Blog posts tagged as 'links'

It’s Friday the 7th of October, and this is Berg Friday Links.

The recommended soundtrack for this edition of Friday Links is Keygen Jukebox, provided by Andy, and my favourite link of the week.

Alex provided us with this link to a 1971 Nintendo product.

We got excited enough about this new Roland 3D hobby mill that we started talking about the games consoles we used when we were kids.

There’s been a bit of interest in Point Of View videos on the list, bringing up these examples: The Stampede by Biting Elbows, Cinnamon Chasers – Luv Deluxe, Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up (NSFW) and the game Mirror’s Edge.

We also had a mini discussion on the greater debate around what now seems to have been coined wackaging. Denise, the person I would most trust on this issue, gave us this:

Main thing is that writing in that style and doing it well isn’t easy. And it’s not quick. It doesn’t just trip off the tongue, its not like writing an email to your mates. Get it right, and people like it. Get it wrong and it’s really offensive. It’s also very difficult to tell people how to get it right. Christopher Hitchens explains it better:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.

Alex provided us with this animated gif:

And finally, from Denise via She Went of Her Own Accord, is New Old Jokes Home:

My robot wife has gone to the Carribbean.
Jamaica?
No, she came ready-manufactured.

Have a good weekend.

Video Game in a Box by Teague Labs. Delightful.

danw’s Toby Barnes’ collection of glanceable displays and devices (above is dextr).

The reconstruction of what a person sees by measuring brain activity:

The left clip is a segment of the movie that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this movie from brain activity measured using fMRI. The reconstruction was obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video.

Physical graffiti that beautifies (via @urbnscl)

Time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station. WHOA.

With at least a quarter of the studio gone on any given day this week, it’s been a bit quiet on the studio email list, but there have still been a few gems popping up.

Alice sent round a link to “The Flashed Face Effect”: the phenomenon that normal faces flashing by look monstrous when you’re viewing them with your peripheral vision. It’s another one of those fascinating things the brain does, and scientists still aren’t really sure why.

Denise pointed out Bill DeRouchey’s SXSW presentation on The History of the Button. It’s a fascinating walk through the past century looking at how buttons developed, what they signified, where we’ve gotten to now and where things might be going.

Matt Jones found the utterly delightful Rapping Paper. I’d be tempted to just frame the Run DMC “It’s Tricky” paper and hang it on my wall.

Nick pointed us to Bacon Ipsum, for when your Lorum Ipsum needs to be a little meatier. Simon countered with his friend Katie’s Vegan Ipsum for those among us that eschew meat and meat products.

Another last minute entry from Jones: his friend Steve Murray created “Forty Fords”, a tribute to Harrison Ford in commemoration of his 40th credited big screen appearance.

And finally, just for fun (we do quite like a bit of fun round here after all), I will leave you on this lovely Friday with the inimitable Beeker, doing an impressive multi-dubbed video rendition of Ode To Joy. That is, until it all goes a bit… err… badly.

Have a great weekend!

A glut of interesting stuff on the studio list this week.

Matt Jones sent round an intro to Biophilia, Björk’s new multimedia project. As you’d expect from the small Icelandic bundle of re-invention, her new work is a departure from her previous oeuvre; Biophilia isn’t just an album, it’ll be accompanied by ten iPad apps. Her tour isn’t simply a tour. Starting with the Manchester International Festival, she’ll be continuing with a number of residencies across the world involving live performances and workshops.

Yesterday I watched the making of her new iPad-controllable celeste, the Gameleste. I love it, especially the little burst of Bach’s Invention No. 13 in A minor on organ in the middle:

The Gameleste – a custom instrument for Björk from Andy McCreeth on Vimeo.

Next door, RIG have been pumping out Robyn this morning [“I’ve got some news for you / Fembots have feelings too“], which seemed fitting as Matt Jones sent round Kevin Grennan‘s work The Smell of Control: Fear, Focus, Trust from this year’s graduate show of Design Interactions at RCA. It explores the blurring lines between robot and human interaction.

“The contrast between the physical anti-anthropomorphic nature of the machines and the olfactory anthropomorphism highlights the absurd nature of the trickery at play in all anthropomorphism”

Robot with sweat gland, from The Smell of Control

Mr Jones also sent round this genre mashup video. If only Amazon really sold a choose-your-own-adventure plot device button to sex up the weekend.

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Timo and Alex had their interest piqued by Nizo, which promises to bring Super 8 film goodness to the iPhone. I like the scrolling effect on their homepage. A nice way of tease-introducing the features which the app will contain.

Terminator 2 is twenty years old on Sunday. This stop-motion tribute is totally mesmerising:

Splitscreen: A Love Story was filmed entirely on a Nokia N8 and sent round the studio by Denise. Nicely shot, and not without a healthy dollop of romance-cheese.

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

Happy weekending!

Another Friday, another round-up of the various things that have been flying around the office mailing list this week.

Core 77 are running a feature on visualisations of The Metropolis in comics. Part 1 is all about the night:

Simon sent this around – a video from the camera mounted on each of space shuttle Endeavour’s rocket boosters:

Timo sent around the trailer for producer Amon Tobin’s live tour:

Matt Jones sent around Olafur Eliasson‘s latest exhibition ‘Your rainbow panorama‘ – a 360 degree viewing platform ‘suspended between the city and the sky’, which looks incredible.

Denise pointed us to this (via @antimega), a wonderful video of dust devils lifting plastic sheets from strawberry fields:

Finally, as the sun’s out here in London and music features fairly high on our agenda at 6pm on a beautiful Friday evening, Matt Webb sent around this video from Brighton based duo Rizzle Kicks – a superbly produced video, and quite a nice track as well. Enjoy!

It’s Friday. Here are links to some of what’s been blowing around the studio this week.

There’s an interview Geoffrey Hoyle about his 70’s book 2011: Living in the Future looking back at looking forward with some lovely, yet not altogether pleasing to the author, illustrations. via @futuryst

Jones pointed us to filmonpaper.com, Eddie Shannon’s extraordinary archive of film posters.

Datamoshing rears it’s glitchy head again with Yung Lake – Datamosh via @philgyford and kottke. ‘sCool because it’s nerdy…. And made better by a bit of context in the form of a how to and David O’Reilly’s first compression transitions in 2005.

Timo points to Bluefin labs, an ambitious initiative growing from the Speechome project, building on Deb Roy’s work. Couple that with this and we should be about ready for an O’Reilly Baby Hacks book.

Glorious hues are revered from the golden age of comics and despised in 10 modern movies that are better in black and white.

And if you’re trying to make the most of your space too just be glad you don’t have this much stuff on your desk.

Of course, no week would be complete without an elaborate machine, and this human powered helicopter is quite something.

Happy Weekend!

It was a busy week last week, so Friday links have rolled over to Tuesday.

Lots of historical things this week. A brilliantly curated and annotated collection of movie title cards and trailers. A work of incredible devotion by Christian Annyas via @LukeScheybeler:

An early colour autochrome photograph of equally early airshows, via Claes Källarsson:

Some early photos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Matt Webb says: “There’s something uncanny about these unstudied portraits of people taken before they got to be such presences in the world.”:

And another historical artefact from Steve Jobs on marketing, branding and values, this is why Steve is absolute #1 mind-gangster. Via O’Reilly radar / gnat:

In one of the stranger moments last week Durrell Bishop reminded us of Maggie Thatcher killing a multi-million pound British Airways branding project with a simple gesture:

As tomorrow is a holiday, the weekly BERG links post is coming to you one day early this week!

It’s been a rather quiet week on the BERG studio list, but we (where “we” mostly = Matt Jones) did manage to dig up some interesting things from the internets.

Jason Kottke linked to Clement Valla’s collection of “melty roads” – Google Earth images where the 2D-to-3D mapping doesn’t quite work. Browsing through the images invokes an Inception-like world.

Via Khoi Vinh we discovered the brilliant “Back of a Web Page” Tumblr. Ever wonder what those Twitter birds do behind the scenes?

One afternoon we heard some odd bloopy music coming over the studio speakers, and Matt Jones confessed he’d been playing with Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata, a generative sound sequencer.

Go over and have a play yourself!

Via Mike Migurski came Xiaoji Chen’s Isochronic Singapore. It’s fascinating to see the city of Singapore expand and contract like a living, breathing thing as average travel times change from hour to hour and day to day.

Chen has been playing with other dynamic maps of Singapore as well:

Finally, via our neighbour and RIG super group member Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, a list of Robots, Cyborgs and Computers in Film and TV. It seems that list hasn’t been updated in at least five years (and therefore actually feels rather short), but for me the best thing about it is it reminded me of something I had completely forgotten about: the TV show Small Wonder. Ah, mid-80s American family sitcoms. Most of them are best forgotten, actually…

Vicky the robot child!

Here are a few things of note which have been posted to the BERG studio mailing list this week.

Matt Jones linked to a lovely poster from Pop Chart Lab, which organises and visualises the taxonomy of super-hero and super-villan powers. For instance, Powers of the Body/Superhuman Ability/Super Strength shows itself to be a highly populous category, but Weapons Based/Powered Prostheses/Armored Suit/Armored Suit with Telescopic Legs less so, highlighting a possible Darwin Awards subtext to it all.

Alex linked to Pica-Pic, a Flash site which lovingly recreates vintage 80’s handheld electronic games from around the world.

Matt Webb linked to a page detailing an algorithm for calculating exactly when Easter falls in the Gregorian calendar, which itself is a republishing of an anonymous correspondant in Nature, from April 1876. Hot pseudocode is hot!

And finishing on a video, Matt Jones also linked to this clever idea demonstrated on an iPad 2, marrying up a 3d engine with facial tracking from the front-facing camera. Have a great weekend, folks!

It’s my turn on the blog rota this week, and so it’s my turn to let everyone know of interesting things that have been floating around the office mailing list.

I really liked this old video explaining how differential gearing works.

Nick found this – the result of someone taking Deutsche Telecom to court to gain access to 6 months worth of mobile phone usage data.

Andy sent us this video of juggling Quadrocopters:

And we also liked this Quadrocopter combined with a Kinect sensor.

Jones sent around this series of photos from BBC4 documentary ‘Around the World in 60 minutes’. As the Space Shuttle Atlantis nears the ISS, hexagonal lens flares appears on the screen. Superb.

Finally, Matt Brown sent this video of the original animation references from Prince of Persia.