Blog posts tagged as 'friday links'

A slightly delayed summary of what’s been floating around the BERG mailing list in the last week.

Matt Webb sent us Music for Programming:

A series of mixes intended for listening

while programming to aid concentration

and increase productivity (also compatible

with other activities).

In our ongoing email series entitled ‘HTML5 watch’, we found Suit up or Die Magazine and the browser version of ‘Cut the Rope‘.

Simon sent us the IBM Glass engine, which ‘enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.’

I really like this blog from the people behind the NYT graphics department, showing some of the data sketching behind their infographics.

Nick found this really nice prototype for a cursor based iPad keyboard.

This is what happens when you put a Kinect and a projector over a sandpit:

And finally, this has blown my mind this week. Araabmuzik plays live sets on Akai MPCs. There’s a lot of clips floating around of him making hiphop beats on the fly, but this dubstep clip is particularly good. Enjoy.

There’s been lots of exciting things circulating the studio this week; bacon butties, choccies, beer, the usual, but with the most notable of all being the simply delectable mango, courtesy of our Simon (and I think Sainsburys – good work guys). All the edible things aside, here’s some bits for you to enjoy.

A solar powered calculator preparing to take on the world.

What life was like in the swinging sixties.

The robot company bought by Amazon… Simply astounding.

An article about why you can’t stop throwing those birds.

The future of comics?

And finally… the biggest Creme Egg you’ve ever seen. (Bigger than a kettle):

Happy Easter all.

It’s Friday, and this is being hastily penned after a particularly good Friday Demos, so here we go!

Alice linked to this explanation of Sim City’s new simulation engine.

Alex has been having fun with Flixel, and sent us all this image.

Denise sent us all a link to this, simply saying “The sound of the Internet. Lovely piece by Giles”.

I sent a link through to yet another amazing Boston Dynamics robot in the making.

Matt Jones linked to a PBS article which details where News Corp makes its money, which also ties in nicely with the recent Panorama documentary on Pay TV hacking in the UK.

We’re wrapping things up in the studio after an impromptu Youtube party, and are off for a well deserved pint. Have a good weekend!

I am going for a bike ride in Kent tomorrow, so this is the state of my inbox as of the end of Thursday.

Timo shares “Warriors of the Net” -a video from the 1990’s that I am pretty sure I watched in an ICT lesson at school. It is probably the root cause of my deep seated fear of sysadmin, and anything lower down the TCP/IP stack than the application layer. Leave that stuff to the neck beards, I say. I do wish BERG videos had more gravel toned voice overs though.

It also has this natty website: http://www.warriorsofthe.net/about.html

Timo also shared Robin Sloan’s Fish. I had to borrow an iPhone to experience this, but it was well worth it. A lovely and thought provoking thing.

Stamen’s maps were also all over the web this week. Most impressive is the watercolour view, but I also really like the toner view.

Timo (again) shared this video from Nature and MIT about seeing round corners with lazers.

Denise shared these brilliant stereographic drawings: http://robotmafia.com/stereographic-drawings-by-dain-fagerholm/

Denise also shared this story about an author who has written software to automate writing sports reports. This is both pretty impressive AND gives me a great idea for Friday Links…

From Nick, piccolo, the tiny CNC bot:

Piccolo the tiny CNC-bot from diatom studio on Vimeo.

From Denise, Dog Ear, a new publication on a bookmark by Fallon:

From Alex, Synchromy – an animation by Norman McLaren from 1971 created by using an optical film printer:

From Timo, Intersections in the age of driverless cars. This gave me the willies.

Matt Jones shared this picture of a Hydroelectricity Plant, which reminded me of John Glen-era Bond movies:

James, like the rest of us, really like the new design of Fix My Street, especially the way it scales for different sizes of devices. Check out what needs doing near our studio.

From Jack, reaDIYmate – build an internet-connected thing in 10 minutes:

Shouts to @alruii for sharing Terry Wogan’s Secret Pirate Radio, brainchild of the marvellous Peter Serafinowicz:

What have we been looking at this week?

Telecommunications services for the 1990s

Friend of BERG Tom Stuart is writing a book for O’Reilly: Understanding Computation

answering questions about computation and the fundamental mechanics of programming languages: how do they really work? what can they really do? what do the programs we write in them really mean?

Music video watch:

“lonely AI whose efforts to reach out to its creators ends in tragedy” by @johnpavlus.

Injection moulding watch:

Injection moulding of 72 screw caps in less than 3 secs

Mattel’s Apptivity iPad toys enhance ‘Fruit Ninja’, ‘Cut the Rope’, and ‘Angry Birds’ gameplay

Pneutu.be

Nine block pattern generator

Wrap Your Head Around These Gears

The Strongest Weapon In the World a.k.a. Weapons of Mass Happiness / 2006

Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer

Nike+ new sensor array using Bluetooth LE.

The Mu

Weekend in SF from robert mcintosh on Vimeo.

Related: CINESTAR-360 COMPLETE PACKAGE

And the quest for a studio dog continues, Maddie is our inspiration.

We started this week, as all weeks should be started. With a video of a creature, on YouTube. Not a kitten, but a corvid. A crow.

There’s something completely delightful about this. As I watched it slide down the roof I found myself thinking – ‘Ha! nice, but lucky’. As I watched the rest of the video, I thought it was less luck, and more that the crow was having fun.

There’s some discussion about it here. I thought this was interesting:

‘… when humans look at a crow doing something human-like, they have a very hard time not seeing themselves as the crow.”

It reminds me of Hello Little Fella, where people see human faces in — as Wikipedia puts it — ‘vague and random stimulus’. Turns out there’s a word for that, and it’s Pareidolia. There’s also a word for the loss of this ability, ‘Prosopagnosia’. It’s taking a huge amount of strength not to fall down a Wikipedia worm hole right now, but the links are there if you have more time. (Chuck Close, a painter of hyperrealistic portraits has prosopagnosia. Apperceptive prosopagnosia is particularly interesting.)

Anyway, to continue.

Alex shared a link to a beautiful 360 degree panorama from the Shard at dusk, and this periscope rifle. I hope the two are unrelated.

After some time out of the office, Matt Jones has been on a link-sharing roll this week. There’s an open source espresso machine (which came via Jennifer Magnolfi), and a piece entitled “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”, by BERG friend Jamais Cascio, discussing the problems of future technology prediction.

There was also this Sinclair advert from 1983, and a rather spectacular advert for a dishwasher — a question of which Matt asks: “Is this the best advert ever? Lady fighter pilots, jetpack robot transforming baby bjorn dishwashers and coffee…”

Nick sent us this link of a 3d printing machine that works with concrete. It’s beautiful to watch…

And Alex also shared this link of a record player that plays slices of wood…

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

And that’s all for now. Early links this week – so enjoy the rest of the day, and have a great weekend.

Monday is the new Friday. We were moving studio last week, so it was a quiet week for links. Here we go:

Trillion frame per second video is pretty astonishing. “Nothing in the universe looks fast to this camera” according to MIT researcher Andreas Velten:

Here’s a Bearded Dragon playing Ant Crusher. This is the first time I’ve seen a reptile using a tablet device – I hope it’s not the last.

Timo was intrigued by looking behind the scenes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.

Start.

1. Ice Cube on the Eameses:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRWatw_ZEQI

2. A comprehensive list of cute robots
http://io9.com/5865655/

3. Animals talking in caps
http://animalstalkinginallcaps.tumblr.com/day/2011/12/06

4. Good Gifs
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665547/8-mind-bending-animated-gifs-by-mica-l-reynaud

5. A Tube app / Alarm clock
http://london-underground.blogspot.com/2011/12/underground-delay-alarm-clock-android.html

(image) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CMS_Higgs-event.jpg

6. ‘Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time’
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/09/01/ten-things-everyone-should-know-about-time/

7. ‘Thatcherism As Tragedy Then Farce’
http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2011/12/thatcherism-as-tragedy-then-farce.html

8. ‘The Tao of Zookeeper’
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/ZooKeeper/Tao

9. Light-dancing
https://groups.google.com/a/berglondon.com/group/studio/browse_thread/thread/bac0a9f85bccce2e#

10. Soft-Maps
http://www.hapticlab.com/

11. And more soft maps
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665548/wanted-blankets-and-napkins-printed-with-personalized-maps

12. Two-screen gaming
http://distractionware.com/atadistance/download.html

13. Drawing composed of 3.2million ink dots
http://vimeo.com/33091687

14. James Bridle ‘Waving at machines’
http://www.webdirections.org/resources/james-bridle-waving-at-the-machines/

15. Kickstarter from IBM chief scientist celebrates history of computing
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/05/kickstarter-from-ibm-chief-scientist-celebrates-history-of-computing/

16. World’s tallest man saves dolphin
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6178659.stm

17. Triggertrap is an open-source, Arduino-based universal camera trigger.
http://triggertrap.com/

18. Sony projection mapping
http://www.rubbishcorp.com/19137/

19. Follow up to “Android graphics true facts”, or The Reason Android is Laggy
https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJRGS

20. George Clooney’s private satellites
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2101425,00.html

21. The Draganflyer X4
http://www.draganfly.com/uav-helicopter/draganflyer-x4/gallery/videos/video-2.php

22. Founder of Mint closes project on alternative urban transport
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/founder-of-mint-closes-project-on-alternative-urban-transport/

End.

A bumper crop of videos this week.

Denise pointed to this from Wired UK, 2D patterns assembling into 3D objects once exposed to light.

You’ve probably all seen this ISS timelapse by now. But I can’t stop watching it.

Chairman Bruce‘s Venn diagram on product invention merits study.

In the ‘things you can spend money on dept.’ Matt W pointed to this New Aesthetic backpack, and Alex pointed out that our friend Brendan Dawes has got his new Beep store up and running which is awesome.

From our ‘robot-readable world dept’, Kari shared this advert she saw for a children’s toy video camera with face tracking A.R. capabilities

In the ‘giant nutty land-art dept’ Andy shared this sculpture in Germany

Alex shared this ‘superhydrophobic’ nanotech

Reminds me of ‘The Man in The White Suit’…

Robofold! Robot-Readable-haircuts for footballers!! Rhianna vomiting ribbons!!!

Finally, Kari won ‘subject line of the week’ prize with her email to the list entitled ‘Big Brass Nuts’… Which turned out to be this marvellous film about hand-casting a short run of beautiful metal things rather than a meditation on Schulze’s sales techniques…

Have a great weekend!