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Greatly enjoyed eevee's history of CSS and browser-based code; particularly, I enjoyed the moment where you're following along with things you knew… and then you viscerally go "oh, _here's_ where I began!" I twinged as I remembered where I began, my move away from table-based layout… and then the point where I started battling quirks mode for a living…
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"Everything is Someone is a book about objects, technology, humans, and everything in-between. It is composed of seven “future fables” for children and adults, which move from the present into a future in which “being” and “thinking” are activities not only for humans. Absorbing and thought-provoking, this collection explores the point where technology and philosophy meet, seen through the eyes of kids, vacuum cleaners, factories and mountains.
From a man that wants to become a table, to the first vacuum cleaner that bought another vacuum cleaner, all the way to a mountain that became the president of a nation, each story brings the reader into a different perspective, extrapolating how some of the technologies we are developing today, will bur the line between, us, devices, and natural beings too."
Simone has a book out!
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"The result is a rhythmic meditation on the tonality inherent in her instrument. To hear bits of the viola on repeat is to hear the organic turned into a machine, as nuances are frozen into employment as compositional elements." Yep.
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It's great to see Omata leaking into the world, and I enjoyed this for the early sketches, the playful renderings, and the box of prototypes, as much as the interview.
Workshops are measured in years
30 May 2012
I’ve been making a lot of things recently, both at work and at home. And as a result, I’ve been having to buy tools.
Not a lot, but a steady trickle: discovering I need one of these, or one of those. A box of screws or bolts here; some wire there; a different kind of this to fit a particular need.
I’m trying to artificially acquire odds and ends.
This is hard. What, I think, I’ve been needing is a workshop.
But you can’t buy a workshop. A workshop isn’t a set of tools in a room.
It’s everything else, as well: offcuts; spares; old bits of wood; weird bits of plastic with strange holes in; broken things with one useful part to be cannibalised; hand-made jigs that fit particular things.
There is no shelf in B&Q or Maplin marked “this, that, and the other“, and yet that – more than anything else – is what I’ve been needing recently.
You can’t buy leftovers, spares, or “just the right thing”.
And given that, I think a workshop isn’t measured in the volume of tools it contains, the number of shelves, or the lengths of its benches.
I think it’s measured as a duration. A one-year workshop. A five-year workshop. A ten-year workshop.
Ten years of making things, and ten years of all the entropy that goes along with that: spares, duplicates, improved versions of things, swarf, offcuts, and thingummys.
When you view it like that, it’s no wonder I’m always finding new things I’ll require. I’ve only got a baby workshop (and let’s face it, the tools are in a closet and I’m drilling and sawing things on my dining room table – it’s hardly a workshop, is it?)
But babies grow up.
And it’s a reminder why, when I visit my parents, I can almost always find the bits and bobs I need, or the right tool for a job, or a part I didn’t even know the name of – because there’s a thirty-year workshop waiting for me.
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"Rather than wondering if aliens exist in the cosmos, let's assume they are all around us, and at all scales – everything from dogs, penguins and trees to cornbread, polyester and neutrons. If we do this, we can ask a different question: what do objects experience? What is it like to be a thing?"
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"It’s important to note that this number does not reflect either the number of people owning a mobile phone and that the United Nations Millennium Declaration remains a crucial milestone to reach for the mobile industry. However it shows that homes, bridges, cars, laptops and netbooks, white goods, plants, spimes, and other objects have a mobile phone subscription and are likely to become the most important target segment for mobile operators around the world." Which begs the question: how do you market to things?
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It Just Works and is good.
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Learning datamining, using the WoW Armory as a data set.
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"This page documents the web API calls that allow you to retrieve information from the item system in Team Fortress 2." Steam now has a Web API. Ooooooooh.
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"Maybe participating in a Game Jam ought be a required rite of passage for anyone who wants to make videogames. It's a deep, oxygen-less dive into the depths of the industry, compressed into 48 hours. Survive it, and you can survive anything." Development as fractal.
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"Smart things: the design of things that have computers in them, but are not computers". Mike Kuniavsky outlines the book he's currently working on. Looks interesting.
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35mm, f1.8, crop-factor only, and with a built in motor so all the D40/D60 users can use it. This is big news – the first-party crop-factor prime. If they can make it super-affordable and good quality (at least as good as the 35mm f2 I'm thinking of buying) it's a lock.
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"Marketing is a strategic function about delivering customers what they want. It isn’t a jazz hands and rubber chicken and t-shirts. It is the heart of successful companies…"
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A few notes on Flickr's queueing systems.
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Cultured Code do a large behind-the-scenes look at how they designed their Things iPhone UI. Lots of detail, lots of working shown. Even if you don't agree with the choices they made, it's excellent to see somebody sharing at this level of detail.