Sunday, 13 Mar 2016

Blue Monday 1930's old skool  

One of my favourite songs from high school, Blue Monday by New Order, is creatively covered by Orkestra Obsolete using only instruments and technology available in the 1930's.

This is such a good and original cover of a great song, love it.

Via Kottke

Friday, 11 Mar 2016

3D Dress Making  

Two technologies I feel will have an enormous impact on our lives over the next decade is Virtual Reality/Augmentation and 3D Printing. An example of where 3D printing is headed can be seen in the video below. Kinematics Cloth App is an interactive 3D garment app people can use to design their own 3D printable garments.
Thursday, 10 Mar 2016

A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon  

Michael Heinemann’s detailed analysis of the history of the Millennium Falcon is an impressive piece of work. The story behind how Star Wars’ most famous ship came into existence is fascinating.

Something I love about design is the iterative process a designer goes through before arriving at the final version. One of my favourtie models, the Rebel Blockade Runner above, was an the early Millenium Falcon design but was removed from contention after the untimely release of the TV series Space 1999 which had a similar looking ship, the Eagle Transporter.

Wednesday, 17 Feb 2016

SF2LA Trip - 2015  

I love good drone videos, especially if they're not too 'droney'. This one is just beautiful.

Americanisms  

The Economist has produced a concise style guide for avoiding the over-use of Americanisms.

Try not to verb nouns or to adjective them. So do not access files, haemorrhage red ink (haemorrhage is a noun), let one event impact another, author books (still less co-author them), critique style guides, pressure colleagues (press will do), progress reports, source inputs, trial programmes or loan money. Avoid parenting and, even more assiduously, parenting skills. Gunned down means shot. And though it is sometimes necessary to use nouns as adjectives, there is no need to call an attempted coup a coup attempt, a suspected terrorist a terrorist suspect or the Californian legislature the California legislature.

Considering I live in a non-American, English speaking country, I’m surprised how many Americanisms I use in day-to-day conversation. Maybe this will help a bit.

Aero Glass  

I haven't had much time lately to post new links and content, but I came across this yesterday and loved it. Its a great proof of concept video to show what will be possible in the near future using Augmented Reality to assist with day to day tasks, such as flying an aeroplane.
Thursday, 5 Nov 2015

Ikea makes Soft Toys from Kids Drawings  

My kids love Ikea's soft toys, we have several dogs, a rabbit, two rats, a bear and three reindeer. Now it looks like we can expect monsters, skunks and a Picasso-like tiger to be added to the collection thanks to their latest Soft Toys for Education campaign.
As part of its long-running charitable program, the Swedish furniture manufacturer asked kids who visited their stores around the world to design the ideal toy last year. From thousands of entries, ten selected designs were transformed into plush toys—and the resemblance is spot-on.

Cute, I love the effort they put into making the final product as close to the original drawing as possible.

UPDATE: Ikea isn't the first to do this, Childs Own Studio has been making toys from kids drawings for years.

Via Quartz.

Wednesday, 4 Nov 2015

Plex now available on the new Apple TV  

Plex is the reason I bought my first Apple TV several years ago. I went to great lengths jailbreaking it then installing Plex and setting it up to access our library of TV shows and Movies. It worked well but needed constant updating and you had to be careful not to go installing updates from Apple which would undo all your hard work with the jailbreaking.

Now that Apple has finally released an App Store for the new Apple TV, Plex has been quick to release a native version of its media player for the App Store. This alone is almost enough to justify once again getting a new Apple TV!

We’re incredibly proud of this new app, which is essentially one of the richest apps we’ve built feature-wise, built in just five short weeks. Feast your eyes on the screens, and then go download the new app. It’s completely free for everyone, and it’s awesome.

Five weeks is an impressively short amount of time to prepare an App for the App Store, good effort.