Links & notes for this month

• • Science Museum - Visit the museum - Dan Dare & the Birth of Hi-tech Britain
    "In an age before globalisation, products from rockets to radios sprang from local roots. Together they reveal a fascinating ‘lost world’ of British design and invention – a glimpse of a time when the TV in the corner was a Murphy, not a Sony."
    (tags: exhibition sciencemuseum technology design eagle futurism comics)
  • Loyalty inflation | A Better Course
    "I always want to see more marketing that solves problems, and liked the idea that a loyalty scheme could solve more problems than the fake “I have to pay for ten out of ten coffees rather than nine out of ten” kind of problem."
    (tags: loyalty brand branding marketing premium product design)
  • Homegrown people planet profit - Raphael Grignani - Thoughts
    "If the intangible human benefits of communicating through our devices are the rewards, it’s the physical things we produce and consume that are the costs." Great expansion on the Homegrown project.
    (tags: design energy consumption sustain sustainability nokia manufacture product phone device)
• • ben.send :blog » Blog Archive » rspec plain text stories + webrat = chunky bacon!
    "We can now deal with forms in the language of our stories, something that the customer understands and relates to." Webrat lets you navigate your Rails app through the DOM, rather than HTTP.
    (tags: testing rspec stories agile rails ruby rubyonrails webrat storyrunner)
• • GridMaker Reboot - Article - andrewingram
    Lovely little Photoshop jsx script. Might tweak it to make the horizontal lines a config option - I've hacked it to disable them for now.
    (tags: photoshop design grid layout script automation generation)
• • Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
    "The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going." Wonderful talk from Shirky.
    (tags: clayshirky televsion tv industrialrevolution society culture revolution change participation interactivity)
  • Wish I’d seen this « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
    "...what exemplars like Dopplr and Fire Eagle demonstrate beautifully is [that]... the seams between systems are as important to the way a service is ultimately experienced as the more obvious interface between system and human user."
    (tags: application web design development interaction data ownership portability distributed)
• • Color + Design Blog / All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts by COLOURlovers
    Lots of hex codes for Crayola crayons. Lovely.
    (tags: crayons colors design fun)
  • lixo.org :: Go for a walk
    "When faced with a roblem you want to solve, or even to find out where the real problems are in the first place, try what the native americans called the Medicine Walk." I've been doing this a lot recently, and the pairing tip is spot-on.
    (tags: process practice productivity walk walking meditiation calm)
  • VespeneGas DOT Com
    "This is a port of Tyrian for the Nintendo DS." Wonderful top-down shareware Shmup, now abandoned, and put on your portable.
    (tags: ds abandonware tyrian danc epic shmup port homebrew)
  • LoneWolfDS Homepage - Play Lone Wolf books on your Nintendo DS
    The first of Joe Deaver's adventure gamebooks translated to a rather beautiful NDS port.
    (tags: homebrew adventure gamebook ds nintendods games play narrative)
  • The best DS homebrew.
    "Not necessarily the completest 'best' collection, but some of the more notable games, applications and emulators that have grabbed my attention long enough to stay on my DS."
    (tags: ds homebrew opensource play games mobile nintendo nintendods)
  • From Atoms to Patterns
    "This exhibition rediscovers the intriguing work of the Festival Pattern Group. This creative conglomerate of X-ray crystallographers, designers and manufacturers was inspired by the patterns discovered in crystal structures..." Anyone want to go?
    (tags: festivalofbritain design crystallography textile xray xraycrystallography wellcomecollection exhibition london)
  • Fav.or.it - Overview
    "Favorit is a unique product that not only allows you to aggregate content like a newsreader but also allows you to post comments, all without leaving its site."
    (tags: stream feed rss comment flow application web aggregation)
  • Git Magic - Preface
    "Git is a version control Swiss army knife. A reliable versatile multipurpose revision control tool whose extraordinary flexibility makes it tricky to learn, let alone master. I'm recording what I've figured out so far in these pages." Really excellent.
    (tags: git vcs sourcecontrol versioncontrol distributed programming development)
• • GTA IV: okay, here we go | Games | Guardian Unlimited
    "This is an important game - ... important because it is so ambitious, so detailed, so confident in its originality and inventiveness. It would sort of be an act of cultural irresponsibility not to play it."
    (tags: gta gtaiv games play rockstar writing article)
  • Modernista!
    "You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web. The menu on the left is our homepage. Everything behind it is beyond our control." Inventive, certainly. Not quite sure how much I like it, though.
    (tags: design web agency portfolio crazy distributed)
• • Simon Heys » Word Clock
    "Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence." Gorgeous.
    (tags: macosx mac osx typography type clock design screensaver)
  • Funnel
    "Funnel is a toolkit to sketch your idea physically, and consists of software libraries and hardware. By using Funnel, the user can handle sensors and/or actuators with various programming languages such as ActionScript 3, Processing, and Ruby."
    (tags: sketching ruby actionscript processing hardware physical computing design arduino)
• • INVDR
    Robots made out of sans-serif fonts. Squee!
    (tags: cute robots type typeface typography design)
  • I.D. - Down with Innovation
    Not quite sure what point Poynor's trying to make; in many ways, his list of examples at the end really is a list of design thinking examples - architecture, engineering, etc, seen with a design hat on. Lots of statements I'm uncomfortable with in this.
    (tags: rickpoynor design designthinking innovation engineering essay article style)
  • nick - Ruby Pearls vol. 1 - The Splat
    "When I first learned this at RubyConf I thought this was mind-blowing. I have since never used it."
    (tags: programming development ruby array hash splat syntax)
  • Timeframe
    "Click-draggable. Range-makeable. A better calendar." No IE6 support, but it's not half bad so far.
    (tags: widget interface javascript calendar code design programming development date time calendaring)
  • Be Good
    "...if you put those two ideas together, you get something surprising. Make something people want. Don't worry too much about making money. What you've got is a description of a charity."
    (tags: paulgraham essay writing business startup)
• • Sonzea - Syncopation
    "Syncopation from Sonzea provides a hands-free solution to keep your iTunes® music collection synchronized across multiple computers running Mac OS X." And this is what might make a Squeezebox practical chez nous.
    (tags: synchronisation osx mac itunes music library)
  • pintprice.com - the price of beer anywhere in the world
    "The only price comparison website worth drinking to as well as the only travel and short-break holiday guide you really need."
    (tags: economy finance currency money beer pint exchangerate yardstick)
  • Osmo Wiio: Communication usually fails, except by accident - (37signals)
    "Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws"
    (tags: communication language speech)
• • Why the great British breakfast is a killer - Times Online
    "You never see anyone with a degree eating a fry-up; they're too intelligent to consume it, says Times restaurant critic." What rot. Terrible article, lots of lazy journalism, somewhat sensationalist. Grr.
    (tags: gilescoren nonsense bobbins food fryup health sensationalism casualracism)
  • Grand Theft Auto IV's Aaron Garbut: Part 1 Interview // Xbox 360 /// Eurogamer
    "We take interesting or representative elements and create something new from them. It's about taking inspiration from real places and producing something that captures the essence of it." Interview with Rockstar's art director on building cities.
    (tags: gta grandtheftauto cities architecture feel play games design environment)
  • The Video Nasty Project
    "In 1984, the British Conservative government banned scores of horror films under the Video Recordings Act. ... They became known as Video Nasties. ... There are 73 Video Nasties in all, and I aim to watch them all."
    (tags: film videonasty censorship horror exploitation)