plasticbag.org

I’m not a great fan of U2, but it’s still an impressive site – and more importantly was created way before Gawker media and the current fad for commercial webloggery. I wonder if it makes any money…

Basically talking about the role of design and the character of the designer within The Incredibles. Mr Biddulph and I went to see the film a week ago and tried to encourage our boss, Dan Hill, to go and see for the design alone.

Includes: smile, gorgeous, enthusiasm, banana, paradox, galaxy, kangaroo, whoops and gazebo. Weirdly does not include: badger, potato, geranium. Stupid survey.

He takes a screengrab of his GPS/map position every thirty seconds along the way, and then turns it into an animated gif. I want one.

Tom Rankin shows various visualisations of the emergent upper and lower case alphabets and numerals that came out of the Typophile Smaller Image pixel-by-pixel experiment.

And you know what – I agree with them. Once last season’s ghosts were exorcised, it’s actually started to be a watchable and interesting piece of TV again. My name is Tom Coates and I am a geek.

“On weekdays, his team worked from 9 to 10 (that is, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and on Saturdays, a half-day (that means 9 to 6). Then Sundays were added – noon to 8 or 10 p.m. The weekly total was 82 to 84 hours.”

I wrote about something similar to this a while back. The basic concept is some kind of widget held by the potential subject of the photograph that communicates privacy preferences to the camera, changing the way that it functions.

“If I were a private nervous person who didn’t want photos taken of me at all, then I could set my camera to a ‘leave me alone’ mode. If someone tried to take a picture of me on a ‘normal’ setting, then they’d find that their camera simply wouldn’t work.

The donation does not entitle you to any special treatment and if you misbehave you will be ejected. I quite like this approach as a way to deal with bandwidth and a way to cut down on rogue users abusing the system.

The combination of some of the most peacefully infuriating buddhist-tetris-like music and weird instinctual gameplay made this an ideal way to waste ten minutes.

The latest contender in the collaborative pixel artwork stakes is Pixelfest – where each day each person can change the colour of one pixel. Very slowly an image is emerging.

How awesome is this photo? Various colleagues of mine won an award last night at the BBC’s Radio and Music Awards for their work on mobile phones and photography.

How apposite! And on the day when my co-worker appears to have bunked off work because he is “ill” or something. Bah! I shall have fun with this forthwith…

An ongoing list of links to Design Engaged presentations compiled by Andrew Otwell who dragged the conference out of his head and directly into reality. I really wish I’d been able to drag a paper together in time.

At the end of Design Engaged, we all stood up and wrote the names of three books on a post it and stuck it on a wall. Here’s the complete booklist – again assembled by Andrew Otwell.

On Saturday November 20th, Ron Johnson, Apple’s Senior VP of Retail, and John O’Grady, General Manager of the Apple Store, Regent Street, cut the ribbon to signal the opening of the world’s largest and most anticipated Apple retail store.

According to Simon Nelson, controller of radio and music interactive at the BBC, the figures are an indication of the fact that internet listening, and particularly catch-up listening via the Radio Player software, has “gone mainstream”.

“We acknowledge that such trans-species caregiving may in fact be a form of control. In recognition of this paradox, the new structures are aesthetically based on the architecture of Giuseppe Terragni, an Italian Fascist active in the 1930s.”

Drives me mad this stuff – firstly because it’s not always been the case that a man who porks another man should be considered unmanly (sometimes quite the opposite) and because Alexander’s relationships with men were clearly unusually passionate.

The episode in question had this whole plot about webloggers not being journalists and not understanding (or at least not caring about), “not on the record”. Alleged Wonkette rip-off site was really ugly.

“We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we‚Äôre hooked on.”

“The study contradicts a previous report, conducted in 2002, which said swapping songs online had no negative effect on music sales.”

Del.icio.us and tag-based structures like Flickr are still interesting the hell out of me – mainly because of the possibility of the sudden creation of a completely new layer of information worth mining and manipulating.

An extraordinarily high-quality digital image that allows you to zoom in to a ludicrous extent. It’s a bit of a shame that the place they took pictures of is so banal, but hey…

“There was this odd moment where Mrs. Reagan and President Reagan were having this little private chat and right in the middle you see Michael Jackson.”

If it’s real of course, which it might not be. And then of course if no one got hurt in the process. Which they very well might have been. Still, pretty awesome visuals…

Pictures of the new Apple Store to open tomorrow morning on Regent Street in London. There are apparently 250 grab bags with a value of over ¬£700 for sale for under half that price, if you’re prepared to wait outside for six-ten hours to get them…

I’ve no idea what this set of photographs is about – I can’t even remember where I found it although almost certainly it was on kottke’s site because I nick a lot of his stuff. I just link to it because of the pretty colours…

“Even prominent websites make elementary errors in the use of basic user interface controls. The main guidelines are clear, but there are ten other things you should consider when using checkboxes and radio buttons.”