SOPA Strike
Today was the internet’s SOPA strike day. Netizens, websites and tech companies rallied to stop the internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA. From the EFF‘s post, Thank You, Internet! And the Fight Continues: The numbers are pretty amazing. More than 1 million messages (and counting!) were sent to Congress today via the EFF action center. More ...
Photo Locations
On the iPhone you can see locations of places you’ve taken photos. Here’s a screenshot of the map showing where I’ve been this very West coast year.
Real-time Recommendations
Love that Foursquare is using smartphone geolocation features to provide you with real-time recommendations through the app.
Billabong Donations to SurfAid Through Instagram Photos
Send Instagram photos to Billabong to donate $1 to SurfAid for each photo. You can see six of my photos in the first two rows. Get involved at the Life is Better site.
An Urban Emoticon that Measures the Happiness of Cities
This is emoji writ large. The Fühl-o-meter/Public Face is an interactive art installation that calibrates the mood of the city in which it has been erected with a monumental illuminated Smiley. The work of artists Richard Wilhelmer, Julius von Bismarck, and Benjamin Maus, the urban emoticon accurately communicates its host city’s gefühlszustand according to “mood data” obtained using integrated software which ...
A $25 Handheld Computer for Education
Raspberry Pi is a new credit card-sized computer designed specifically to teach computer programming to students. The device is the brainchild of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a U.K. charity that “exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level” and wants “to put the fun back into learning computing.” ...
Twine
Connect real life tasks/objects to the internet. Like IRL @ifttt. Want to hook up things to the Web? Maybe you want to get a tweet when your laundry’s done, or get an email when the basement floods while you’re on vacation. Even if you’re good with electronics and programming, these are involved projects. Instead of ...
The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face
Kare’s work gave the Mac a visual lexicon that was universally inviting and intuitive. Instead of thinking of each image as a tiny illustration of a real object, she aimed to design icons that were as instantly comprehensible as traffic signs. There was an ineffably disarming and safe quality about her designs. Like their self-effacing ...
Location Recommendations
While I still use the app, I haven’t visited the Foursquare site recently. They’ve made some changes and one that works well is the logged-in view of the home page which shows you locations near you that friends have visited and recommended.
Lookwork Visual RSS
Checking out @lookwork, a visual rss reader with solid features (tags, dropbox backups, following): http://lookwork.com/
Stop-Motion Music Video Shot Over Two Years with 288,000 Jelly Beans
Amazing dedication and creativity: Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It’s a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have ...
The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami
You could even say that translation is the organizing principle of Murakami’s work: that his stories are not only translated but about translation. The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, ...
On Creativity
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they ...
Visual Grub, an Instagram Mac Client
If you’re a fan of Instagram, you’re going to want to try out Visual Grub, a free Mac desktop client made by Ryan Grimm. Download it from the Mac App Store here. It’s full of features, including: View your Instagram friend feed A feed of the photos you’ve liked View what’s popular right now See ...
Thank You, Steve
I got my first Mac when I was thirteen (thanks to my progressive parents) and my life hasn’t been the same since. Steve Jobs inspired me beyond the physical products that he helped make at Apple, but through his ideas and his relentless pursuit of his own vision to change the world. He elevated design ...
Designers Are The New Drivers Of American Entrepreneurialism
As with The Designer Fund, this article by Bruce Nussbaum captures the emerging emphasis on designers as entrepreneurs. One key to entrepreneurs’ success is that they frame things differently, they connect existing dots in unique ways. via Designers Are The New Drivers Of American Entrepreneurialism | Co. Design.
ifttt
Trying out ifttt (if this then that), a web service that lets you create your own automated tasks, triggers and actions from various social media and digital channels (email, sms, instagram, twitter, dropbox, etc). For example, you can create a task to save every new photo you take in instagram to dropbox. Love the idea.
On Perfection
“It was like perfection was the thing that was destroying me — being totally focused on making it perfect,” she says. “And I found that when I would improvise, I didnt care about the technique. I would just put my mind outside of where I was, and just be in the music.” via Zoe Keating: ...