shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: thruxton

Morning Linkage (Mar 8)

Transportation

Low rent trans­former of now neglect­ed, beloved city mas­cot. This robot built of sovi­et era car parts stands out­side of Odessa.

Love­ly. Thrux­ton based.

Some back­ground on the engine design of the IoM Nor­ton I showed you a week or so ago. The squish com­bus­tion cham­ber was the idea of a jan­i­tor? Not real­ly. Leo Kus­mick­i’s sto­ry reads like an adven­ture com­ic none-the-less. Read the com­ments for addi­tion­al info.

Inter­est­ing if true, BMW has a firmware rev lim­iter on the new S1000RR. It gets turned off at the 600 mile ser­vice. Is this going too far? Or is BMW jus­ti­fied in try­ing to pro­tect it’s machines from ear­ly life abuse and itself from unrea­son­able war­ran­ty claims.

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Literature and Gadgets

A book design­er talks about the move to eBooks, what the iPad brings to the par­ty, and what the future of the print­ed book looks like. His dis­tinc­tion between form­less and def­i­nite con­tent is a good way of con­sid­er­ing which books deserve to be print­ed and which don’t. Per­haps it is time to rec­og­nize that some books are not worth the paper they are print­ed on.  Excel­lent civ­i­lized dis­cus­sion in the com­ments as well.

Less thought­ful but more imme­di­ate­ly and com­mer­cial­ly rel­e­vant. These two videos fea­tur­ing Pen­guin Books’ CEO John Makin­son talk­ing about the pub­lish­er’s move into the dig­i­tal book mar­ket and the upsides and down­sides that they see in the near future.

Low tech, for book lovers. Book plates can aid the return of your pre­cious vol­umes. There are three free designs, I like the one with snakes.

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Art, Images, and Design

Some of the nicest remake/reuse fur­ni­ture exam­ples I’ve seen. Not a bun­ny or flower stick­er in the bunch. Decent hard­ware upgrades too. From Pur­pose Restora­tion.

Flickr is home to the port­fo­lios of some amaz­ing pho­tog­ra­phers. The work of Nicholas Moulin includes lots of wicked cool macro images like this four-eyed spi­der.

Scott Camp­bell of Zom­bie Fair poster fame has new work hang­ing in Lon­don.  Who can resist ambigu­ous wood­land crea­tures and a race car carved out of a boul­der ? Or the Bedrock air­ships?

Cecil­ia Murgel’s jour­nal pages. Each fea­tures an image of two women and a com­men­tary on the activ­i­ties of a day. In Por­tugese but you don’t need to read the entries to know how she’s feel­ing about what’s going on in her life. I haven’t seen mark­ers used so well in ages.

ta ta for now my freaky darlings…

Morning Linkage (Mar 2)

Transportation

The F1 safe­ty car. M‑B SLS AMG. My very favorite alpha­bet soup car. The rear light­ing is par­tic­u­lar­ly stylish.

Vin­ta­gent pro­vides anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry from yes­ter­year. A 1967 “pro­duc­tion” bike class at the Isle of Man TT led to the cre­ation of a spe­cial Velo­cette Thrux­ton. Tales of it’s suc­cess­es and failures.

Lover­ly. In-car and side-of-the-road video of a prac­tice dri­ve for the 100 Acre Wood ral­ly. This is why they do it.

Fun­ny British “Watch for Motor­cy­clists” ad. Humor and a reminder. Plus per­haps the ulti­mate hel­met acces­so­ry, neon.

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Tools

A nice vari­a­tion on the multi-tool. I like rounder shapes for pock­et objects.

I love my rotary cut­ters for cut­ting both fab­ric and paper. I have sev­er­al includ­ing a cou­ple of the pret­ty flower pat­terned spe­cial edi­tions. Now the rotary cut­ter prin­ci­ple has been applied to emer­gency equip­ment. A bet­ter way to cut through lay­er of den­im, tex­tile, or leather.

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Science

A real­is­tic recon­struc­tion of a snake prey­ing on a rep­tile. Unre­mark­able except for the fact that the snake is 11 feet long and the rep­tile is an infant Titanosaur. Nice pho­tos of the orig­i­nals fos­sils as well as the reconstruction.

Tiny-saurs. Build-it-yourself mini mod­els, less than $20 for the deluxe kits.They also do cus­tom work if any­one is look­ing for the ulti­mate trade show swag.

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Art, Images and Design

Ani­ma­tion — sort of. Aard­man presents Home Sheep Home. Infu­ri­at­ing­ly sim­ple brows­er based game for lovers of Shaun the Sheep. Hate, hate, hate. I suck at video games.

Flickr user A Jour­ney Around My Skull is always a good source for new things to look at. These illus­tra­tions from Iran­ian chil­dren’s books are at the same time famil­iar and alien. Many seem to be folk­tales. This image of two rich­ly dressed char­ac­ters with flow­ers for heads sets the tone. There are many equal­ly fine images through out the set.

These are scary and weird and full of vague­ly obscene pigs pro­vid­ing moral guid­ance(?). In oth­er words, ter­rif­ic. Scott Has­sell.  Most­ly pen and ink. (NSFW)

Bird obsessed Jungil Hong was trained in ceram­ics at RISD but is best known for her collages.

More tomor­row…