iconolith

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

Stephane Tartelin’s portfolio - I don’t think I’ve ever seen gesture drawings exude so much attitude.

Twiddla - An quick online white board app with chat and a few extra surprising features.

Honibe - One teaspoon-sized serving of dried honey per lozenge. Who knew it was possible to dry honey?

YETII - Yet Another Tab Interface Implementation. If you need tabs on your web page this is quick and easy to customize and has a few extra features.

UCSD Podcasts - Recorded lectures from UC San Diego. I’m exploring the cognitive science-related ones now.

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

There is a lot of cool stuff I came across this week, but no backstory. The University took the day off today for spring break, which meant I didn’t have to go to work. I did go, however, because like a genius I forgot to bring the power cord for my laptop home with me when I left work Thursday. Fortunately, I set off the office security alarm and had to call the campus police - otherwise no one would have ever known I showed up on a day off (a Friday no less). On with the links:

• Logitech diNovo Keyboard - They must have know I’ve been looking desperately for a thumbpad for the PS3 to surf the internet from my couch.
• Phun - and it is! This little program adds some physics to your drawings. Sodaplay is somewhat similar space for creative experimentation and is a little more social.
• Plates from Owen Jones’ book The Grammar of Ornament can be viewed as a set on Flickr. EricGjerde, who posted the set, has a few other (sets) that are equally as interesting. [via]
• I also picked up a copy of the latest release by [dj] Cheb i Sabbah titled Devotion (his website - warning, it is Flash and frustrating). Yes, I did it because I heard that piece on NPR. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for the tabla.

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

A couple years ago my parents came up for a visit to Alaska. Part of the trip involved some campground “camping”. The kind with those giant bath houses that have concrete floors and many shower stalls. One night while I was in there brushing my teeth, mom walks in and asked what I was doing. Of course, I immediately flashed back to childhood and tried quickly to think what I was doing that could possibly be out of the ordinary. She asked why I was running the water while I was brushing my teeth - like I don’t pay for it at home. At that moment I realized I had - for all my years, been running water down the drain the entire time I brushed my teeth. I had never even stopped to think about it to that point. This video illustrates the potential impact my simple act of changing that one aspect of my routine could make.

• Beautiful posters at ISO 50 - particularly this one
• Charis Tsevis’ “small pieces” mosaic illustrations. Amazing attention to detail.
• PicLens - yes, it is cool. Magical? I wouldn’t go quite that far
• Hacking Flickr - Add refferer information to comments you make on Flickr with this GreaseMonkey script. There is also a Flickr Hacks group I never thought to look for

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

Actually on a Friday this time. Hell just might freeze over today.

• Piwik - Weird to say, but cool in concept. This is a web statistics tracking project aimed to develop a open source competitor to Google Analytics.
• jQuery Tutorial - Think jQuery can do cool things, but don’t think you’re up to par? This tutorial is a good place to get started if haven’t yet gotten the hang of it (like me).
• Custom laser engraved stuff from moleskines to laptops. The laptops are particularly beautiful. Too bad these Flickr photos aren’t organized into a set of all this guys engraving or I would link directly to it. [via Brian Faust - who also has an awesome Friday list]
• The wiki dictionary of Obsolete Skills
• GlassBox - Vista-style api with translucent borders and fade transitions. Released under the MIT license. Might try this for presentations.

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

I was going to post this yesterday, but I’m glad I didn’t because at a small get together last night a few of us found the End of the Internet. Yes, like the guy in that commercial that surfed all the way to the end of the internet. His wife says, “I thought you were surfing the internet.” and to that he replies, “Yeah, but I finished it.” Well, if you go to endoftheinternet.com you too can get to the end of the internet. I don’t know why none of us had ever thought to go there before last night - or maybe we had never been that bored until right that moment. The links below are much more interesting - I promise.

• A “Best of” list of tutorials for Illustrator from Smashing Magazine
• Design by Humans t-shirts - yes they are t-shirts, but if you’re going to have them anyway why not get cool ones?
• TiltViewer - an interesting (interesting, but sort of crazy and cool at the same time) way to display your Flickr photos using Flash. Here are mine tagged “alaska”
• CSS Type Set - Prototype text displayed using CSS. Great for explaining what can be done with type using CSS, and great for developing too.

Super Happy Fun Time Friday: Sunday Edition

The past three weeks have been a flurry of work, leaving little time to read. Fortunately, the weekend has been a nice break to finally catch up and download. It comes as no surprise that a couple of links from Open Culture have found their way into this week’s Fun Time Friday. That blog is an autodidact’s dream.

Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection - Foreign language audio resources from Arabic to Vietnamese. While we’re talking about languages, Mango is flash-based language learning website where you can learn French, Japanese, and Pig Latin just to name a few.

Audio Book Podcast Collection - This list features books as well as some podcast sites.

BookMooch - Lets you swap books with others based on a point system. It is free to join and participate, save the cost of shipping books you’re swapping. They also have a mobile accessible site.

HelloTxt - Another messaging service. Sends messages to Twitter, jaiku, Tumblr, Meemi, beemood, and yapped all from the same page. I noticed last week while I was playing with a Nokia 770 that I couldn’t login into the Twitter site using the device browser (I assume it was an ajax issue). This is one way to get around that.

rsizr - This site is pretty cool if you need to resize an image to a different proportion without smashing everything. If your name drops two or more vowels does that mean you’re cooler than web2.0?

SIMS 141 - Berkley class lectures are now available on YouTube. This class is Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business.

EM-X270 - Embedded Mobile Device - For the DIY’er in you. This is a fully functional mobile device that arrives ready to use. All you need is to design a super cool enclosure for it. This would be a fun and inexpensive project to play with, but I have to admit I’m currently wishing I had a Nokia N810.

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography - a collection of sites displaying informed treatment of type, collected by ilovetypography - another really great site. Yes, I know everyone is linking to this today but it is really good, so I am too.

Projekttriangle Design Studio - Work by a German graphic design studio. Beautiful.

Black Box Sculpt Studio - a Second Life in-world sculptie editor.

Particle Wizard - Create particle systems for Second Life without all the scripting. Buy in-world on Horowitz

Magento - Open source ecommerce solution for the web. Demo.

The Classic Mojo Shirt - from bearskinrug.co.uk. Because everyone needs an under enthused monkey hero.

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

SkreemR - An MP3 search engine that has returned some interesting podcasts.

BM Custom WordPress Login Plugin - Create your own unique login screen for your WordPress installation. View Examples.

Name that Color - a color selector that returns the nearest named color swatch from a swatch you select from a spectrum. If nothing else it is a mildly entertaining way to find a little color inspiration. The author gathered the color names from places like Wikipedia, Crayola, and Color-Name Dictionaries like Resene.

Fall is here (in Alaska at least), and one of the great comfort foods of fall is zucchini. The Urban Vegan has posted a list 50 ways to stuff zucchini and all of them sound yummy. If my mom reads this she will fall off her chair - as a child I hated zucchini with a passion.

Super Happy Funtime Friday

I’m seriously thinking about changing the Funtime Friday post to Super Silly Saturdays seeing as how I have rarely managed to actually make a Funtime Friday post on a Friday. On the other hand, Fridays are becoming fun again now that we’ve made it through the really busy season at work. Maybe I’ll give it a little more time.

60+ Places for Design Inspiration - a great collection of sites, magazines, and books. While there are many things on this list that I already read regularly, I some new sites and book recommendations that are great.

Superuse - A site dedicated to reuse and recycling. [via]

If you’re into reuse design you may also enjoy Emotionally Durable Design (isbn: 1844071812) - my best read yet this year.

The Serif - A design inspiration blog that is heavy on typography.

I’ve often wondered if the characters on those futuristic shows like StarTrek ever enjoyed Fridays or if they simply didn’t follow the convention of the traditional “Earth” calendar. I’m not much of a fan, but it seems I can’t really recall them ever making reference to weekly events, and why would they need to with star dates and all that? So, do they just relegate themselves to living at work and committing their lives dutifully to some remote federation light years from their duty stations? Are their crew quarrels over those who hog the holodeck schedule? Maybe I’m just not idealistic enough for intergalactic space exploration yet.

Super Happy Fun Time Friday

del.icio.us Network Explorer - A visualization tool written in Processing that allows you to explore common connections among you, your network , and networks of others on del.icio.us.

Macro.scopia - Another Pipes-like webapp tha allows you to mash data together by using “blocks”. There is also a developers wiki available.

Abstract Background Tutorial - I’m not as up on all of the Illustrator tools as I should be and this tutorial outlines how to use the Blend Tool to create what I poorly describe as a warped ribbon effect. I’ve actually wanted to create something like this before.

Becoming an Evil Overlord - Things to consider before undertaking your transformation to evil overlord… or the good guy… or auxiliary evil characters.