So I turned on the XBox earlier, and it made me do this major update. Turns out microsoft has a jonesing for some nintendo action, and alongside a whole new interface/menu we’ve also got some extremely Wii-ish avatar’s going on. It’s so random and weird! Anyway, apparently in the US you can stream netflix through it, for us over here in the UK though I’m not really sure what’s different? We’ll see, haven’t really had a good look around it yet.

So, I do a lot of print screening, grabbing etc to get bits from one place to another quickly (it’s super good for getting css rendering quirks from diff browsers logged!). On my old mac that I didn’t really use for work I never had the need to do such things. Well, now that I do, I’m amazed at the capabilities of the grab function!

Here’s a handy reference list of the keyboard shortcuts to use when you want to grab things

• Shift-cmd-3 will capture the whole screen to a file on your desktop
• Shift-cmd-4 will bring up a crosshair where you can select an area of your screen to grab and save to a file on your desktop.
• Shift-cmd-4, then space, then click a window will capture that window as a file to your desktop
• Holding down ctrl with any of the above will save it to your clipboard, handy for taking things to fireworks/photoshop

Super cool.

Christ, this month’s vogue was really full of inspiration! Another great find in there was the series of typefaces designed especially for the fashion fantasy issue. The designer behind these fonts was another female, Jo Ratcliffe (good on the female designs for making such a great issue of vogue even better!).

The addition of these fonts made the articles and cover really POP! It’s fantastic to see fonts other than regular sans-serif’s used! woo for fancy fonts!

So, I mentioned in my weekly good stuff about the papercut books that were in this months vogue? Well, the artist who made them is called Su Blackwell, and here’s some of her amazing work….

I’m a great fan of anything connected to fairytales and stories, and as an avid book collector the book sculpture that Su Blackwell creates are just… ah! fabulous. You may have seen some of the alice in wonderland ones around before, I sure have!

This one’s the Wizard of Oz, which is super ace I think. I think that the books used are the actual stories that the scenes are from, which makes these even more special.

• Putting offers in for houses - it’s scary but also totally cool at the same time!
• Making and eating loads of salsa fresca and guacamole, bring on the antiox’s! Seriously though, how great is homemade salsa???
• Catching up on last weeks heroes via the iplayer on New Macbook
• This Sunday we’re heading to the MPH show at the Birmingham NEC, that’s right kids, your friendly neighbourhood HipHopper is a bit of a carspaz. (ZOMG get to see the topgear boys!).
• Booking tickets for a May trip to Hong Kong. How super thrilling! We’re going to see one of our besties who moved out there earlier this year for teaching purposes.
• Mary Kate and Ashley’s book, Influence, hasnt’ been released over here yet, but not long now! I’m looking forward.
• I feel proud for my country’s Vogue issue this month, have you seen it? It’s totally amazing. Have some scans…

  

  

  

  It’s full of delicious Roald Dahl inspired images featuring HBC and Tim Burton (photographer Tim Walker), juxtaposed with Book Art and amazing fashion. What more would a girl want?

  The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creatures head, and bang bang bang she shoots him dead!

• It’s children in need day, which means loads of snacky nomnoms for tea whilst watching BBC personalities make themselves look like wankers. Oh, and of course, it’s all about the kids too.
• Adam bought me a most excellent CD just ‘cos I’m ace, it’s the Nightmare Revisited CD. Much fun to be had there I can say!
• I’ve beaten it out at the gym this week, fuck it was hard going. Anyway, I feel much better for it and am totally proud that I actually did my quota when I felt like giving up after 10 mins on the crosstrainer. So that’s good.

As a side note, has anyone read Twilight? I’m tempted to read it because of them film (but fuck, Cedric Diggory is not a vampire…). Also, the woman at the library was dressed like a bin bag the other day. Seriously, black shiny legging things, black boots and this totally ugly, hidiously badly cut shiny black shift dress thing. Do Not Want!