shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: dakar

Morning Linkage (Jan 19)

Transportation

There’s a fan club for every vehi­cle ever made. And restora­tion nuts will go to great lengths to get their babies back on the road, or in this case, back into the air. A Viet­nam era Huey flies again — dig the Led Zep­pelin accom­pa­nied trail­er for the doc­u­men­tary. (Video — music and com­bat footage)

I am fre­quent­ly the object of friend­ly rib­bing because I can make an entire day’s worth of errands into an itin­er­ary with­out a sin­gle left turn across traf­fic. Turns out I’m not crazy. A world with­out left turns would be both safer and more efficient.

Bul­ta­co Sher­pa T. That is enough dan­gling bait for most of you. It’s a love­ly Span­ish resto.  Also Motor­cy­cle Pic­ture of the Day has moved house. Remem­ber to change your fee­dread­ers and bookmarks :)

First enjoy this soon to be a clas­sic image of a lone rid­er on the dunes. Then click on the link labeled HERE to see a huge set of Dakar ral­ly pics — lots of bikes.

Science and Tech

Sun­sets on Mars. They’re blue. Just thought you should know :)

A cou­ple of days ago I showed you a bit of ani­ma­tion made with the help of the CellScope a micro­scope add-on for cell phone cam­eras. Now some folks at U Mich have cre­at­ed a lit­tle don­gle that will HiJack the audio out­put port of your iThingy and turn it into a nifty sen­sor host. You can get one of the pro­to­types for your own — if you have a clever enough idea  about how it should be used.

Art, Images, and Design

More Lit­tle Red Rid­ing­hood. So far beyond the usu­al flat, boxy results of using  chil­dren’s blocks as a sculp­ture mate­r­i­al. The tex­tures achieved in the wolf and the bar­ren trees are per­fect. (And I think I might have a lit­tle red rid­ing hood problem.)

A short mus­ing on the nature of name and brand in pop­u­lar art. Did/does Banksy (and by exten­sion a num­ber of oth­er “famous” street artists) use a crew? The com­ments will tell about all you need to know about the state of popular/folk/commercial art appre­ci­a­tion in this coun­try. le sigh.

Char­lie Brown and Snoopy, gen­er­al­ly any­thing not drawn by Mr. Schultz is crap. Except maybe this time trav­el piece that puts the boy and his dog on a street cor­ner sell­ing com­ic books.  By Boulet for the lat­est issue of Zoo.

The full issue of Zoo for which the Snoopy and Char­lie brown illo was done is worth a cou­ple of min­utes of your time even if you don’t read French. There’s a lot of good work to see.

Animation

I’ve always loved the sly humor of the yel­low polka-dot biki­ni song. The shy­ness of the girl want­i­ng to be fab­u­lous but a lit­tle afraid of all the atten­tion. Here is Lisa T’s (Lasse Pers­son) trans­gen­der ver­sion. Big burly swedish beach boys and one teenag­er full of trep­i­da­tion. It all ends well, I promise. (Pos­si­bly NSFW, no nudity)

Morning Linkage (Nov 22)

Transportation

I will do this man’s TPS reports for noth­ing. Hon­est­ly. Tim Lawrence of Cin­e­ma Vehi­cle Ser­vices.

BMW’s plug-in sports car is due in 2013. I would­n’t even con­sid­er an elec­tric sports car. Unless of course they bring this one out with the high­ly hal­lu­cino­genic camo paint scheme intact.

T‑Shirt of the week. Do good and look cool. Sup­port the Bul­ta­co effort in Dakar. Okay — it’s one crazy Spaniard — all the more rea­son you should give a lit­tle. A bit on the crazy Spaniard.

Total­ly sweet lit­tle Gilera. The whole sto­ry of Mor­ton’s Gilera TS — start to fin­ish with 100s of pic­tures and com­men­tary in at least 3 languages.

Art, Images, and Design

I am charmed and lit­tle sad­dened by this side­ways crea­ture and the dan­de­lion puffs.

Squir­rels kin­da freak me out. They twitch too much and are always scold­ing. But I’m glad I got to see all of these because I was remind­ed of a cou­ple of my favorite illustrators.

A wry detail or two makes these car­toons per­fect. Daan Botlek.

Animation

Old school car­toons still have a mag­ic that the newest all dig­i­tal stuff can’t touch. For exam­ple this great telling of the Shoot­ing of Dan McGrew. Most of the sto­ry is told by the back­grounds. Enjoy the 6 min­utes of high cul­ture and then crawl around the oth­er links to soak up more of Walt Pere­goy’s work.

keep calm and car­ry on (it’s just a lit­tle snow)

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 (May 19)

Transportation

Bridge­stone pro­vides two videos that explain the tire pro­gram for MotoGP.  Lots of you all know this stuff but the vids make a good intro­duc­tion for the uninitiated.

I love my Benz, but per­haps not enough to get me up in this Eurocoptor/MB col­lab­o­ra­tion. Luxo traf­fic beat­er.

In 2011 the Dakar Ral­ly will once again be held in South Amer­i­ca. Ral­ly dates and routes were released recent­ly. Looks like a great tour through Chile and Argentina.

Science and Tech

This arti­cle on open soft­ware offers anoth­er inter­est­ing visu­al­iza­tion of the process of cre­at­ing soft­ware. Open soft­ware is some­times said to ‘evolve’ but does it? And  does that evo­lu­tion mim­ic the evo­lu­tion of bio­log­i­cal enti­ties? Infor­ma­tists Marc Ger­stein co-wrote a study com­par­ing the net­worked infor­ma­tion trans­fers involved in the change process­es of E. coli and Lin­ux. Inter­est­ing conclusions.

Anoth­er use for LEDs. Gui­tar picks. Seri­ous­ly. A mini-light show in your liv­ing room.

Pass­word secu­ri­ty is a right roy­al pain. Either you can remem­ber the dan­ged thing XOR it’s secure — rarely can you have both. And writ­ing your pass­words down on a cheat sheet is a big no-no. Unless your cheat sheet is some­thing like this. It may take you a few min­utes to fig­ure out how this is sup­posed to work. But it’s both sim­ple and ingenious.

Art, Images, and Design

Take some of the best street art being done today, add a pho­tog­ra­ph­er with an eye for line and col­or in his por­trait work and you have Gabriel Mendes’ Urban Puns. Bold, bright, and bit­ing. 8th image down NSFW.

My own, sim­ple as I can make it, web­site isn’t per­haps the best exam­ple to use for the geo-citieizer but hey this is my list of links so I’ll use my web­site. (Results are some­what ran­dom. If you don’t think it’s too bad try the link again in anoth­er tab.) Try mess­ing with your own site by using the generator.

Bonus bike and choco­late com­bo link today. “This motor­cy­cle runs on choco­late but needs to be parked in the deep-freezer when tem­per­a­tures are not ade­quate.” nuff said.

Alex­is Grotius’ sum­mer bike is pret­ty cool as well. Except that it’s creepy.