And thanks to Nick we are all trapped in a world where candy is currency trying to farm lollipops with aniwey’s amazing ascii art adventure game Candy Box.
Its Friday links, transposed to Thursday as I’m off to the beach tomorrow! Here’s a run-down of some of the what’s been flying around the studio mailing list this week.
Alex spotted an article on factmag.com about artist Patrick Flanagan who uses “robot” drummers.
Alice passed round an article on Microsoft’s Illumiroom concept as reported on The Verge, augmenting your television by letting the content spill out into the surroundings.
Lastly Denise linked to a lovely site about the scale of time called hereistoday.com.
Although not strictly Friday Links material, I also made a post on engineering.bergcloud.com about our dev board progress, including a little animated gif showing it booting up.
So what images, videos and links have been whizzing round the BERG studio this week?
Simon shared this article about the philosophy of human extinction. I’ve only read the first third so far, but am finding it quite a fascinating read. The extinction of humanity isn’t a topic I think about very often.
A topic I think about even less is automobile design, but I immensely enjoyed this interview with former BMW head designer Chris Bangle, sent to us by Matt Jones. Jones pulled out this quote:
Probably 25 years from now the critical issue in car design will not be: “electrification yes or no”, but “do the cars drive by themselves or not?”
Timo pointed us to gifpaint.com. There’s a good (?) way to waste time on a Friday afternoon.
Speaking of gifs, Joe sent us the link to this animated gif of a vintage Pioneer CT-F 1250 tape deck.
Joe was the king of “old stuff” links this week. He also sent us these two videos:
(More on that one here. Unlike Joe, I’m actually old enough to remember seeing that on Sesame Street.)
Nick shared Friend of BERG Dan Catt’s write-up of Diesel’s Days to Live Project which also involved Friend of BERG James Bridle. Here’s the direct link to the Days to Live project if you haven’t given that a go yet.
Last one this week: Simon, one of our resident musicians, sent us a link to this video of a Pendulum Choir. I just kept thinking about how they must have really strong neck muscles. (More on the project here.)
Good morning citizens of the Internet! My quiet revolution to bring back Friday Links is limping along, inasmuch as some people always remember and some people always forget. My latest idea is maybe what we need is an animated glitter GIF? Also, maybe some confused metaphors? What if that’s what’s missing?
SO what hairballs of greatness have the cats that I work with coughed into my litter box this week?
Alex sent us an animated GIF of how a lock works. You’ve likely seen this already being the hip plugged in individuals that you are, but in case you haven’t, behold:
If you would like to see inside a key factory (the answer is ‘YES’), there is a video for that too:
Denise went to Design of Understanding last Friday, it sounded excellent. She returned with many stories, chief among them, that of the ex-mayor of Bogota:
“Famous initiatives included hiring 420 mimes to make fun of traffic violators, because he believed Colombians were more afraid of being ridiculed than fined”
Alex shared this video about mechanical principles:
Denise shared Autographer, “the worlds first intelligent, wearable camera”, made by the amazingly named OMG PLC. (Calm down everyone, OMG stands for ‘Oxford Metrics Group’). Autographer combines a bunch of sensors and an camera to take photos at the best moments throughout the day.
Matt Jones sent an article about building moon bases using 3D printing with the materials available on the surface of the planet.
And that concludes Friday Links! Happy Friday everybody. February will be better, I promise.
In typical January style everyone’s a bit all over the place putting into action all the bits they’ve been thinking about over Christmas but settling down nicely. In random mood fashion there’s been a whole bunch of odd bits shared since we got back.
My personal favourites are those shared by Denise. The first of which I can only imagine is a link to what she imagines people with iPhones get up to at the weekends followed by a link to a digital pencil microscope - that’s right – a HD Digital LED Microscope that looks like a pencil.
From far off lands, Timo linked us to a short film entitled THE FUTURE OF CINEMA with Douglas Trumball followed up with a related article in which Jacob Kastrenakes points out that without realising it, in 24 frames-per-second films, ‘we’ve allowed ourselves to exist in an Impressionistic world of filmmaking’.
Matt Jones shared an abundance of links including:
- and a link for those not wanting to aggravate people when redesigning apps.
Joe forwarded a link to Teenage Engineering’s new, and lovely, wireless speaker. Slightly bizarre that the majority of the comments at the bottom are discussing the title of the article but a nice thing nonetheless. On a different subject entirely he also sent round a link to Streetview Explorer. An ‘old project that permits a new way to look upon Google’s visually arresting 3d flatland’.
Matt Webb shared a video selection of some e-things at CES as well as a link about why the width of his face doesn’t matter.
Andy, whilst using a hosepipe to suckle petrol from next door’s lorry, came across wireless device-to-device charging. Much more impressive.
We’ve also spent a little time reflecting on the wonder that is Kickstarter with a round up of the team, what it achieved in 2012 and a couple of current projects:
We haven’t had Friday Links for a while, so I’ll keep this relatively compact and to the point. A few things that have been flying around the office mailing list in the last few weeks, in no particular order…
4. Lytro cameras now allow you to change perspective as well as focus (without any new hardware, and with all existing Lytro images) – which is a bizarre but brilliant experience
5. Microsoft’s Smartglass working outside of gaming, allowing a second screen for media content:
Using your second screen device, The Dark Knight Rises Xbox SmartGlass experience offers:
Exclusive content
Storyboards
Triviax
Quotes from the film’s director and actors
A closer look at The Dark Knight Rises’ vehicles, gadgets and characters
Time-synced information about the epic conclusion to the Dark Knight legend
Behind the scenes look at Bane’s in-flight hijacking, the stadium disaster and more
ATOMS give kids of any age the ability to make their toys DO things. And not just new toys – ATOMS were built to work with the stuff kids already have, like LEGOs, costumes, stuffed animals, Barbies and action figures. ATOMS don’t require any electronics skills or programming experience – or supervision from a parent with an engineering degree. In fact, because of the tiny electronics built into each one, kids can make all sorts of cool stuff within 5 minutes of taking ATOMS out of the box.
Welcome to Friday Links. Today I am going to provide the links with wild assertions about what bigger categories of BERG interest they fit in.
Internet of Things Meta Watch
As the concept of Internet of Things continues to seep into more people’s brains (A waiting list of 57 for the next IoTLDN, with Matt Webb speaking!), naturally, the common patterns get pulled out and satirised. isittheinternetofthings.com does this well.
Music Hacking Watch
It’s been great to see Music Hack Days move from purely data driven (eg listening data) hacks to more artistic ones. My favourite meeting of the two so far has to be The Infinite JukeBox
Influencing Culture Watch
“Design is about cultural invention” is, to me, one of Jack’s founding principals of BERG. So you can imagine how excited we were to see that the new Avengers comic has Tony Stark owning a device that sounds awfully like a Little Printer.
Browser War Watch
As someone who wasn’t ‘in the business’ during the first browser wars, I’m more used to years of IE6 apathy. So watching the new browser war unfold, with adverts everywhere, very odd. But accompanying it is the commissioning of some great HTML experiments. Like Chrome Experiment’s ‘Stars’, this weeks example.
Infrastructure Hacking Watch
Any time I see a bit of software toying with massive infrastructure, I get tingles. This week’s tingle supplied by Randomized Consumerism.
Atom Watch
Shipping atoms is hard. Whilst I sat in my tower of software, watching the hardware being developed for Little Printer was a very eye opening experience. I hold a new reverence for atoms. Read about Jawbone’s process of developing Up to get a little bit of this.
Software Defined Radio is something that seems to rapidly moving from hobbyists to something that could be quite game changing for many products. See it’s first strides here .
This is my first Friday links. First up is attention to detail which is something we all take very seriously.
Joe found this brief DVD extra from the excellent (and very Scottish) Brave from Pixar where they went to extraordinary levels of detail right down to the modelling of individual threads
A slightly longer example of this level of detail was picked out by James from back in the day on Wall-E.
It’s always nice to see something that we’ve put out in the world get picked up and adapted somewhere else. Timo found this library of objects inspired by our own iPad light painting.
This example even has an audio guide track to help with the painting.
I’m writing this whilst BERG drive time plays in the background so it is fitting that two musical links tickled our fancy this week. The first found by Fraser suggests that;
“Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic “pictures of sound” dating back as far as the Middle Ages directly into meaningful audio.”
At the other end of the spectrum the good folks at Google Creative Labs have put together another Chrome experiment so you can ‘Jam’ in real time at jamwithchrome.com. I have it on good authority that if you hold down the keys A. C. I. D. at the same time you get an 303 drum machine as an easter egg (but that may not be true).
All around us we see the cost of new technology dropping precipitously, not least with the Txtr Beagle e-reader costing a mere £8 and which Jack found recently reviewed in the Guardian.
We were really impressed until James noted that;
“The txtr beagle can be offered at such a low price because its cost will be subsidised by mobile carriers. The beagle itself won’t be sold individually; you’ll only be able to get one is by purchasing it when you sign up for a mobile phone contract on specific carriers.”
So how much does it cost really?
Finally I’m very relieved to say that even your Jeans can now get involved in Social Media.
Denise found this over at PSFK and I’m sure you will be glad to hear you can share your ‘happiness level’ featuring eight different modes to choose from – how did we ever cope until now?
