23 Oct

The waiting game commences

I used to buy a new computer every 6 months when I was a decade younger. I’d package up and eBay the previous generation gear and roll the money into the latest and greatest from Apple twice a year. But when I got my 13″ MacBook in October of 2008, I found that the cycle had played itself out. 2009, 2010 and even 2011 came and went and the designs were mostly the same – and my little notebook kept chugging right along without any real issues.

This last year of freelance projects and a need for occasional forays into Windows has become increasingly sluggish, though. And then the advent of the Retina display on notebooks sealed the deal: it was time to upgrade, both for my strained eyes and for my cooked lap, burned under a more and more taxed set of four year old components.

So I plunked down an ungodly sum of money and placed an order for the above 13″ MacBook Pro on launch day today. I’ll be checking the tracking site and scouting the driveway for FedEx trucks nonstop from here until up to 5 business days from now. In some ways, perhaps nothing has changed in the last ten years…

16 Oct

Shopping, now with less buying anything

Technology by Nick

QR Code Groceries

While it seems somewhat silly in the form of a grocery store with no products, just photos of items and QR codes, the Tesco example in this article from Ubergizmo does make a lot of sense:

Yihaodian has already done something similar on a smaller scale by sticking up posters in subway and bus stations, while in South Korea, Tesco has launched something similar where customers can shop for groceries at the subway while waiting for their trains.

7 Oct

Finding Fall

Cars by Nick

Otherwise known as me making new footage for use in classrooms this academic year…

24 Sep

What to wear on those long spaceflights

Art, Fashion by Nick

Normally I pay no attention to YouTube ads before my video content loads, but damn did Prada do a fine job on these spots for their Fall/Winter 2012 collection. These are “Real Fantasies” that I can most assuredly get behind.

I love the way the scene vanishes to reveal the credits at the end of this one.

The most intriguing game of moon-chess you’ll ever see, guaranteed.

17 Sep

Death by PowerPoint? No more with Haiku Deck.

Work by Nick

[F]or anyone who has had to squint at a PowerPoint presentation that was essentially just the unedited text from the reader’s speaking notes, Haiku Deck offers a merciful alternative. In an academic lecture or a business meeting, an overly dense slide show is like a Pavlovian signal to zone out.

For students, colleagues or coworkers who struggle with creating compelling, simple and memorable PowerPoint slides, Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell may offer salvation.

The free app for iPads allows users to type in just a few keywords about each slide and then it automatically scours Creative Commons images for bold background photos that tell the story for you. Even better, it plops in correct attribution information for each slide created, a godsend for some class settings, as I’m sure you know.

While the aesthetic may not be for everyone right of the box, a $2.99 expansion pack will provide another 11 themes and there are plans to offer some font packs in future versions to tweak the basic text layout.

Learn more about Haiku Deck at the Co.Design blog.

co.design creative commons death by haiku deck powerpoint presentations

11 Sep

Where stuff gets done

Books, Technology by Nick

Really big stuff, in fact. Like 20 km high towers into space big. At least that’s what Neal Stephenson is up to with his amazing Hieroglyph project. io9‘s article on the potential impact of a massive stairway to the stars led me to “Innovation Starvation“, an essay by Mr. Stephenson in which he derides science fiction – his own chosen genre – as being dreadfully lazy for a generation. Some choice quotes that sum up the gist of his argument:

The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age.

io9 further quotes Stephenson from another interview as saying “Everything got put on hold for a generation,” while civilization busied itself with figuring out the Internet. While this point is certainly likely to be true, it does provide some hope. Not only does the Internet enable us to access all of the optimism of innovative science fiction thinking of the past (plug: and even take a class about it online), it also immediately connects visionaries like Stephenson with the young engineers in Israel, Finland and Japan who are itching to build something really big. (There was no Kickstarter when Clarke pitched the space elevator, after all…)

And that’s not such a small thing, is it?

7 Sep

Together apart

Art, Internet, Technology by Nick

“They were a bit puzzled how the image was going to be done. But once they start seeing the resulting image, most of them start to see the deep impact of such a session. There’s a very deep longing in their sentiments. You can sense that they miss each other very much, and yet it’s something we have to accept in the current fast-paced society.”

Artist John Clang explains his new exhibition Being Together with The Atlantic.

24 Aug

Musical landscaping

Art, Music by Nick

Ever wonder what your favorite album might look like as a physical object (and no, I’m not talking about moving back to CDs, tapes or vinyl)? The Microsonic Landscapes project from Mexico City has done exactly this by printing the sonic landscape of five artists as 3D plastic artifacts. Gorgeous, no?

22 Aug

Science fiction-y backlog

Art, Internet, Technology, Television by Nick

It’s been a busy week here (and it’s only Wednesday) and I’ve been meaning to post the following for several days. So without further adieu:

1.

The first episode of Brian Singer’s new web series H+. You’d better believe I’ll be watching the rest of these tonight.

2.

With the advent of the smartphone, many Americans have grown used to the idea of having a computer on their person at all times. Wearable technologies like Google’s Project Glass are narrowing the boundary between us and our devices even further by attaching a computer to a person’s face and integrating the software directly into a user’s field of vision.

From “Cyborg America: inside the strange new world of basement body hackers“. While not necessarily a new concept, it’s a new take on the subject that looks really well done.

3.

Amazing Martian art that was actually commissioned by NASA, proving that they have a sense of style even more so than Starhawk did.

14 Aug

Text-based horror

Art, Books, Games, Technology by Nick

Having played my fair share of text-based adventure games as a kid, I can tell you the joy that was getting to the occasional point when a crazy-awful illustration would pop onto the screen after multiple pages of story whizzed past. And when we progressed to mostly picture based games, the illustrations were an ever-present fact of storytelling, even if they didn’t really look all that fantastic.

Fast forward to now and we have io9 presenting us with haunting animated gifs in the style of vintage computer games by Uno Moralez. It’s like Zen & The Art of The Macintosh gone spooky.