shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: Afghanistan

Morning Linkage (Jul 7)

The Art/Science of Getting There

The quad goes ful­ly enclosed to make a high­ly mobile fire­fight­ing plat­form. The Ama­toya is con­sid­er­ably big­ger than you’re going to assume when you first look at the pic­tures. Lots of inter­est­ing tech employed, like aero­gel insu­lat­ed win­dows.  (thx toucan)
http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/11/26/the-story-of-amatoya/

Mitch Boehm holds forth on Bike­EXIF on the Yama­ha DT‑1. For many of you this is a nice reminder of the excite­ment the DT‑1 caused when it was released. For oth­ers it will be a look at might arguably be the ori­gin of the dual pur­pose bike and the sport of adven­ture touring.

The offi­cial pro­mo for 2011 Dakar.

Culture and Living

50’s Kab­ul — not what you think it will be like.

Air-delivered city in a crate, the prod­uct of the merg­er of two vast­ly dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es: expe­di­tion orga­niz­ing and con­struct. So many pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­merce and human­i­tar­i­an aid.

Technology

Archival stor­age of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion is ham­pered by the short lifes­pan of most record­ing tech­nolo­gies. Tamper-proof col­lec­tion and stor­age of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion is fraught with pit­falls. These WORM SD cards are a big step in solv­ing both prob­lems. Also a sim­pler answer to the Iron Butt no more Polaroid dilem­ma than the cur­rent dance of the SD cards. WORM — Write Once Read Many

Art, Images, and Design

Very ornate french chest, but yeah, I’d find a place for this in my house.

Card­board steam punk. A card­board col­lec­tion of gears and levers. It does­n’t do much but it does it nicely.

Pret­ty, creepy. Pret­ty creepy. Japan­ese sur­re­al­ist painter Tet­suya Ishi­da makes the claus­tro­pho­bic side of Japan­ese cul­ture visible.

Japan­ese mon­sters. I’ve done some­thing like this before? Worth hav­ing a look at some more then.

Animation

Ani­mat­ed paint chips. Com­mer­cials for Sher­win Williams use paint chips to make lit­tle scenes and inspire you to get out the brush­es and rollers.

keep calm and car­ry on,

-lara-


It’s always something.

Morn­ing Link­age lives at http://shinymagpie.net

Morning Linkage (Mar 11)

Transportation

You’ve seen the pic­tures of the hacked togeth­er ones but here’s the real deal. Motor­cy­cle side-car based cam­era mount. The fab­ri­ca­tion qual­i­ty blows me away. Based on a 6 cylin­der 1500cc what? Seats 4.

Sexy enough to make me con­sid­er a elec­tric car. Almost. Or I could buy one and put a real engine in it. Porsche 918 Spy­der.

A lyric piece of descrip­tion. The destruc­tion of a medi­an strip is care­ful­ly watched from it’s seem­ing­ly innocu­ous begin­nings with a few dusty foot prints to it’s take over a a cross­ing point for auto-rickshaws. (New Del­hi, but it would be under the Viaduct here in Seattle.)

A few pages from the cat­a­log of the 1930 Ear­l’s Court Bicy­cle and Motor­cy­cle Show. Love Smith’s gauges.

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Technology

In Afghanistan there are peo­ple work­ing hard with lit­tle more than trash to bring some con­nec­tion to the mod­ern world. Wi-fi points and repeaters made from stuff scrounged out of the garbage — lit­er­al­ly. Great inge­nu­ity and dri­ve. And so much of the same-same has­sles, pet­ty pol­i­tics, and inter­per­son­al fail­ures of rela­tion­ships that affect any tech project. As Amy says, it’s fun­ny but it’s not.

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Literature

Good Night Moon has dri­ven par­ents bonkers since 1947. Now there’s a Star Wars based update called Good Night For­est Moon. Bet­ter yet it’s a down­load and bind your­self project with excel­lent instruc­tions. Craft time to bed time.

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Art, Images, and Design

Best iPhone stand ever. What is this gad­get hold­er doing in Art, Image and Design? — It’s great found object sculp­ture. Fork over.

Also an iPhone/iPod acces­so­ry. The ammo box speak­er set, per­fect dis­guise. Do Want.

More cross-over stuff. Why won’t the world stay nice­ly sort­ed in to my cat­e­gories? The title of this recent­ly released book says it all — Go Faster: The Graph­ic Design of Rac­ing Cars

A lit­tle cool for my day today. Here’s Ms. Loren from the Impos­si­ble Cool.

onward and upward, or at least out the door.