Andy Laub

Andy Laub is a designer & developer in the Twin Cities.

Published Aug 05

Rusty »

Some kind of machine, outside of the old Wausau East High School which recently reopened as apartments.

Reserved »

K-West’s new album Late Registration hit today. Give it a listen.

I had originally planned to run over to Best Buy and pick up a copy but work ended and to be frank I was just too lazy. So instead I bought it off of iTunes. This is the first album I’ve gotten that includes a digital booklet. The concept is kind of interesting – instead of the typical paper booklet you’d get with a physical CD, it’s a PDF’d version of that booklet.

The bizarre thing is, like your AAC files, it’s housed in iTunes, and when you launch it then Preview (or whatever your default PDF-reader is) opens up. It works perfectly fine as you’d expect, but that made me wonder: can you just throw any PDF into iTunes?

As it turns out, sure. Drag the PDF onto iTunes if you’re on a Mac and it responds exactly the same as it would with an audio file. iTunes just uses the document name (whatever.pdf) with the extension dropped off. This also works with MOV files, but the playback isn’t so hot. From what I can tell the movie plays either in the area that usually displays the album artwork or at full screen. Neither of these is really that useful, so unless you’re going to load them onto your nonexistent video iPod then there’s really no need to transfer them from your other media management system (the Finder).

Radiate »

Sun + mirror + shoes (cropped) + lens.

Seen »

It was a three-rental weekend.

Sin City was a spectacular visual experience. Even if you could care less about the story it’s worth just watching at least once to take in the gorgeous cinematography and rendering. The story on it’s own was impressive an interesting, and together with the style of filming it was a perfect combolation.

Assault on Precinct 13 was good as well but was almost more trouble that it was worth. Apparently this is a remake of a movie released in 1976, which I didn’t know until it started. 20 minutes and at trip back to the video store later, we were watching the *new* version, which was good enough but could not compare to the others.

Teacher’s Pet was a free impulse rental from the kid’s section. It’s yet another Disney movie based on Saturday morning cartoon series, but there’s one thing that easily sets this one apart from all the rest: Baseman. Those not familiar with Gary Baseman out to Google him (or better yet, Google image). I would venture to say that his style is among the most well-known today, and it really adds to a series that would’ve been just another Disney series otherwise. Add to that the voice talents of Nathan Lane, Debra Jo Rupp (from That 70’s Show), Megan Mullaly, Kelsey Grammar, Jerry Stiller and more and you’ve got one heck of a Disney movie. And singing – there’s singing too. I’m rather surprised at this but out of the three movies we rented I’d recommend this one the most.