Now joins the limited group of things I know about, thank to the convincing tweets from Moleitau
These guys have the toy. See the demo video linked in the title of this post. Then watch it again.
Nice bingo from Wired.
Read it, read it, read it. Recreational vehicles, nod office, automobile snack conveyor, sleep-in cubicles, skylight oven, hidden showers, grindplayers, self shorting sedans, view-cabs, folding bike-vests, walking treadmills, automobile abandonment zones, pedal train, sanitized reincarnated garbage… all by Steven M. Johnson.
Are you not reading it yet?
Man’s shirt modeled in subdivision surfaces and printed on Objet. The one you see is a small scale test. By far one of the hardest models I’ve ever built, as most of it had to be a single volume. Actually, only the buttons and the stitching (not visible) are separate geometry.
Beautifully written post on male-brainedness in relation to Google.
Their brains are beautifully suited to the genteel eugenics program that is the Google hiring process but are broken for real-world use.
Maybe I am just discovering hot water, but could it be that the whole secret to Google’s success is to provide a shelter of realization for extreme nerds?
The Fresnel lens has never been so elegant. Instant classic by Paolo Rizzatto1 and Francisco Gomez Paz.
Absolute must see, the work in progress pictures on Francisco’s Flickr stream.
For the uninitiated, Paolo Rizzatto, together with Alberto Meda whom he often collaborates with, are the Daft Punk of Italian design. ↩
Philips, I admit it, this is actually cool; great job.
Want! It’s so beautiful.
Surprising. Can someone explain me how they did this (the webpage, not the filming)?
Just watch it. The video is so odd; it says 2007, but the whole thing feels like it’s been filmed in the 80’s. Which makes it even more futuristic. Via David Weiss.
This year at the Fiera I’m showing 39 new projects.
Feeling the crisis…
One good side of this crisis is that it makes us all consumers consider for a moment, regardless of how well off we are or how poor we are, what and why we have what we have in our lives.
Huh?
There’s a certain naivety now, that you pick up a magazine, y’know, if I could just make one funky chair that gets attention I’m gonna be famous. I think that’s kind of a wrong approach, you know, there’s something about the impatience of popular culture that’s happened, where we all have this kind of desirous want to be famous, to be immediately recognized.
I see…
You are so gentle to talk to, it’s really beautiful.
…
Still from Vivo, a small design firm with studios in Rome and Milan, a nice take on a desk lamp. I love the RGB LED dimmer switch being fully exposed and not preset-based.
Nice. Quite twisted for a trashcan. More info and press kits on Vivo’s website (which, on a side note, would greatly benefit from a complete redesign…)
Writers cling hard to the word, to semantics, to meaning and sensibility. Design, by contrast, is less verbal. Design is busily inventing new ways to blow itself apart. Design is taking more risks with itself than literature. That is why contemporary design feels almost up to date, while literature feels archaic and besieged.
From Tony.
As usual, here is a more readable PDF version of the same article
Makes me want to rush out and buy a 21 gears mountain-bike.
I first encountered Ballard on the back shelves of used bookstores, and thought he was one of the best treasures I ever discovered there. I always felt, reading his work, that I didn’t process a Ballardian piece of fiction; instead, it processed me.
Jeff VanderMeer on Amazon’s book editors’ blog Omnivoracious
A Twitter memorial seemed the best way to participate.
Money redefined on Schott’s Vocab (in the comments).
I wish I found it first.
Convoluted1 but welcome re-find. I used to know this one back in 1999. Its once spectacular minimalism has now turned into glitch art, the new baroque.
Daringfireball sent me to Zeldman who gave me his book for free. Get a copy yourself; it’s an oldie, but if you filter out the obsolete noise, what remains is actually interesting. ↩
In order to register an Italian TLD of the .it flavour you re required to follow the most anachronistic procedure ever:
As of Tuesday 28th of April, more than 20 days since I started the registration, the domain is yet to be seen.
After the recent newspapers crisis-related articles, a bell rang in my head and I “found” this little video gem in my Vimeo account. I totally forgot I had it there. Unfortunately it is just an excerpt of a much longer talk, but if you have never seen the man talking, this is a good start. Watch it, watch it! He talks about a lot of things, amongst them is “getting a tool right” in reference to online publishing systems. I told you, he is engaging. Watch it. I do not have it yet, but friend says his latest book, Here Comes Everybody, makes a lot of sense and it is a pleasure to read.
Flat to compound, through a laser cutter and some brilliant work by Elijah Porter.
I have a thing for this sort of stuff. See here
The about page is jaw-droppingly self-confident, but her work is in fact quite impressive.
I’m Nirrimi, a sixteen-year-old aspiring fashion photographer aching to take the world by hurricane, thunder and rainstorm. Photography took my hands and led me to a personal paradise at age thirteen, and I’ve been self-taught and seeing life through a lens since. My aspirations are heaven high and my potential and dedication higher still. I have a peculiar vision of beauty- I see beautiful where others don’t think to look and I capture it all so they do. I want to be shooting for Vogue before I’ve even reached adulthood.
Best written article I’ve read in a long time about Dubai and the UAE. A chilling read.
It is a long article, and it is definitely worth reading, so I am providing (with no explicit authorization form the Independent) a re-typeset PDF which you can print, turning the reading pleasure dial up to 11. The original link and the source are included in the PDF for fairness and backtracking ease.
This in NOT what originated this blog’s name. I was first.
Just noticed on Geoff Manaugh’s RSS that the BLDGBLOG book is out. Very, very highly recommended; just look at his blog if you need any proof of goodness.
Already out of stock on Amazon UK… Mad. Good job Geoff.
Interesting transcript from Mike Nash – of Tallemu.com – of a chat with a phisher trying to get some money by advanced fee fraud scamming technique. What is different this time is that the scammer is quickly told out of his scam and the discussion drifts into a humorous exchange between the “client” and the the scammer. Sweet.
http://digg.com/http://digg.com/http://digg.com/http://digg.com/
Going to implement this sometime soon: How To Block The Diggbar.
UPDATE: Implemented with a simple mix of PHP and JS. URL detection is server-side á la Gruber, redirection is via JS. Why? Not sure, but it works perfectly and I prefer having the server do the majority of the work. I think I might also add some 301 in the redirected header. May Digg dig its own hole.
And on a side note, have a laugh.
They are cheap, they are small, they are lost property moments after you bought them, they are your own, but not really, they seem to never end and you never see them die. Or maybe yours made it till the end?
Really, how many lighters that you owned did you actually manage to fully deplete?
Last Flame, initiated by me and Merel Karof over a couple of pints, which excuses everything forever.
This afternoon I had to change a few things on the server and I was doing it live, rendering the site unreachable or broken a few times. Now it should be alright.
Following a few long reads about the state of newspapers, here are some links which are worth a look.
On per-customer editions:
Time Inc.’s Mine Magazine is a Printed RSS Feed
Could Customized Newspapers Bring Readers Back? - NYTimes.com
On business models, a great triplet from Clay Shirky:
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Why iTunes is not a workable model for the newspaper business
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers
And two final ones:
European Newspapers Find Creative Ways to Thrive in the Internet Age
It Is Anti-American to Try to Keep Newspapers Afloat
I’d argue that “square miles” and “square kilometers” really have no place in popular journalism, because we have little connection to what they mean.
I am not really getting this one, mentioning popular journalism in a post about the use of hyphens and correct word order. Moreover, while it is true that most people don’t instinctively judge area size in square miles or kilometers, how else would you express the same concept? There is no way I am aware of to provide a rough indication of how large a very large area is other than using an international system that most people should have a grasp of. Using any other parallelism such as “1/6th the size of Rome” may work for a few but not the majority. One far from perfect solution, would be to use Los Angeles as a comparison metric, since the article refers to the LA Times. But this article appears online, not just on a local paper. Oh, I know. We should say 1/2.000.000.000 the area of the Internet. That may work; everyone knows how big the Internet is.
John Nack, highlighting a comment from brushing engineer Jerry Harris on CS4 and the new Wacom Intuos 4 tablets:
PS now preserves pressure beyond 8-bit throughout the painting code, whereas before CS4, only 256 levels (8-bits) made its way to this code.
For as much as I could find out in a two minute search on Google, the Wacom Intuos from 1998 already supported 1024 pressure levels. Photoshop supported 16bit colour to a certain extent since version 2.5. God only knows how many people bought professional Wacoms in the last ten years, convinced that their tablets were actually doing something more than moving the cursor around. What took so long to actually pass those 1024 levels on to the PS brushing engine?
This is from an Intuos datasheet; it’s quite puzzling or maybe I just misunderstood the whole thing:
Not sure why the title says “mad”, but still worth a quick look to refresh your basic design museum skillz. More points if you can tell the names of each one of the designers pictured below without flipping your screen. Don’t cheat, you L4M3rZ.
The solution: ɯosıɹ suǝɾ puɐ sǝɯɐǝ sǝlɹɐɥɔ 'ɐıoʇɹǝq ʎɹɹɐɥ 'uǝuıɹɐɐs oɹǝǝ 'ʎǝlɯɹoʍ pɹɐʍpǝ 'uoslǝu ǝƃɹoǝƃ
[…] I merely go out into the world, I wanna make a photograph, I come across something that excites me, I see the picture in my mind’s eye and I make the photograph; then I give it you as the equivalent of what I saw and felt. The whole key lies very specifically in seeing into the mind’s eye which we call visualization and the picture has to be there clearly and decisively and if you have enough craft in your work and in your practice you can then make a photograph to desire.
Far from trying to trace a parallel between me and a giant like Adams, this interview – which is more of a quote – summarises perfectly the process I instinctively applied to my Playgrounds project.
Next to-do/to-learn in Rhinoceros, at least for me. It seems like Grasshopper might be of some help here.
I think I saw this one far back in 2005 when it was not yet in production. Now it is, albeit I would guess each one is built to order as the prices range from 16K to over 30K dollars. Wouldn’t it be nice to play around with one of these?
When users install Windows Internet Explorer 8, they have a choice about opting in to a list of sites that will be displayed in Compatibility View. Compatibility View helps make Web sites that are designed for older browsers1 look better in Internet Explorer 8.
True, it sounds like such an elegant solution. I am sure The Average User will have a lot of fun deciding whether to browse in compatible mode or not. They could have labeled the button as “Sorry, We Messed it All Up Mode”. Can some leading web expert explain Microsoft the meaning of the word “standard”?
I would guess they mean just older versions of Internet Explorer. ↩
Sorry Dan, please don’t take it personally – I read you blog and I dig your stuff, but this one doesn’t pass it for me. At the cost of sounding like a broken Italian vinyl I hereby state that Starbucks is one of the worst coffee experiences one could think of. Leaving aside all the corporate hate that surrounds it, which I don’t care much about, it’s a natural reaction for me to oppose any positive comment about SB.
It Just Plain Sucks
While coffee quality may be a nano-notch above similar chains, the way they serve coffee is sad. I mean it. Queuing up at the till, looking up that abomination of a menu with those uber-silly names, dealing with a depressed “barista”, waiting for your paper cup at the end of the counter sucks. Sucks if you have experienced coffee in a wholly different way, fast served at a banged-up steel counter, in smoking hot thick and chipped ceramic cups in a real no-name family ran bar. Sure these no-name places are the standard in Italy, but I found great coffee bars elsewhere, including the US, and I am sure you know what I am talking about.
True, your post is not much about Starbucks and more about instant coffee (which makes me think of it as drug assumption rather than an experience)… But I had to let the SB rant go, I had to let my fingers drop on the keyboard for this one. It’s a twitch I got, or maybe a natural reflex, ∞ may know. It’s coffee my friend, you don’t do bad things to coffee, coffee likes you.
Hope you understand,
Tomm
I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten.
Andrew Lahde farewell letter is a must read. Either see the original linked from the title of this post or fetch this loosely re-typeset version which is a bit easier on the eye. At any rate, read it.
Has product design become a commodity?
So yesterday I went through the Major Pain of installing CS4 on Windows, which is in no way a worse experience than doing it on OS X. Fair enough for the pre-certified and approved crappiness of the whole process and related UI, already mentioned by a number (Adobe UI Gripes, Betalogue, DF) of reasonable people. This time it was my turn. I was installing Photoshop and Illustrator from the CS4 Master Fuckup disc paying great attention to deselect any component I did not need, as I was doing so on a forcibly space-restricted Bootcamp partition. After painfully un-checking every box, I felt my selection was small enough to warrant a click on the install button. Still, Adobe sw “engineers” thought they may as well preserve some creative install action. Ladies and gents, here is what I found in my Program Files folder (not to mention what gets dropped in the Common Files folder) at the end of the process:
Aehm… After Effects? Encore? Media Encoder? Premiere Pro? Soundbooth? The folders are full of “recommended” files (watch your language there Adobe!). They do not actually contain the executables or full installs of the aforementioned. Dirty, dirty, cheeky mess. So hard to figure out what components are shared and place them in a Shared components folder? Oh, and Mocha. Mocha for After Effects, I will surely need it for some hardcore planar tracking in Illustrator, thanks for thinking about that, I would have surely missed it otherwise.
UPDATE: To make things clearer, this is the contents of the CS4 package I was trying to install.
Maybe it’s because I have a thing for paperclips – although I don’t use them too often – but intervening on an archetypical object as this one, without completely messing it up is Très Cool. The whole Art. Lebedev studio is cool; for one I totally dig the way they credit every single person involved in a project; it is a very elegant act of humility and respect which is rarely seen in the design world. Then they work on anything, with no topic restriction. Be it furniture or electronics the approach is always very relaxed. It is a “doist” approach to design that seems not to ask too many questions aside for those within a 2m radius from the project itself, all the rest can go. For this reason everything they do feels beautifully open, they don’t feel detached from us. This is very different than most other design practices which tend to push projects out only when they are “perfect”; true, that’s where their beauty lies sometimes, but perfection is not for humans, isn’t it?
Making me laugh loud and alone in front a my computer at 2.30 in the night is an achievement only few can claim (whether they care or not). If you don’t know this blog and you live in the UK, you only thought you were living in the UK. If you don’t live in the UK, 90% of it still applies globally. So, for real, if you can read go and read.
Massively uncanny. More than 2000 people’s voices singing along Daisy Bell; another beautiful example of Amazon Mechanical Turk’s potential, this time by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey.
From the project’s website:
Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.
Need to say anything else? Pushed in my email by a friend.
Guy has bike accident and replaces lost finger with USB prosthetic. Surprised that the folks at NextNature seem to have missed this one. With no doubt this is the ultimate and definitive USB gizmo; not that weird-shaped USB keys have ever been particularly noteworthy anyway.
clus•ter•fuck |ˈkləstərfək|
noun
Military term for an operation in which multiple things have gone wrong. Related to “SNAFU” (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”) and “FUBAR” (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair).
In radio communication or polite conversation (i.e. with a very senior officer with whom you have no prior experience) the term “clusterfuck” will often be replaced by the NATO phonetic acronym “Charlie Foxtrot.”
And 53 more definitions on UrbanDictionary.com. Wiktionary.org reports the etymology of the term.
