Morning Linkage (Jan 13)

Transportation

Night Market. Or what to do with a box truck on a Saturday night in San Fransisco. Wheels have always been our tick­et to the lim­i­nal places.

The first per­son who does the math and points out to me that $2995 in 1962 dol­lars is … hey wait a minute. That’s only $22K in 2010. I want my Porsche Speedster!

This should be so wrong, but I love it. A ‘67 Triumph Tiger. Custom and orange. And any­one who is will­ing to cus­tom machine his own brass…

Cool Tools

Hot knives are a sta­ple with the prop, decor, and fan­ta­sy object build­ing types. It’s the only way to cut Styrofoam, foam rub­ber, and a hand­ful of oth­er mate­ri­als. But most hot cut­ters use a straight wire so get­ting any sort of con­tour is a long, fid­dly job. Not any more. Bendable wire to the res­cue. A Proxxon hot wire cut­ter will make that next set of drag­on scales a cinch!

Art, Images, and Design

This intri­cate­ly detailed and some­what fan­ci­ful cross sec­tion of the Kowloon walled city was drawn by a Japanese team just before the city was lev­eled in 1993. And some fol­low up in the com­ments on doobybrain.

To cre­ate a map of a place from mem­o­ry is to your soul. Maps Drawn from Memory is was the name a Flickr pool and Visual News grabbed a hand­ful of the best and offered them up with link to the Google maps of the actu­al loca­tions. If you care about real­i­ty. Which you won’t when you’ve seen the much more human ver­sions of places that live in the artist’s head. (SFW)

The Flickr pool has been changed to from “Maps Drawn from Memory” to sim­ply “From Memory” and is, sad­ly, no longer sole­ly about maps. (And is now NSFW)

A pho­tog­ra­pher’s body of work. The images she cre­ates from the time she first picks up a cam­era until her death can be the most illu­mi­nat­ing record of a life, and the time and place that it was lived. John Maloof found and pur­chased the near­ly com­plete works of one woman, Vivian Maier, who lived, worked, and pho­tographed in Chicago from the 1950s through the 1990s. Here are just a hand­ful of her images. I sus­pect there will be con­tro­ver­sy in the com­ing months as the full sto­ry of the dis­cov­ery, pur­chase, and lan­guish­ing of these pic­tures comes out. But you need to have a first look at them now, while they are still new and intrigu­ing. More of Vivian Maier’s photos.

Animation

Claiming to be the world’s small­est stop-motion ani­ma­tion, cre­at­ed by Aardman and shot using a Nokia 8 and the field med­ical Cellscope tech­nol­o­gy (yes, that’s a cell phone used as a micro­scope) — Dot. Also a mak­ing of video, and a time-lapse of the shoot­ing rig. The phone, the mag­ni­fy­ing lens, the 3‑d print­er… oh hel­lz this is the best gig­gle I’ve has all day.