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.
Friday, 19 Feb 2016
Van Gogh's Bedroom on Airbnb
As part of their Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibition, the Art Institute of Chicago has set up a life size replica of Van Gogh’s bedroom, as depicted in his famous paintings, that you can rent for just $10 a night on Airbnb.
Via Colossal
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.
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.