonate’) was developed by the Secretary of State’s office to provide easy access to constantly updated data, which users can then use to create customized information. For example, users will have constant, real-time access to databases listing such information as who is lobbying at the State House and which businesses have incorporated in the state. At the same time, users will have the power to generate information by combining data from separate databases. For example, users would be able to create a data feed letting them know if there are any lobbyists who incorporated a new business."
Mac Geekery - Play AAC music on your TiVo Hot damn! It worked!
I downloaded a lame pkg and installed it and it did not work. TiVo saw the music but didn't play AAC files, just MP3. But it at least saw them. So, I checked and, sure enough, I had a newer version in /sw/bin/ courtesty of fink. So, I symlinked /usr/bin/lame to that one and then it worked just fine.
It won't play anything purchased at the iTunes Music Store thanks to the DRM. Not sure how much I want to worry about that right now. At the very least, we can finally finish ripping all of the CDs in AAC and put them away in the garage in boxes and get back that wall where they are now.
In Getting Real, Step 1: No Functional Spec (Signal vs. Noise) Jason Fried writes that user interface design must be an up-front requirement, not something that is done in response to some abstract functional specifications document.
More about sunday's brunch, this time from the Blogdigger Development Blog
A partial list of who was at today's Scripting News Brunch.
Mark O'Neill explains Skype's connections methodology. There are very important implications here for anyone doing Skype recording for podcasts or other purposes. It also explains why my interview with Dave Winer was much clearer than he had likely experienced: I wasn't at home where I am NAT'd but in a more open network (and faster, for that matter).
Brent Simmons sums up Podcasting quite well.
inessential.com: Weblog: ‘The value of podcasting’:
"It’s kind of like the difference between email and a fax—a fax is a picture of text, while email is text. A podcast is the sound of words.But all of that is beside the point—the value of podcasting is that people enjoy it. They like the spoken sound of words."
I'm moving the podcast into its own weblog. So, for future episodes, please check out the new URL (http://www.podcrumbs.com/) and new feed (http://www.podcrumbs.com/index.xml).
I'll post an audio note tomorrow here for people using iPodder or its ilk who won't actually see this text.
Well, I can tell when my podcast gets released and it's clear at least a few people are listening (or at least catching, if not listening).
In doing some further research, I found Dave Slusher's Recipe for Podcasting which matches pretty closely what I have done. I should also point out that Hugo Schotman (who references Dave's entry) is also a pioneer of figuring this stuff out.
As a number of people have pointed out, none of this would be possible without the free software from Rogue Amoeba (and, in my case, their commercial Audio Hijack Pro which I now swear by) nor the incredibly useful SoundFlower and SoundFlowerBed.
I hope the folks at Rogue Amoeba are paying attention (I suspect they are). The market is 100% ripe for a new application which merges the functionality of all of these tools together into a master Podcasting recording and sequencing application. Imagine being able to pull all of the media elements, the OPML show notes information, and recording/mixing capabilities into a single application?
It was a lot of work and a lot of googling to cobble the system I have together. If it weren't for the sites referenced above and in the previous post on this and the brief glimpses Adam Curry provides on his own setup in the Daily Source Code, I would still be casting about for how this is all done. If somebody makes the technical setup to Podcasting easy, the benefits would be amazing.
I'm just sayin'...
I figured out how to record Skype calls. I've seen a lot of confusion on this so hopefully this will help someone else. If nothing else, this will serve to remind me later when I forget what i did.
Basically, I started with the information from Engadget's Podcasting Article as a starting point.
Using the tools they specify, I set the following:
System Preferences Settings: Sound input: Soundflower (2ch), Sound output: Headphones.
Line In: Input Device: iMic USB audio (my sound input port is dead so I use an iMic), Output: Soundflower (2ch).
Skype: Audio Input and Output: Soundflower (2ch)
Audio Hijack Pro: Created a new entry in the left panel called "Skype Conversation" and set it to hijack an audio device as follows: Input: Soundflower (2ch), Output: Built-in Audio, Headphones.
Once all of that was set, I was able to place a Skypeout call to my home phone and was able to record it (and hear myself at the same time :)
Special thanks to this site which, while in Italian, had enough pictures for me to figure out what to do.
For a screen shot of all of the various settings windows at once, see this screen snapshot.
Chris in Just Some Thoughts does a shout-out to me to read something Tantek wrote in his blog...
Technorati is a service that follows the threads of conversations going on in the web. In this post, Tantek reports on some questions thrown out at a recent converence regarding the relevant sorting and presentation of inforamation. Of course it is focused on blog info, but the questions are interesting in general, too.
Very interesting. While I read this, specifically the line where Scoble says that he doesn't watch much TV anymore now that there's blogs to read, I was listening to the latest Daily Source Code by Adam Curry and at that exact moment he said that thanks to podcasting, he barely never watches TV anymore. (Cue eerie music).
Anyway, Chris and I have been talking a lot lately about Social Bookmarking (Spurl, del.icio.us and such) and what they can do, what they mean. Today I just started playing with a semi-public beta of a social task management site, 43 Things...
In the beginning, we had virtual communities based on mailing lists and newsgroups (one such community is the Friends Zone which will be 10 years old in February) and some more niche groups in MOOs/MUDs. Then we had more web-based communities especially blogs. LiveJournal, for example, is a blogging service which greatly facilitates people posting about each other. Movable Type introduced the trackback system as a way of having something like that but I've never seen it used as powerfully as LiveJournal uses it. Somewhere in there we also had group services start like ecircle and, Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. Then we got social networking via Friendster and Orkut. Now we have social bookmarks and social task management.
And if you've ever listened to a podcast, you know how self-referential that community is as well.
Chris and I need to have one of our patented long-talks-over-beer about what this all means. Maybe I should trick him into doing this as a podcast. Yeah, that'll work...
My Spurl bookmarks (also appearing in the right sidebar on this page)
Wow... ten years ago this month I started jotting down interesting things I wanted to share on my website. I just remember seeing some stuff I wanted to remember and thought it would be interesting to put them on my website as a sort of public journal. I don't know where I got the idea or why but I did. Granted, my second entry was four months later or so but, hey, it started in November 1994 (see the link to the archives on the sidebar). So, happy 10th anniversary to my blog!
I recently saw one of those memes go around the net which asks you to jot what your life was like 10 and 5 years ago and where you think it will be in 5 and 10 years. So, this is a good place to do that.
Ten Years Ago: In the fall of 1994 I was in "dating retirement" taking a break from things to grow up a bit and trying to figure my life out. Shortly afterwards (the following spring) I met Ann and began applying to graduate schools so my work on my life at that point paid off quite nicely.
Five Years Ago: In the fall of 1999, Ann and I had been married six months and she was in her second trimester with Jack. I had a good job at WebCT (which was still Universal Learning Technology at the time) and things were looking up. The dot com bubble burst was still a ways off.
Five Years From Now: I know I want to do a lot more writing so by 5 years from now so I hope to be published and starting to make a real go at writing. In addition, I want to get back to doing more teaching and more lecturing/seminars than I am today.
Ten Years From Now: Jack will be a teenager so I just hope that I survive the experience.
In Information Is Not Knowledge comes the post So true it hurts... which describes a story of a blind dog that will, years after running into some object, always moves around that spot when running. He's memorized the landscape in his mind and always moves around objects, even if they are long gone. The story is drawn into a parallel with users working with computers and echoes everything I have experienced in all of my years in technical support.
I often find myself getting frustrated with my wife when I am showing her how to do things on her computer. She never uses keyboard shortcuts, if I ask her to go look at a particular menu, she has to read left-to-right across the menu bar to find it (even though "Window[s]," say, is always right near the far right end), she has a million sticky notes on her desktop when we have a perfectly good shared calendar/to-do list in iCal and shared address book in Address Book, and so forth. Of course, she's learned how to do things and she gets things done. It's perfectly fine. My problem is that I am never satisfied with learning one and only one way to do things. Once I know how to accomplish something on the computer, I immediately ask how I can do it faster. Is there a keyboard shortcut? Can I create a macro? Can I write an AppleScript? I realize that I am the exception, not the rule.
That, and I'm a big pain in the ass. Ask my wife.
The Shifted Librarian talks about how companies are enabling people to Listen to a Book on Your Cell Phone. That's great but I would love to see these people support Daisy which is an open standard for allowing people to navigate hierarchical data (left/right to go back and forth in the book and up/down to go through the hierarchy itself... chapter to section, etc.)
At Devis, we built a prototype system to deliver Daisy formatted books over the telephone and it works very well.
Here's my page on del.icio.us a social bookmarking site.
You can easily add new links, categorize on the fly, and more. I'm curious if this will be useful or not so I'm giving it a go.
Interesting article: adaptive path » organization in the way: how decentralization hobbles the user experience.
Airbag (a very well designed weblog) lists books on web design in a post titled Four-Fifty-One.
The list is quite interesting. With the exception of the Lynda Weinman and Jeffrey Zeldman books, all of these are mostly new to me.
Adam Curry has created iPodder which will check specific rss feeds and pull out any embedded mp3s in them and put them right into your iTunes library and, thus, your iPod. I'm already hooked.
And, yes, I may yet start doing audio blogs... if I can just find the time... ;)
Finally. I finished Neverwinter Nights tonight. This is the first game I've obsessed over in a great many years and it was completely worth it. A great story, rewarding game play, and immersive graphics, music, and ambient sounds. All in all, very fun.
Now it's time to get the expansion packs and to download modules from the web to play other stories...
Rhode Island has a long history of being the maverick. This is over a year old, but I just found it while doing some research on something for work.
Linux in Government: Federal Contracts, a New Era of Competition
I've talked about this before. Workforce Connections (as released by the Department of Labor) is a nearly 1-year older version of devis EZ Reusable Objects (EZRO) which is much more stable and feature rich. Both were developed by devis and it's the project I've been on for most of my time here (in one form or another).
It's an interesting article which gives a window into the complicated legal dance we went through to get the tool released at all.
I just uploaded a catalog of my iPod's music for anyone who cares what I'm listening to these days.
Andrew talks about the new iTunes 4.5 print features and laments that it is only a half-way done feature.
Andrew, check out OmniGraffle which, while not free, is a fantastic program for doing all kinds of great diagrams. I use it at work for a great deal. It has an extra download which is an AppleScript which does the full jewel case labels for you. Select a playlist, run the script, and boom. It's very nice.
In other news, I'm loving the new iTunes. I've already uploaded two iMixes, Andythology '83 and Andythology '03 The former is what iTunes could find in its store of a 3 tape collection my sister made me back in 1983. The latter is what iTunes had in its store from a "my all time favorites" list I put together last year. They are woefully missing many good tracks, but they're still good mixes.
A really great write-up on devis (where I work) and some of our recent work in Info World (InfoWorld: U.S. government seeks the open road: March 12, 2004: By Grant Gross and Ed Scannell: Application Development). The key tool is the application of which I am the project manager: EZ Reusable Objects (EZRO) which has been built over the last few years by a team of incredibly talented developers.
I run EZRO on my PowerBook G4 under MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) but it was developed to be run under Linux and, more recently, directly under Windows. I wish I could host it at Pair.com, my hosting provider, but I need to be able to run Zope and have access to Apache configs. I need to work out a solution for this. I want to be able to run my sister's business site in it so she can manage her own content without having to know any HTML at all (it's perfect for that kind of thing).
It's a pretty neat tool. It lacks many of the bells and whistles of the higher-end content management tools but it's core goal is to be a super-simple, very easy to use and manage tool for doing site content.
The most recent site to go live in this engine is our own site (devis.com) which I spent a very long week building out from the deisgners Photoshop master into a CSS-based skin (view the source, I did some sneaky things in there... it's not, by any stretch, the best semantic markup, but at least there are no goddam tables in there! :)
Anyway, that's what I've been up to lately. When I'm not railing against the Bush Administration.
The Mac Observer: Dr. Mac: Rants & Raves - First Look: Hands-On With GarageBand
I agree completely. I used to do a lot of electro-acoustic music composition at Dartmouth in the Bregman Electronic Music Studio. This is the first time in years I've been able to do anything remotely like it. It's wonderful. Ann's already decided she's lost me to software.
Vivisimo Document Clustering - automatic categorization and content integration software -
Amazing... I've been playing with this a lot today. Still blows me away.
creativepro.com - Bit by Bit: A Digital Fill-Flash Technique for Improving Images
Found via very good collection of tips in the latest Macworld magazine.
Courtesy of a few entries on Simon Willison's weblog (link 1, link 2, link 3) comes the following CSS- and accessibility-related links.
The Fishbowl: Bayesian Filtering: The Spam Fights Back
Charles Miller writes of an interesting, and disturbing, new trend in the spam wars: spam that uses lots of large words that don't typically appear in spam making for more false positives and, worse, false negatives as they get marked as spam.
O'Reilly Network: Outboard Brains for Mac OS X [Aug. 05, 2003]
A good survey of information managers for the Mac. I'm trying out DEVONthink and am intrigued so far.
An excellent description about why saying Apple's market share is only 2% is simply wrong.
All Quiet on Campus Save the Click of Keys
Great article. I was one of the students mentioned who originally helped develop it. I know I was involved and my name is in the help file (well, my old name, Andy Williams :) is in there to prove it. But I can't at all remember what I actually did. Probably some UI stuff.
Anyway, I went to Dartmouth from 1986 until 1990 and then worked for the college until 1996. In those years, I watched a number of fascinating cultural shifts happen.
First, in 1988, people who used BlitzMail or other email packages were geeks. They were the losers and derided by everyone who was trying to look cool. By 1992, BlitzMail had already become far more ubiquitous. The shift had happened. Suddenly, the cry of "geek!" was gone. Everyone used it. Everyone came into the computer center, long a refuge for the CS majors. By the time I left, it took me months to stop using "Blitz" in any conversation except about WWII. (Ironically, for most of my time after graduation, I used Eudora. I just didn't like BlitzMail all that much.)
I sure hope Jack wants to go there. Just so I have excuses to continue visiting long after my fraternity forgets I ever existed... :)
AskTog: Good Lawyers, Bad Products
How all the warnings on products is reducing usability and causing more problems than they solve. This quote was priceless:
What is needed, of course, is a return to the "prudent person" standard in American law, rather than the "biggest damned drunken idiot" standard we now enjoy.
The Mac Night Owl's Weekly Newsletter writes about how the latest Consumer Reports spreads the same myths about the Mac. It doesn't take a lot of research to show how incorrect these are.
Wired News: Apple Cube: Alive and Selling
Huh. We have a Cube but since we both have work-provided TiBooks, we hardly use it. Maybe we should sell it and recoup some money...
This is really getting fun... I've been hearing some old Simon and Garfunkle, Mozart, Gin Blossoms, Tom Waits, and, oddly, some modern pop-shit I had no idea was on here. So, this is also helping me trim my music collection. How DID some of that crap get on here? I have no idea at all.
Currently listening to: Addagio Sogni di Gloria from the album "Quartetto Gelato" by Quartetto Gelato
Derrick Story writes a tip on playing unsung heroes. That is, setting up a smart playlist in iTunes to play tunes you normally don't even listen to. So far, I am hearing great stuff I haven't heard in ages. Such as...
Currently listening to: (Lisa Loeb) Do You Sleep
We also launched the new Career OneStop Coach for the Employment Training Agency of the Department of Labor at the Workforce Innovations Conference here in Washington this week. So, it's been a good week for devIS.
We had another major launch today: Military Spouse Resource Center was launched today in a mini-media event hosted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. Here is the transcript.
This is another big win for the company I work for (Development InfoStructure (devIS)) as well as me and Chris. See, Chris had the idea to put the rings in the corner and I did the actual pixel pushing. :)