Toy Camera Fun

Massive, massive enjoyment from Takayuki Fukatsu's iPhone camera apps, particularly Quad Camera, Toy Camera, and Old Camera. Worth many times the collective $5, and thank you sir!

Also, as always, photos can be found on Flickr.

Simon Stabs

Simon Stabs was easily my favorite thing at the ITP Spring Show. As always, the young nerds were up to lots of cool tricks (and lots of half-baked ones). And I forgot how cute/hot/nerdily-androgynous the young nerd community can be...

The Whalehunt + Basik Group's City of Light

There was a point where I may have been skeptical of Jonathan Harris' self-stylization as an internet artist or digital artist or whatever, but he consistently produces elegant, dense, engaging pieces that fully utilize the potential of Internet as medium. His latest, The Whalehunt, is well worth a look.

Basik Group's holiday gift contained a link to their City of Light project, which I found to be another altogether charming and worthwhile use of the internet.

Paleo Future

Holy shit, can I just say you need to look at this blog, Paleo Future, and the attendant videos and photos that they are posting on the Internet. A good place to start is here, which is the video that MF sent me that started this all of for me, and you may as well follow up here. MF, thanks for the heads up, and if this is one of your projects, you are doubly-genius and making the rest of us look completely useless...

Shouldn't Someone Put a Stop to This?

Like, immediately?

From an impressive NYT article.

UPDATE: I hope they don't teach Leo to shoot lasers out of his eyes, otherwise that nice post-doc is going to be missing a few fingers the next time she tries to turn that blue button off immediately after telling Leo to turn all the buttons on.

Held Hostage + Other Topics

RM sends an article from this weekend's NYT. The lede is as follows, and the rest of the article is a fun enough read (as far as kidnapping stories go...). Makes me want to move to China:

AS an American journalist based in China, I knew there was a good chance that at some point I’d be detained for pursuing a story. I just never thought I’d be held hostage by a toy factory.

That’s what happened last Monday, when for nine hours I was held, along with a translator and a photographer, by the suppliers of the popular Thomas & Friends toy rail sets.

“You’ve intruded on our property,” one factory boss shouted at me. “Tell me, what exactly is the purpose of this visit?” When I answered that I had come to meet the maker of a toy that had recently been recalled in the United States because it contained lead paint, he suggested I was really a commercial spy intent on stealing the secrets to the factory’s toy manufacturing process.

“How do I know you’re really from The New York Times?” he said. “Anyone can fake a name card."

And an unrelated note on publishing. Yes, I am maintaining two blogs. No, you don't have to regularly check both. Just this one. If you are reading. Here is what I have written about recently on the other blog:

• A brief post on moves by social-networking platforms Facebook and LinkedIn to open up to developer communities.
• A glance at environmental initiatives being speared by China and Google, respectively.
• A response to an article sent over by RM, exploring how city living can be more environemtnally inefficient than rural living.
• A query into whether the incentives that drive entrepreneurial solutions to technology problems are really well aligned to the looming global environmental and energy concerns.

Pandora: Hella Dying

Pandora didn't come to me in dreams, but rather in stumbles, across the internet. Pandora is a site by which to expand and enrich your taste in music. Music, which is the arbiter of life, that most holy of elements, plus that thing that makes you cool.

Get with the program.

Pandora is dying. Will you support it?

Mr. Woo Number 25

Truly, the world is too big and too beautiful. Courtesy RM.

Continued Laziness: Wired Digest

Two cross country flights in the last ten days finally bought me the time to leaf through the May issue of Wired magazine. Wired continues to be one of my favorite magazines, even as it reinforces my general sense of uncertainty and unease (and confusion?) about what the future will bring. It is the moments of brilliance that shine through. Here are four:

- the Miami "art collective" Friends With You. Their website is a little twee, their aesthetic hops between too-cute Japanimation whatever and glorious moments of effervescing psychotic joy, and their Rainbow Valley playground is awesome. Kids know when their worlds are rocking, right?
- Photographer Mark Richards has some super cool photos of old computers as part of his new book Core Memory:

- The m-ch project builds modular "micro-compact homes" which embody a minimalist cool while still providing functional living accommodations:

It's All Just Paranoia

I get fidgety in elevators, if I'm by myself. Only for a moment. I'll tap on the carriage walls, or sort of stretch and contort in to some odd position, or maybe do a little twirl and dance. Until I remember about the video camera. It always happens one second too late, after I've done something to prove that I'm not an adult.

I have three basic reactions when I notice a security camera. The first is to stare at them and smile. The second is to give them the finger or make a face. The third is a desire that I had a can of spray paint, so I could spray paint the lens.

The Institute for Applied Economy, whose stated mission is:

The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. Our mission is to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.

has put together the iSee website, by which you can map a destination route from one Manhattan location to another, encountering the least possible amount of automatic surveillance. Handy.