Ploafmaster General

IKEA announced this week that it intends to operate a pay-as-you-go phone service, initially in the United Kingdom. I hope we can expect to see some contemporary handset designs bearing the Scandinavian design aesthetic. I hope they have catchy names, too, like Tala, Telefonsamtal, or Konversation. But mostly, I hope their phones can race.

I was already a huge fan of Isiah Flores' short films, but below you can see him assembling beats in real time. I'm guessing many of them, if recorded, were edited later to smooth out the timing and what-not, but either way, I'd bump to these beats.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1456446 w=580&h=437]
isiah flores live mpc beat making from Spencer Keeton Cunningham on Vimeo.

For the starting price (indeed, it goes much higher) of $4,600.00, you too can have a bespoke Leica rangefinder camera. I mean, a man can dream, right? Right?!

Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating (if not slightly morbid) article about a 1924 kidnap and murder of a 14-year-old boy in Chicago by two young, wealthy, and deranged men. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb botched a scheme to kidnap and murder one of Loeb's cousins while extorting ransom money from the boy's father, and their trial gripped the city - indeed, the country - while a prominent prosecutor of the day battled with attorney Clarance Darrow between the death penalty and life imprisonment.

The article gave the impression that Darrow fought more for preventing another execution than for the defense of his clients, and his quote after the trial seems to feign disappointment at the "loss" of his case:

Well, it's just what we asked for but...it's pretty tough....It was more of a punishment than death would have been.

While the piece has been unfortunately paginated its window into early 20th century culture is worth the read.

Who needs burritos when you have magic pants?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb2a2pNBR0c&hl=en&fs=1&w=580&h=470]
(via waxy)

If you, like me, live in a part of the City of Richmond (or anywhere, really) that has yet to see fiber optic internet connectivity in your neighborhood, there's a simple way to check if it's coming soon:

Verizon's Virginia Community Page contains a link to a PDF-format schedule of their construction plans for FiOS. I've not linked to the schedule directly because it's typically bi-monthly. It looks like they're finally getting close to my humble Seminary Avenue, but I can't help feeling like they'll have something newer and better by the time they finally get to my block.

There are pages for states other than Virginia as well. It's a shame you can't get to these pages more directly or common-sense-like. When you check for FiOS availability in your area and there is none, all they do is try to hawk their DSL service instead.

It's Friday, so my brain isn't really at work. But some portion of my brain is almost always on the internet, so here's a glorious entry from Sarah Walker over at McSweeney's to distract you, too.

Peep it - a totally sweet animated video for a blippy electronic club piece:

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1154958 w=580&h=326]
Ghislain Poirier - Hit & Red (official) from departement on Vimeo.

"Hit and Red" comes from Montreal musician Ghislain Poirier who seems to specialize in bumpin' beets.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/877053 w=580&h=326]
A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

This glorious animated short not only features one of my favorite Sigur Rós songs (Takk...'s "Hoppípolla"), but highlights a sweet blend of traditional stop-motion handicraft and digital artistry. Carlos Lascano describes the process (and is gracious enough to include photos) on his website.

I'm pretty sure this is in response to the over-blown media noise-making about the recent cover illustration, but even if it's not, yesterday's totally safe animation from The New Yorker is hilarious.

It turns out that as politicians continue to crawl their way into the land of 21st-Century technology, Congress must consider the proper use of communication media like Twitter...

You can thank me later for laughing your head off this Friday morning:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1YJbCftjBI&w=580&h=485]
(via trey)

David Friedman over at Ironic Sans has turned one of his great ideas into a reality with Thsrs.

Thsrs is a simple (on the surface) web application which attempts to do for words what services such as TinyURL do for hyperlinks, providing shorter synonyms to help folks keep Twitter messages at or under 140 characters. Sure, it's a niche app, and likely only to be used by those few tweeters who stretch the bounds of their alloted message space. But it's creative thinking like this that moves the internet forward.

It's still in its infancy, so it's not perfect, but it's a sweet idea for now.

Oh Wikipedia, you treasure trove of useless yet entertaining knowledge. You have surprised and delighted us again with your exhaustive list of problems solved by MacGyver.

Some serious gems:

While being pursued by dirty CIA operatives at a strip club, MacGyver loads a confetti cannon with make-up powder and fires it at them as they enter a door, thus blinding the enemies with powder.

MacGyver builds a hot air balloon from scratch to escape from a Soviet search party. The balloon was made of homemade super-glue, old clothes, a parachute, welding equipment, a refrigerator, condoms, and metal box.

MacGvyer also built a swinging playpen out of hockey sticks, a rope net and rope, and fastened a baby's diaper with duct tape.

(via the title text of today's XKCD comic)

The nerd in me often has a desire to check out new web apps at least for a short period of time, and the flavor of my week is Textpattern. Textpattern is a blog-centric CMS which is PHP-based and open source. It was pretty easy to install, and seemed to near-seamlessly import everything from Wordpress in a few seconds. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects to me is the CSS editor...should be fun to play with.

Anyway, if you're curious, it's at blog.danielcwarshaw.com - but don't expect much. Followers of my site know my attention span for these things is pretty short. If it plays nicely, though, it may be time for a change of platform, so we'll see how it goes.

The above is one example of a series of Thomas Roche photographs from the aftermath of fighting at Petersburg, VA in 1865.

It appears Martha Stewart's criminal record is preventing her from obtaining a travel visa to the U.K. Who knew a stint in "Camp Cupcake" would force the homemaking maven to wait out the summer at home?

John Gruber's post covering stray observations from WWDC 08 has this interesting nugget:

The combined market share for, say, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 is larger than the overall market share for Mac OS X. Plenty of developers write desktop software that only works on the Mac — why aren’t more people writing apps web apps that only work in truly modern web browsers?

I hear web developers and designers complain about spending 80% of their time fixing bugs in Internet Explorer. Imagine how much cleaner and spectacular their work could be if that time was spent polishing the app itself? At the least they'd be more productive without having to devote so much time to the garbage browser. I don't think this would work in all cases right now - I don't, for example, see a major financial institution ignoring IE in a sight rebuild/redesign. But for new web applications delivering innovative ideas and functionality, why not?

I'd be interested to see what the browser usage is among early adopters of web applications. My guess is many of them aren't using IE.

Do yourself a favor and check out Tommy Oshima's photos on Flickr. He's shooting primarily film, and he has a fair number of incredible pictures taken with a Super Ricohflex TLR medium format camera. These pictures, particularly, seem to indicate an affordable way into medium format film. Cameras in decent working shape can be had for well under a hundred clams, and maybe even under fifty...

Some of my favorite shots from Tommy include "ripplet" and "...Zarathustra"

Here's a shocking message that arrived in my inbox this evening:



I have to say that I'm extremely pissed off about this right now. I subscribe to the two-at-a-time/unlimited-per-month plan, and Valerie and I split the two DVDs between separate profiles. This allows us to maintain our own ratings for movies we watch, and the recommendation system (one of Netflix's main strengths, in my opinion) for each profile remains unpolluted by each other's differing tastes.

I'm calling B.S. on their reasoning for the change, too. I followed the link to the help page, and the "Why?" portion simply repeats the third paragraph from the email. Netflix has a solid reputation for going above and beyond customer service expectations, so maybe they'll offer a better explanation when I call them tomorrow, but I can't help feeling like their public reason is a PR answer. How will taking away a very useful feature (that I don't think is very complicated) improve the website?

I seriously hope there's sufficient customer push back to this ridiculous move. Otherwise, it looks like I'm going to drop my subscription to a single DVD, and get a second subscription for Valerie. This will bump up our cost by about $4 a month, but at least Valerie's recommendations won't be affected by my art-house flicks, and my recommendations won't be affected by her chick flicks.

Not cool, Netflix.

GENTLEMEN...BEHOLD!!!



(via Uncrate, which still has a good one left every now and then)

While searching for whether anybody had created a boat purely from duct tape, I was surprised to discover a host of cardboard/cardboard and duct tape regattas (regattae?).

A number of official local events can be found through a simple Google search or two, and there's a ton of hilarious videos on YouTube as well.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-PRpqj7N4&hl=en&w=580&h=485]

Jack Conte's version of Radiohead's Exit Music (For a Film) is not only a superb example of a cover, but a very clever arrangement as well which is available for download.

(via Shaun Inman)

So today is "Download Firefox Day," wherein Mozilla intends to set a certified Guinness World Record for the most downloads of a single software program in one day to celebrate the release of Firefox 3. I wanted to participate. I'm an internerd, and besides, I use Firefox on my work computer. Too bad I can't actually download it, as of this writing, since it appears mozilla.com and getfirefox.com (which redirects to mozilla.com anyway, I think) are criz-ashed.

I'm sure everything will be up and fixed soon, but you'd think if you were purposely trying to attract as many visitors and downloaders as possible, your servers would be prepared.

UPDATE: Looks like they're taking care of things, but they put their pages back up too soon. The Firefox 3 download page provides links for downloading Firefox 2. Way to go.

UPDATE 2 (3:10 pm , EDT): I'm finally able to download the right version of the file. Hopefully it's worth the hassle.

Laugh Out Loud Cats are the brilliant creation of cartoonist Adam Koford. Armed with a brief but humorous "back story," he assembles a collection of vintage-style funnies which bear the mark of expert nerd convergence.

They're all pretty funny, but some of them are clearly genius.

(via tumblin' trey)