George Orwell’s essay Poetry and the Microphone talks about broadcasting verse over the radio, but I think there are some internet parallels here, another way to cross distances. People who are interested can find and enjoy just as easily as those who aren’t interested can move along. That combination of distance and intimacy affects how […]
The Stylophone is a pocket-sized organ you play with a stylus. Here’s a medley of Survivor, Final Countdown, and some other 80s hits. I love how the stylophonist leans back around the 45-second mark to kick out the full rock climax effect.
Scott Rosenberg is giving away paperback editions of his book, Dreaming in Code. I liked it—no reason not to snag a copy.
“Email apnea is temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email.” [via collision detection]
Spent some time playing with Flickr stats the other day. I’m not really looking to be known for my photographs, but I am a sucker for data. As expected, my stats don’t demonstrate that internet users worldwide have come to appreciate my uncanny eye for composition and form, but rather that one can leverage Flickr’s […]
The Twitter Curve. I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. It’s one of the best things distractions going, but I have to be really careful to keep my signal/noise ratio in balance.
The Web that Wasn’t: Alex Wright talks about precursors and alternatives to the web we know.
Holy crap. I just noticed that there’s a LibX plug-in for Emory University libraries. There are a couple hundred other schools that use LibX. From the comfort of my own Firefox toolbar, I can search Emory’s catalog, journals, and databases, as well as Google Scholar and WorldCat. This makes me unreasonably happy.
Is it me, or is there subversive body language in this Apple promo video? I was watching the iPod Touch guided tour, and I noticed that our friendly host keeps moving his head left and right, as if to express disagreement. It’s incredibly distracting.
Liz Danzico analyzes the closing phrases we use in e-mail. My most common reflex closings: Thanks, Later, Rock and roll, Don’t stop believin’, Heh, See you soon, Etc., Ciao, Yours. I do like to mix it up every now and then with a tongue-in-cheek rendition of the earnest and baroque.
Did a little housekeeping around here…
I restored the link to subscribe to the RSS feed for this site, which I took away some time ago in an inexplicable fit of madness.
The sidebar now reatures a running list of what’s playing in my iTunes, updated every 10 minutes or so. I suppose you can get the […]
A friend at work got a RipStik. They’re like skateboards, except they’ve got two wheels and you can take really tight turns and you don’t have to keep doing that annoying foot push-off thing to keep moving. Watch some of the videos. Might be a good Christmas gift.
A timeline of things that have gone or will go extinct from 1950-2050. [via kottke]
Scott Underwood and Merlin Mann talk about productivity stuff. I’m not really a huge fan of instant messaging in the workplace, so I enjoyed this brief exchange:
Scott: IM to me combines the worst aspects of the telephone and e-mail—
Merlin:—and being a teenager.
Something I learned today: I was reading this NYT article about fashion, and I discovered that if you double-click a word in an NYT article, it will make a pop-up with a little dictionary/ reference search for you. Doesn’t look like it works on the home page, but that’s pretty cool. Am I the last […]
Wikimindmap maps out the subtopics and links in Wikipedia articles. A little slow, but very cool. [via idw]
I would very much like to own a Monome 256. It looks like just the kind of wonderful toy I need* these days. They mentioned the beautiful woodwork was from Atlanta—I wonder if that’s Matt Soorikian’s craftmanship?
*i.e., want
In the Year 2000 is a photo collection about “past visions of the future,” like picnicking with your hover station wagon.
Doing a little housekeeping around here. If this were 1996, I’d be displaying one of those “under construction” gifs.
A very cool bit of wisdom from Hugh MacLeod.
I remember Robert Hughes, the great art critic saying in his wonderful book, “The Shock Of The New” that the Conceptual Art scene that emerged in the 1960s-1970s was actually good for “Painting”.
Why? Because with everybody else scattering bits of string around gallery floors and calling it […]
Octavo publishes old, significant books in digital form. I love me some rare books.
The Dvorak Zine is a 24-page web comic about the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. Pretty cool. [via comics pundit]
A photo collection of handmade, miniaturized synthesizers from yesteryear. Those are some incredibly detailed models.
The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. And I want one.
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Man, I’d love to make some gigantic wallpaper. Where to begin… [via not martha]
Here’s an analysis of the economy of Second Life. Rapid, artificial inflation of the Linden dollar means a recession is due at some point. It’s hard to predict when they’ll reach it, but it seems pretty much unavoidable.
Anil Dash noticed the recent popularity of pixel graphs, citing an awful example in the New York Times and a not-as-bad one in Wired Magazine. I also recall this one from Business Week a while back, and another commenter mentioned one at Curbed today. It’ll take some time and trial & error to figure out […]
Your spreadsheet has been attacked. Modern office life can be a little like The Oregon Trail.
A video of Merlin Mann talking to Google employees about Inbox Zero, e-mail management philosophy and technique. “Before you get good, you have to stop sucking.” For the past two weeks, I’ve gone to bed with an empty inbox. It feels great. And now that I’ve got a good Seinfeld streak going (thx, Austin), I […]
Lately there have been a couple good interviews with William Gibson in anticipation of his book, Spook Country. From his talk with the College Crier:
One of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a […]
Mark Hurst just published a book to get you back on track: Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. Could be a good one.
I like Andy Rutledge’s little essay on quiet structure: “Quiet structure is achieved when you de–emphasize the structural elements; the containing boxes, structural lines, bullets, structural color elements, etc… and bring a rhythmical consistency to the layout.” A good grid is a powerful thing.
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