Uncategorized – The Friday Links

February 22nd, 2019

Welcome back to Friday!

And it’s the last one in Feb. 2019. That was super fast.

And now! Some links.

Nordic Style: These Vintage IKEA Catalog Covers Will Blow You Away

Or at the very least, they’re pretty well designed. 🙂

Click-baity headlines = dated! Oh well…

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

Browse the web using an in-browser emulation of the first web browser from 1990.

e.g.: the Friday Links!

It’s a little more complicated than expected. I started browsing using Mosaic in 1994. The web is old!

Why Flying On The Hindenburg Zeppelin Was So Expensive

“Between 1931 and 1937 the Graf Zeppelin crossed the South Atlantic 136 times. The trips took about four days in each direction, and a one-way ticket was about $400, which translates to about $7,050 in today’s money.”

I find it interesting that many of the interiors look like mid-60s office meeting rooms.

Also: Smoking rooms. On a zeppelin. Filled with hydrogen gas. Yikes!

UFO Attack 3d

A really challenging arcade shooter. Nicely designed!

I would play the crap out of this on my PS4. No joke.

There ya go! That was easy right?

Let’s do it again next week!

Have a great weekend.

February 15th, 2019

Happy Friday!

And welcome to your Friday Links! It’s mid-February, and where I live, we get a long weekend. Huzzah!

For whatever reason, this edition is half Dutch. It just worked out that way. Please know that I really did try for three-quarters.

Experience The Night Watch

An interactive examination of this seminal Rembrandt work presented by the Rijks Museum.

Really beautifully done.

Maptime Amsterdam #5: Street Patterns

“This is a tutorial on using OpenStreetMap road data to make physical visualizations using Fablab equipment.”

Search for a specific intersection or area of a map. Generate data from that map, transform that data into an SVG image (and its data) and 3D print that into a model of that intersection. Or print a t-shirt of it. Or whatever else you want to do with it.

A great, fun little idea.

Candida Höfer – In Mexico

“Her archetypal images capture the interiors of grand spaces including libraries, theatres, churches and museums—spaces of public congregation that in her photographs are rendered devoid of people.”

This is making the rounds, and currently installed at Sean Kelly in New York.

These are very large format prints covering nearly 600 years of Mexican architecture.

Really beautiful, striking work.

Mario-Combat

[Flash is required, sorry]

Mario Brothers, but Mario fights Bowser.

Challenging. Well made. I thought it would be a Mortal Combat mashup but sadly, no.

Get out there and have an excellent (long?) weekend everybody!

Happy Friday!

February 8th, 2019

Welcome back to Friday!

I hope it’s warm where you are.

Ready for links? Ready for links!

Celebrities Then And Now (Together)

(German title: “Berühmtheiten neben ihrem Ich von damals”)

“Ard Gelinck photoshopped several celebrities next to their former selves and it looks pretty good.”

Carefully placing current (ish) and former portraits of musical artists. Some great work here.

Mind Twisting Art: Cartoons Mixed Into Classic Paintings

These are extremely good. They’re from 2011 with no credit to the creators at all. So good though.

SarcasticRover: Mars recruitment posters (fixed)

“Right there. That’s where I’ll bury your corpse, Gerry.”

These are both hilarious and dire.

Just Another Stacking Game

Think “Jenga” but each block gets smaller based on where you placed the previous one.

Quite tricky! I like it.

And that… is that! All linked up.

Thanks for following along at home. See you next week everybody.

February 1st, 2019

Heyooooo!

It’s Friday. And so, so cold.

And February!

Readyyyyyyyy? Go!

Top Of The Spots

“Which song has been played more on Spotify?”

More challenging (and probably more depressing) than you think.

Kutarq: Sp!n

“The Sp!n spinning top creates an optical illusion of levitation. When spinning the top, an exclamation mark appears. More than a simple toy, Sp!n is a tool that can be used to relieve stress or reduce anxiety.”

It spins for a super long time too. In some cases as long as five minutes. (!)

Unclear where they can ship this but you can buy one here for 972 Yen (~$9 USD.)

Sign-IO

“A Support Vector Machine Implementation for Sign Language Recognition”

This is an overtly “sciency” page but it’s to present a new invention: gloves that produce speech when the wearer uses sign language.

This is a pretty groundbreaking invention. It appears to be early days for it but still: great, great idea!

Drawer Simulator

This is a weird little game.

You can only use arrow keys to wiggle, push, pull, wiggle (etc) a rickety drawer full of kitchen utensils.

It’s challenging!!

And that’s that! Alllll linked up.

See you next week!

January 25th, 2019

Fridayyyyeeeeeyuh!

And it’s already the last one in January! Boom! Just like that.

Links time!

Lego: Welcome to Apocalypseburg

“Enjoy an epic 360-degree play experience—and prepare for an alien invasion—with THE LEGO® MOVIE 2™ 70840 Welcome to Apocalypseburg! construction toy. An advanced building set, it has over 3,000 pieces and presents an awesome challenge even for master builders.”

Crrrrrazy. But also beautifully conceived.

Sketchnthecity

“In 2016 sketch artist Carl Lavia joined forces with photographer Lorna Le Bredonchel and together they formed the ambitious ’69 cities of the UK’ project. Which aims to create a portrait of the whole United Kingdom through large-scale sketches of its 69 cities.”

These are beautiful!

Sent along by Mark J.

The 1959 Project

“A snapshot of jazz 60 years ago, every day.”

1959 was, of course, 60 years ago this year. This website documents a lot of predominantly Jazz Music happenings that year, and of any year in Jazz 1959 is a pretty excellent one to dig into.

It’s updated daily and lovingly curated. Recommended.

Booster.Space

An extremely challenging multiplayer version of Asteroids.

I do not last very long, which is pretty much how things went in the original Asteroids too. 🙂

This has been your Friday Links!

Please join us again next week.

January 18th, 2019

Happy Friday!

And where I live, we’re finally getting some real snow now. Weee! (Wee?)

And now: the links!

TeamLab: Forest and Spiral of Resonating Lamps in the Forest – One Stroke, Fire

“When a person stands still close to a lamp, it shines brightly and emits a color that resonates out. The light of this lamp becomes the starting point, and it spreads to the two nearest lamps.”

This is a permanent installation at the Mifuneyama Rakuen Hotel in Kyushu, Japan. It consists of numerous lights which have been modified to sense when new visitors arrive.

So beautiful! More info here.

Scott Reinhard: Mapping and Visualization

Mr. Reinhard combines vintage maps of US terrain with contemporary land elevation data to produce these super original map views of several states and the US overall. Some of them are quite abstract.

You can purchase gorgeous prints of these works too.

Dimitris Ladopoulos: Algorithm

“I wanted to create an algorithm that would allow me to produce different random geometric patterns based on a rectangle.

“The inspiration came from the type of diagrams called ‘treemaps’. I implemented a procedure in Houdini, that takes a rectangle and splits it vertically and then horizontally.”

Really lovely work here.

Deep Heat

A fairly challenging little arcade shooter with some lovely retro graphics.

And that’s what I’ve got!

Have a fantastic, warm, safe Friday, and a terrific weekend.

See you next Friday.

January 11th, 2019

Happy Friday!

We’re definitely officially in Winter weather mode where I live. (Temperature-wise at least.) Stay warm out there.

And now: some links!

Chronas

“Chronas is a history map application with over 50 million data points which every registered user can curate and contribute to (just like Wikipedia).”

There is a tutorial video as the site has a variety of indepth features.

A crazy amount of detailed historical data here. This definitely took some effort to achieve!

Amber Cowan

“Amber Cowan is an artist and educator living in Philadelphia. She is a faculty member of the glass department of Tyler School of Art, where she received her MFA in 2011 in Glass/Ceramics.”

Her glass work is incredible.

Her newest works are on display at the Toledo Museum. Simply lovely.

Inverted Grand Canyon

“I wondered, then, if flipping the Grand Canyon into a Grand Mountain might in some way help me make sense of its scale. I’m much more accustomed to seeing the mass of something rather than the massive void of something. So, here’s what that looks like.”

Actually pretty interesting.

Excit

Note: Flash required.

A weird little online game which takes place in an Excel Spreadsheet (?!)

You use arrow keys to quickly move your cursor, one direction at a time, to “excit” the spreadsheet.

Trickier than it sounds. But at least no formulas are involved. 😉

Have a happy Friday, and a spectacular weekend.

January 4th, 2019

Hooray for Friday!

Welcome to 2019 everybody. And your Friday Links.

Of course now the web is inundated with “2018 best of” lists, so I’ll include just a few. There’s a huge rabbit hole you can go down if you search for them obviously.

2018: The Year In Pictures.
Rotten Tomatoes: The Best Movies of 2018
Best of Music from NPR, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Paste Magazine, and Esquire.
Best books from the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Goodreads.
And finally, the best and weirdest heists of 2018. This is a fantastic read.

To the links!

WebGL Water

A water simulation right in your browser.

Pretty basic but beautifully done.

Building a Spotify player for my Mac SE/30

Note: the Mac SE/30 was created in 1989.

This is a super impressive hack!

Roger Vail: Carnival

An exhibition from 2015 of long-exposure midway rides.

Beautifully shot.

December 28th, 2018

Welcome to Friday. And it’s the last one of 2018. That was fast.

I hope your holiday has been (and continues to be) fantastic!

Here we go…

Jon Ed De Vera: paper-cutting art

“John Ed De Vera is a multidisciplinary designer, with a penchant for lettering, paper-cutting, and experimenting with different and new media.”

His work is lovely!

The 100 greatest innovations of 2018

[self-explanatory]

Let the 2018 best-of lists beginnnnn!

Infernal Topography: Dante’s Inferno

“The illustrated and interactive Dante’s Inferno, an alternative learning tool for the Divine Comedy first Cantica, made for aiding visual memory.”

This is a pretty interesting installation. If you’re a fan, it clarifies and organizes concepts of the novel, if you’re new, it’s a pretty great deep-dive / first look at the depths of this work.

Very well done.

G-Switch 3