magpie's shiny things

Let’s see if I can remem­ber to spellcheck before send­ing this
morn­ing, shall we?

Photography

We think of wild fires as being a phe­nom­e­na of the forest­ed west of
the USA and Canada. Mediterranean coun­tries face their own fire
sea­son. The Big Picture has images.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/fires_around_the_mediterranean.html

More from Europe. An all com­ers heavy met­al fes­ti­val in Germany. (folk metal?)
http://designyoutrust.com/2009/08/04/wacken-open-air-2009/

Clearly some of those met­al heads have been cruis­ing the ‘net and seen
this love­ly tiki head carved out of a water­mel­on centerpiece.
http://www.watermelon.org/recipe_detail.asp?recipeDisp=183

————–

The Future…

…of edu­ca­tion. Nathan Shedroff pro­vides the curic­u­la for three of
hos design cours­es, along with the pre­sen­ta­tion mate­ri­als and links to
many of the arti­cles to be dis­cussed. Anyone one study and because
it’s all CC licensed any­one can nuse his mate­ri­als as a start­ing point
for thi­er own teaching.
http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/

…of fab­ri­ca­tion. Printing stain­less steel. If you can draw it in a
CAD sys­tem you can make a replace­ment part for any­thing. (Or a stupid
look­ing fig­urine with its hand up its nose.)
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/08/04/the-future-of-fabrication-is-here-shapeways-announces-stainless-steel-printing/

…of den­tistry. Successful regrowth of a tooth in situ. Dentures may
end up as an item in one of those ‘can you believe they put those
things in their mouth’ exhibits in 2050.
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2009/08/bioengineered-mouse-tooth/

—————

Technology

New chips com­ing for net­books,. More name con­fu­sion com­ing to the
mar­ket space. Smartbooks? — and some peo­ple need to get a grip with
the URL makers -
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/08/arm-based-netbooks-set-to-arrive-on-us-shores-by-year-end.arshttp://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/08/arm-based-netbooks-set-to-arrive-on-us-shores-by-year-end.ars

Remote read­ing of RFID chips in cards is a favorite bug­bear of the
tin­foil hat crowd. Oh and the feds at DefCon. I find the last
para­graph to be espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing. I won­der how many of the
lit­tle blighters I’m unknow­ing­ly carrying.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/fed-rfid/

—————-

Architecture

A remod­el of a lake­side house. I like it but the feel is very 50s
SoCal for some­thing so new and in TX.
http://sweetbakerygoods.com/architecture/architecture-the-peninsula-residence/

—————–

Art

Two illus­tra­tors both doing work on graph­ic nov­els. They have a
sim­i­lar feel but very dif­fer­ent sub­ject matter.

Star St.Germain has a flickr stream of her work. Her work is personal
and young. Her per­son­al blog has a great deign and lay­out. Very
con­sist with and com­pli­men­ta­ry of her work.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thisisstar/
http://thisisstar.com/

Steiner from Mars (aka Emma Rios) draws much dark­er more masculine
mate­r­i­al. (If Warren Ellis had­n’t men­tioned her name I would­n’t have
thought she was a she.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/steinerfrommars/

————–
Games

Slate want you to choose the American Apocalypse. The choic­es are
inter­est­ing and occa­sion­al­ly just plain weird. American ends in a hail
of Rods from God? (bot­tom row) It’s a poll dis­guised as a game.
http://sdn.slate.com/features/endofamerica/default.htm

More lit­er­ary games. Where was that books set?
(6 out of 10 which is sad con­sid­er­ing I’ve read all of the books.)
http://www.mentalfloss.com/quiz/quiz.php?q=705&p=1

Stills and the trail­er from the upcom­ing Fabuous Mr.Fox. Another
adap­ta­tion of a chil­dren’s books clear­ly aimed at attract­ing as many
grown-ups as sprogs. Count me in,
http://www.cpluv.com/www/feeditem/7941

tak­ing a break for the gath­er. see you all next monday.

The world of bits and pol­i­tics is get­ting all het up again.

First there’s this lit­tle mat­ter of AT&T, Apple, GoogleVoice, and the
FCC. The fences around the play­grounds are com­ing down and the
prop­er­ty own­ers are not happy.
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/01/att-responds-to-fcc-letter-re-google-voice-mobile-iphone-app/

Rep. Ed Markey (D‑MA) is try­ing for net neu­tral­i­ty leg­is­la­tion again.
A much more pro-neutrality admin­is­tra­tion might make a dif­fer­ence. PDF
link to the text includ­ed. At 13 pages this bill is considerably
eas­i­er to grasp than most.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/the-war-over-network-neutrality.ars

—————

It’s DefCon time and every­one is punditing.

More hack­ing of high secu­ri­ty locks and access sys­tems. I think these
guys are doing an impor­tant job but Bluzmanis’ grand­stand­ing egoism
and bul­ly­ing of the mak­ers of these sys­tems is quick­ly under­min­ing his
credibility.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/electronic-locks-defeated/

Schneier mounts the bul­ly pul­pit and decries China’s Green Dam Youth
Escort filter/spyware pack­age and then reminds us how much of that
tech­nol­o­gy we’ve allowed into our own net­works int he west.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/building_in_sur.html

One the oth­er hand you could get one of these and pre­tend you’re
secu­ri­ty con­scious. I think I’ve found a new desk lamp.
http://www.a2591.com/2009/08/im-not-security-camera.html

————————

Real Science is odd­er than sci­ence fic­tion. Welcome to the northern
most sci­en­tif­ic out­post. Be nice to the bar ten­ders, beware of the
birds.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/svalbard/

————————

Photography

Jakov Cordina takes great pic­tures. And he’s show cas­ing a, new to me,
wid­get that makes a flickr pho­to­stream embed­d­a­ble slide show. (cau­tion
there are a cou­ple of videos with music included)
http://www.jakovcordina.com/post/86633471/photostream-slide-show

——————–

Architecture

Three entries today. First the “ledges” are Sears tow­er are open. So
you can now stand on a piece of glass 1300+ feet up in the air over
Chicago.  No way in hell you’re get­ting me up there but the sprogs
seem to like the float­ing over the city feeling.
http://sweetbakerygoods.com/architecture/architecture-sear-towers-1353-ft-high-glass-balconies/

Train cars are con­vert­ed into church­es in Russia. Some of these are
touch­ing­ly naive and some are small works of art. (The pho­tos rock
too.)
http://englishrussia.com/?p=2248

The exam­ples are of paint­ings and illus­tra­tion but the Bauhaus
move­ment pro­duced some Very Important Architecture. Never mind, just
read the sto­ry and look at the paintings.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/02/bauhaus-ninety-years-of-inspiration/

——————

Entertainment
Pop out and grab a cof­fee. You’ll about 10 min­utes for today’s video selections.

Amy Crehore is a blue grass fiend and puts up some fab­u­louslinks. This
one is  Josephine Baker and Thompson Jazz Orchestra from 1927. Can you
imag­ine watch­ing this woman in per­son? Electrifying. The accompanying
music is Ahmad Jamal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsXyDrf9HO0

Cab Calloway and Bettie Boop. This can not go wrong. There’s tons more
trea­sure in the Internet Archive’s col­lec­tion of vin­tage cartoons
includ­ing a whole lot of BB.
http://www.archive.org/details/bb_old_man_of_the_mountain

That’s it for today, enjoy.

Everyone is enti­tled to an opinion:

Gorgeous pic­ture of a crap bike.
http://www.bikeexif.com/confederate-p120-fighter

Crap pic­ture of a gor­geous bike.
http://www.bikeexif.com/krugger-overmile

————–

On August 26th the Mini Cooper will be 50 years old. Forbes put up a
nice lit­tle slide show.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/29/bmw-mini-cooper-lifestyle-vehicles-mini-car-50_slide_2.html

———–

Repurposed fur­ni­ture (com­po­nents). Does some­one have a bet­ter word
than repur­posed? It’s so made up.

Cold frames from the As-Is depart­ment at IKEA.
http://plantedathome.com/blog/2009/01/28/diy-cold-frames/

Sweet aviary from a bust­ed up wardrobe.
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/07/diy_aviary_from_old_armoire.html

—————–

Some nice black and white art — book plates. Einstein’s is at the bottom.
http://butdoesitfloat.com/51484

More nice black and white art — Styrofoam cof­fee cups. No, really.
http://www.booooooom.com/2009/07/30/cheeming-boey-coffee-cup-drawings/

———–

The IDEA awards for 2009 are out.These three pages give you little
links to all the prod­ucts. As usu­al, the stuff award­ed sil­ver and
bronze is much more inter­est­ing that the stuff giv­en gold medals.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/07/0729_IDEA_awards_gold/
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/07/0729_IDEA_awards_silver/
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/07/0729_IDEA_awards_bronze/

————

Print Magazine gave four design firms a brief to design pack­ag­ing for
legal­ized mar­i­jua­na. The results are droll at best. Here’s a link to
cov­er­age from Fast Company that does a much bet­ter job of reviewing
the results than Print does on it’s very borked website.
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/imagine-pot-was-legal-how-would-you-brand-it

————–

The three lit­tle pigs would­n’t have stood a chance if the big bad wolf
had one of these. A vor­tex canon. Gather fun pro­pos­al #37. (Just
kid­ding.) Bonus mak­ing of video included.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/30/diy-vortex-cannon/

————-

Off to read Freak Angels episode 63. (You’ll need days to catch up but
it’s worth it if you like dark.)
http://www.freakangels.com/?p=102

Two from Scheier on the recent­ly dis­cussed top­ic of cloud computing
and stor­age. I find the com­ments on his blog to be of high­er quality
than most.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/risks_of_cloud.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/cloud_computing.html

Summary of Kaminsky’s talk on the SSL cert spoof­ing. Clearer than most.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/kaminsky/

As if you could­n’t tell it’s DefCon time. I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed by the
hack­able badges of the last cou­ple of years. Here’s a pre­view of this
year’s badge and a link to the source code.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/defcon-badge/

There have been some great musi­cal guests on Sesame street. So after
all that scary tech stuff a lit­tle some­thing to remind you of what it
“tastes like being poor and small and Popsicles in summer.”
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/30181

Starting with some archi­tec­ture. 10 class­rooms designed specifically
to meet the chal­lenges of 10 sites and com­mu­ni­ties. The promise of
loca­tion appro­pri­ate archi­tec­ture ful­filled. (Mostly — no one’s
perfect)
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/updates/2009–07-22-finalists-announced-for-the-open-architecture-challenge

A mate­ri­als data­base site that is wicked fun to explore. You’ll want
to start projects just to use some of this stuff.
http://transmaterial.net/

Some paint­ings that I find appeal­ing. Airborne architecture?
http://butdoesitfloat.com/50911

A nice exam­ple of mak­ing num­bers come alive. I don’t know why
Hellman’s (mayo) is back­ing an eat local cam­paign in Canada but I’m
not going to com­plain much about some­thing that makes the imported
food indus­try look less appeal­ing. (yeah it’s flash.)
http://www.eatrealeatlocal.ca/

After that attempt to use illus­tra­tions to make some­thing clear.
Here’s Christopher Niemann’s attempt­ing to make the often muddled
process of mak­ing an illus­tra­tion, well, mud­dled. It’s fun­ny, trust
me.
http://www.christophniemann.com/man/bpages/gallery6.html

Boing-boing pro­vides a rather coher­ent giv­en the top­ic sum­ma­ry of the
AP’s recent­ly announced DRM-for-news scheme.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/29/associated-press-cla.html
And a link to the sav­age remix of the AP’s illus­tra­tion. (NSWF if your
boss is look­ing over your shoul­der or you work for a ‘news outlet’.
http://imgur.com/DzZdf.jpg

A news out­let that gets it right. NPR has a sub­tle but powerful
redesign for it’s site. Better look­ing, eas­i­er to use, excel­lent seek
and find tools… Nice.
http://www.npr.org/services/new_site/

In the last cou­ple of days I’ve seen a lot of high-concept fashion
pho­tog­ra­phy. It leaves me cold. This pho­to­graph of Richard Avedon
work­ing does not.
http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com/post/150885070/avedon

Apple and the iPhone are begin­ning to look stu­pid­ly conflicted.

Here they are killing a Google Voice app at the behest of AT&T. Who’s
wear­ing the pants in that rela­tion­ship anyway?
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/07/28/apple-kills-google‑v.html

And here Apple is mak­ing some real­ly far-fetched claims about risks to
the cell net­work from jail-broken iPhones. Transparent attempt to
retain con­trol over the device in the face of upcom­ing FCC looking
into the state of the rela­tion­ship between hand­set man­u­fac­tur­ers and
car­ri­ers duly not­ed. And yawned over.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/jailbreak/

Much nicer apples. Sweet post-it notes from a Japanese design firm.
(No I can’t fig­ure out where to buy them. Someone was very patient to
have sift­ed through he design­ers’ unus­able web­site to find these.)
http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2009/07/fruit-shaped-sticky-notes/

stay cool,