Life & Research Notes

MIT Media Lab: Design Ecology / Information Ecology david small’s design-oriented research group at the media lab. the next vlw/acg/plw? mit research medialab design

Lady Cadogan’s Teapot ~ Made Of Pyrex Borosilicate Glass ~ You Flip It Upside Down To Fill It… And Then It Can Only Co… – #20141 – NOTCOT.ORG very nice notcot coverage of an awesome teapot in the electric works store. design tea electricworks

Home – ruby-processing – GitHub jruby + processing, with support for live, interactive coding a la ogfx. sweet. ruby processing processing.org graphics art programming

THE ENTREPRENEURS REPORT: Private Company Financing Trends – Winter 2008 advice and trends in the vc financing world. via nivi. entrepreneurship finance business venturecapital

Field – Trac interpretted exploratory visual coding system with live updating, similar in some respects to ogfx. uses java+python, with interface to processing. art development programming graphics python processing

JBox2D Demos very friendly, nice looking rigid body physics in java processing.org library physics java

Google’s Irene Au: On Design Challenges – BusinessWeek “A lot of designers want to increase the line height or padding in order to make the interface “breathe.” We deliberately don’t do that. We want to squeeze in as much information as possible above the fold. We recognize that information density is part of what makes the experience great and efficient. Our goal is to get users in and out really quickly. All our design decisions are based on that strategy.” web business design innovation google ux

Goodbye Google | stopdesign “When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.” business design google

Army Surplus, Military Surplus Clothes, Tools, and Equipment at Sportsman’s Guide so i can get awesome used swedish military jackets shopping military surplus

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand aaron koblin’s latest mturk work. long way since the sheep market! web2.0 music art collaboration sound mturk crowdsource mechanicalturk

Safari Client-Side Storage and Offline Applications Programming Guide: Introduction client side storage for webkit. makes native iphone apps seems a little less necessary development database iphone sqlite safari html5 webkit

MATIAS NAJLE in case you have not taken enough acid today music graphics animation flash

Periodic_Table_of_Typefaces_large.jpg (JPEG Image, 3150×2100 pixels) – Scaled (28%) via kjhollen, top typefaces organized in a somewhat retarded but interesting periodic table visualization design typography fonts type system:filetype:jpg system:media:image

Tropo.com cloud based telephony system, with browser integrated development of call scripts. basically this makes asterisk hacking unnecessary for 99% of us. cool you can code in a couple different languages. they must be using bsf. api phone programming cloud voip telephony

Twilio: Web Service API for Making and Receiving Phone Calls, building hosted IVR and PBX telephone applications makes it possible to code telephony apps via rest api. very sweet. see also tropo. web api mashup mobile phone programming voip telelphony voice

The Neuberger’s ‘New Media’ – Brain Trees, DNA, Receipts and Bells – NYTimes.com burak is in the NYTimes! web design art media network burakarikan nytimes

(Sonic.net) this is what andy is using, so it must be fast/good. web2.0 internet dsl isp

TwitterSheep tag cloud of your twitter followers. mine kinda sucks. web visualization twitter folksonomy tag

Our (and Your) RISD » Blog Archive » Daddy? Where does art come from? Our minds and bodies naturally move in the direction that we face. In driver’s ed it is not uncommon for the instructor to say, “Look where you drive, and you will end up where you are looking.” design art mit medialab johnmaeda risd

git ready » what git is not another nice git intro, focusing on the benefits and distinguishing features. reference programming blog versioncontrol tutorials git introduction

Git Community Book ok, it’s definitely finally time to make the switch. once again visnu was way ahead of the curve on this one. reference programming tutorial book howto documentation git

gist: 67060 – GitHub nice piece by the github founder, with insights into failure and success business startup entrepreneurship advice github

Republic Bike | Track bikes, fixed gear bicycles, fixies built by us and you lovely custom single/fixie bikes! design shopping bike

PICOL – Pictorial Communication Language – Icons & Pictorgrams “PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication. PICOL is free to use and open to alter.” web visualization design graphics icons

Internet Famous Class this is like the first hands on internet grass roots marketing class i’ve heard of. how great it’s at an art/design school. weird and wonderful and ridiculous. definitely smart. via arikan. web media culture blog internet designer education class famous

Taco Lab Blog web design blog electronics mit medialab interface siftables sanfrancisco brent jeevan david

Josh’s Blog » OSCemote cool iphone app for input via open sound control (osc). very handy looking. interaction osx iphone multitouch osc

processing.core the processing developer reference is very handy. api developer code processing.org documentation java

Muhneer blog fantastic student blog, including his experiences building a multitouch display. definitely a cool resource. blog interaction diy tui tangible multitouch student netherlands

Siftables Siftables are cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them – piling, grouping, sorting – to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications. tacolab technology interaction mit medialab interface siftables

the daily mariks > documentary about objectum sexuals if you had to marry an object, what would you choose? video culture documentary sexuality object

Taking Apart the $819 billion Stimulus Package – washingtonpost.com not the clearest visualization. could benefit from some compactness, perhaps via mouse interaction/exploration. but definitely a lot of good research and data in here. data politics obama government visuaization economy

Craigslist Foundation Blog craigslist foundation started their blog web blog community nonprofit craigslist foundation

Trackmate sweet tangible media project open sourcing and DIYing a nice, simple, inexpensive webcam-based tangible interface. via kjhollen. hardware diy medialab interface opensource tangible tmg

Installing Oracle Instant Client on Mac OS X | Digital Sanctum nice basic sqlplus+oracle setup for mac. howto mac java sql oracle

www.lettersfromvietnam.com “For the first time, I’m reading hundreds of letters that my father sent to my mother before, during, and after his tour in Vietnam. I don’t know what they say and I don’t know where this is going, so we’ll be finding out at the same time. He passed away in 1992 when he was 44 years old, but they begin when he was 19. She was 17…” history blog archive vietnam letters

Seed: 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic bruce sterling’s more pessimistic take on the future. “Indeed, the year 2009 is shaping up as a planetary Enron. Enron was always the Banquo’s ghost at the banquet of Bushonomics. The moguls of Enron really were the princes of contemporary business innovation, and the harbingers of the present day.” future economics politics science environment brucesterling

Seed: The True 21st Century Begins “Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.” bruce sterling’s optimistic piece on what we’re collectively in for next. future politics science environment economic brucesterling

Bacolicio.us ~Mmmm, Bacon~ this really is helpful. these guys are genius. web funny food bacon

Bacolicio.us ~Mmmm, Bacon~ amazing bacon on the taco tacolab bacon

BRIO Wooden Toys – Network wow, amazing brio network playing toys. design network toys

The web in the world great presentation by Timo Arnall on the web of things, pervasive/ubicomp, etc. via oreilly radar web future map design technology sensors presentation rfid

I LEGO N.Y. – Abstract City Blog – NYTimes.com cute lego depictions of nyc. via tang. lego play city design cute photos nytimes funny

build.kiva: Blog – Introducing the Kiva API wow, the kiva api is out. so great to see them continue on this awesome trajectory. web api microfinance programming social nonprofit

Apache CouchDB: The CouchDB Project big distributed database using http/json api. written in erlang. weird. future data rest programming http apache database couchdb

making friends with hill shading (tecznotes) lovely article/tutorial on hill shading. gis sanfrancisco geography maps hillshading cartography stamen

transit data (tecznotes) stamen dude’s transit database, scraped from 511.org data sanfrancisco database sqlite

Jump Associates via huned. growth strategy firm. some combo of social research, design, and business. gotta say, it looks a little too new age though. business design innovation strategy consulting

We quietly opened up our new Taco Lab Blog a few weeks ago, along with a small refresh of the main TL site.

It’s a little ridiculous it’s taken us this long to get our blog started. But now that we’re coming up on our one year LLCification anniversary (March something!), we’re noticing that we’re a lot more comfortable and efficient with the basics, and we have enough interesting projects and initiatives going to warrant some regular updates.

So please check it out, and check back when you think of it. The shiny new blog has me rethinking this one too. Lately I’ve slipped into the habit of simply recycling content from other places rather than creating my own. So I may make some changes in my approach here to try to start actually writing again. If so, yay.

Jeevan sent me a TajTune today! Listen (mp3). The internet is so strange and wonderful.

AIGA Standard Form of Agreement for Design Services: Design & Business: AIGA the aiga standard agreement. definitely has some stuff in here we overlooked last time. useful for a variety of creative/tech service work. design service business useful web

freshmeat.net: Project details for SQLiteJDBC simple jdbc sqlite layer java sqlite jdbc database programming library opensource

apartments — Urban Yurt — San Francisco google map + craigslist mashup with all the fixins. let's you filter by features that matter to you. created by huned. housing map mashup rental sanfrancisco friend

Brushes iphone painting/sketching app. very nice looking tool. iphone software painting drawing illustration visual innovation creativity

Iphone Sketches – a set on Flickr wow, app designers are figuring out how to use the touch screen for drawing. nice to see progress here. just downloaded the app ($2.99). iphone drawing visualization

My favourite Typefaces of 2008 | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog a roundup of top new typefaces of 2008. typography web design graphics visual

The folks here at Electric Works have a new online version of their store, bringing their delightful and rare merchandise to a much wider internet. Some of the highlights:

The Magic Garden makes a wonderful inexpensive gift for that special someone. Simply add the magic solution and watch it grow.

The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie surprises and delights.

Crocheted Owls (amigurumi) are a top seller, from what I hear.

Beeswax crayons are high quality and come in a variety of thicknesses.

Link: http://store.sfelectricworks.com/