Morning Linkage (Mar 8)

Posted bylara

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…