Noupe.com: Fresh Web Development Goodies Bag -
Useful. Really.
“It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences.” — Tim Kreidler - The Referendum. There are so many quotable sentences in this article, I just picked one. I may be still thirty, but totally identify with the writer - and the fact that Portugal is still a conservative society doesn’t help either. (via Kottke)
Yesterday I attended an academic conference at the Future Places festival that’s happening right now right here in Porto. I normally tend to be wary of such conferences, having previously seen my fair share of the “I’m a genius who knows magic and you’re not” attitude, so I was very pleased by the “Just do it, things do get easy when broken down in small problems!” message that prevailed in today’s presentations, which included, among others, a very interesting and entertaining keynote presentation by Golan Levin. However, by that time I was already dumbstruck by the relatively small presentation by Zach Smith of Thingiverse and Makerbot, about the subject of 3D printing - that is, desktop factories.
For now (and probably for a few decades still), 3D printers only ‘print’ plastic, but still - I held objects that felt right out of the fucking Diamond Age. Need a plug for your bath? Print it! A toy train for your nephew? Print it! A coat hanger? Print it! In time, no doubt people will be sharing the 3D models that will allow you to print more complicated things. Right now, everything that is made of plastic can be ‘printed’ (wouldn’t ‘sculpted’ be a better word?) right there on your desktop. At the moment the Makerbot 3D printer is sold as a kit you have to assemble, but so did the MITS Altair in 1975, and it only took a couple of years after that for ready-to-use microcomputers to hit the retail shelves. I’m only wondering how much will HP ask for a plastic ‘refill’…
A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation
Blue Note jazz sessions, as photographed by Francis Wolff. Nice. (via Kottke)
A beautiful Missions to Mars infographic, related to this report that argues for a manned mission. I personally think space exploration is probably better left off to robots for the time being, as the resources needed to make a mission possible for us nimble humans are better spent on other stuff down here on Earth. On the other hand: I loved the Mars Trilogy, so astronauts on Mars would be infinitely cool. (via CGR)
The number 42? (via circuitry)
A scary xkcd. Next week, I’m about to start teaching Editing to people born after the breakup of the Soviet Union. I teach at an University.
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The music video for The Blow’s Parantheses has some crazy recursions in it. Especially if you are watching it embedded in a Facebook page (wait for the end). ¶
The Last Days of the Polymath. After finishing high school I took a one-year computer technology course and possibly the best thing about it was one of the instructors’ recurrent rants against overspecialization. Specialization is for insects, but it is hard to be a human nowadays… ¶
Would you rather be rich or appear rich - you kinda choose between the two, you know? Here’s a thought: After all the things that happened because people borrowed more than they afforded to, shouldn’t interest rates be higher? I mean, why should my money in the bank and in investments be worth less while people who got loans to buy private condos are partying away with the surplus of their lowered payments? ¶
Bad science story of the week: Early humans started walking upright for sex and food. Here’s a newsflash: every single living species that still lives started
A psychedelic Nigerian movie about Satan. I trully think Nollywood is closer to the future of motion pictures than Hollywood. If only those guys read the DV Rebels’ Guide. ¶
Curiosities of Locomotive Design. When I was a kid my favourite toy was an 8-shaped electrical train track, that allowed for the reenactment of awesome rail accidents. Funny how one forgets about such things.
Recently I gave an interview to a local magazine, you can read it online - my interview starts on page 12 (it’s in portuguese, obviously).
Video Embedding Comparison Site -
Despite the generic name and 1990s-like design this website, this survey of online video hosts is quite useful, as you can compare the embed quality and performance of different sites in a single page. I’ve been a Vimeo user for the last two years, but some things prevented from taking the plunge into a paid account (mostly the buggy player and the sleazy way the introduction of paid accounts meant the removal of features from the free ones). I also have YouTube for a few things, but again I think its player will be an iconic piece of ugly design of the noughts, and the 10 minute limit is a bore. So I wonder about Exposure Room (ugly site though) and OpenFilm…
This year’s winners include an Economics Prize awarded to the executives of Icelandic banks “for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy” and a Peace Prize awarded to the scientists of Bern, Switzerland (the city where Albert Einstein devised his Theory of Relativity, no less) who discovered full bottles of beer do less damage in a bar fight than empty ones.
Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse? -
I wholeheartedly agree with Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker on the main virtue of Windows: no zealots. I dislike Macs by the same reason why I’ll defend my crappy ‘95 Punto against every verbal assault. It works for me, so shut up already. (via The Null Device)