• "Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?" Marvellous, marvellous article, citing that Weizman piece I always end up citing, and looking how John McClane traverses the Nakatomi Plaza tower not through its corridors and elevators, but by literally infesting it.
  • "As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real – so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible – ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time." Beautiful.
02
January
2010
  • "ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations. ImageOptim combines various optimisation tools: AdvPNG from AdvanceCOMP, OptiPNG, PngCrush, JpegOptim, jpegtran from libjpeg, Gifsicle and optionally PNGOUT. It's excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also useful for making Mac and iPhone applications smaller." Ooh, looks excellent.
13
October
2009
  • "Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollenating with data as I travel the city." More wonderful stuff – both in terms of imagery and writing – from the BERG/Touch collaboration.
  • "Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by "land and sea monsters". The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult – but successful – expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart. I'll let the photos below tell the rest of the story." Royal de Luxe are the same group who did "The Sultan's Elephant". Thought: it's all a bit Bioshock, isn't it?
  • The future of image processing and 3D graphics is awesome, bonkers, sort-of relevant and full of bunnies. Worth a watch.
  • "We write and listen and play music in a cultural environment in which there's intense excitement and anxiety around the idea of music as a social object, not just a commercial one… in order to understand better the ways in which songs are becoming lines in listeners' conversations, we need different ways of thinking about how they've played that role for musicians too." Tom Ewing on music as fanfiction.
  • "After she left, the school began to switch away from Acorn computers to Windows PCs, and computing at school became less and less about actually wrangling the machines for their own sake: programming went away, to be replaced by word processing and the other kinds of useful activities which I'm sure helped a lot of pupils gain the kind of computer literacy they needed for the real world, but it wasn't the kind of computer literacy I needed. I needed the more abstract, joyful, engagement with computers that Sister Celsus provided, and which could only have been provided at the end of the 80s." A lovely post for Ada Lovelace Day from Matt.
  • "In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels." Just gorgeous.
26
September
2008

code

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Ruminant 0.9.5: making Moo Stickers in Ruby

Last night, I took a look at James Darling’s Ruminant library for Ruby. It’s a little Ruby library that lets you assembled designs and orders and send them to the Moo API for printing. It’s really nicely designed, but it’s only in the very early stages of development; it only supported creation of Minicards.

For various reasons, I’m looking at creating stickers through the API, and decided that it only seemed right to add sticker support to Ruminant.

As of last night, I’ve done exactly that. This is in part down to the joy that is GitHub. I forked James’ original code, and started work on my own Ruminant fork. I’ve added support for stickers, and have issued a pull request so that hopefully it’ll get merged back into James’ branch.

To install it, you’ll need Hpricot installed (sudo gem install hpricot). Once you’ve done that, you can install it as a gem directly from my Github code. First, add Github to the list of sources rubygems supports:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

and then install my gem:

sudo gem install infovore-ruminant

and follow the instructions in the README.

More to come, along these lines…

Links & notes for this month

Endnotes