Creating an imaginary friend allows you to see your friends content within friendfeed even if they don’t use friendfeed. I can’t decide if it is a cheap version of data portability (good) or an additional layer to add to social network fatigue. If widely implemented you may find yourself managing your imaginary friends as you would your real or fake friends.

via atomiq

Windowshop lets you browse the New, Bestselling and Editor picks from Amazon. Features a fast arrow key interface. Previews in place with video or Audio (!) for books. Pretty nice.

The accompanying photo to an article on the GM building plaza and its relatively new occupant, the 5th Avenue Apple store had this unique feature. Rather than have two photographs side by side to indicate the “look how much it has changed” the photograph is split and you are given a handle to move the window shade down to reveal the past or up to expose the present.

Instead of having to try to fit two people onto a chair made for one person – we have here a chair made for two half people. Studio Ball

(via designboom)

Junk Drawer by Paho Mann

They are a necessary evil I feel both physically and digitally. Not everything is easily file-able or able to be fit into a easily defined category. Clay Shirky alludes to this when speaking of folksonomies allow for things to be tagged with different meanings and thus make them easy to find. Of course he speaks of the problem with physical items, say a library book, not being able to be shelved on 5 different shelves. So we can add tags to things and that will help us organize and find things in the future, and attach meaning to them. I set about the fearsome task of ‘organizing’ my Google Reader this morning and ran into some problems that I am still trying to figure out and get myself to the right mental model of what I want from the tools and options that Reader gives me.

• You can add multiple tags to any particular RSS item
• You can add an RSS feed to multiple folders
• But, tags and folders are the same

Folders are tags, so they get put in the same pool of tags. What’s good about this? One can put an RSS feed into multiple folders, effectively having it shelved on multiple shelves in your library of feeds. But like in a library you only want to have a certain number of folders, so you try to distill down the list, group similar items and get it to a manageable number. And then there is stuff that doesn’t really fit into any of your broad-as-possible-while-still-being-useful folders. This stuff has sat unfiled, unorganized, adrift until today I was able to ignore the desire to put them into 1 (obviously not happening) or 8 (seemed not so great either) folders so I made a new one which I called Interesting, and this is my junk drawer, and I am very happy with it.

Viewer submitted picture of the BBC Box

The BBC has a special 1 year long project called The Box where they are tracking a shipping container around the world to tell the story of globalization and international commerce and trading. The great book of the same name, The Box by Marc Levinson, gives the history of the humble shipping container and the story of how it changed the world. You can track the progress of The Box as it travels the world on a map.

The Box is loaded with Whiskey and on its way to China

Briefly mentioned was his noteriety for giving Aerial Dinner Parties, where guests sat in tall chairs 2-3 meters tall around equally tall tables all which were reached by ladder. The reason given was to give his guests the feeling of being aloft in a flying machine. From the book Wings of Madness,

When Santos-Dumont’s butler ushered the guests into the dining room, they were amused to find that they had to climb a step ladder so that they could sit on high chairs positioned around a table taller than they were. But they were not surprised. Since the late 1890s Santos-Dumont had been giving “aerial dinner parties.” The first ones were held at an ordinary table and chairs suspended by wire from the ceiling. This worked when the hundred-pound Santos-Dumont dined alone, but when a group assembled, the ceiling gave way under their collective weight. Santos-Dumont was a skilled craftsman, who had learned wood-working from the men on his father’s coffee plantation, so he built the long-legged tables and chairs that had become a fixture of his apartment ever since. At the first elevated soirees, his guests, between sips of milky green absinthe, invariably asked what the point of the high table was. And their shy host, who preferred to let others do the talking, would run his bejeweled fingers through his jet-black hair, which was parted in the middle, in a style seen almost exclusively on women, and impishly explain that they were dining aloft so that they could imagine what life was like in a flying machine. The guests laughed. Flying machines did not exist in the 1890s, and received scientific wisdom said that they never would. Santos-Dumont ignored the snickering and insisted that they would soon be commonplace.

xefer lets you make a chart of your twitter feed. mine is above.

The Boombox Project is created by photographer Lyle Owerko. A great visual archive of ‘ghetto blasters’ and ‘jam boxes’

via Thought of the Week

In Architecture school I spent alot of time with one of these KOH-I-NOOR 5611 leadholders in my hand. Usually loaded with a 2H or 3H lead. Its all metal construction felt heavy in the hand and very very solid. I havn’t used one in years and I think I kind of miss it. You can check out a great collection of leadholders over at leadholders.com, a museum for leadholders.

Lost Formats Preservation Society

The society was founded in 2000 with
the design of Emigre issue no. 57.
It’s sole purpose is to save formats
from obscurity.

]]> http://iamtheweather.com/2008/08/19/married/feed/ 0 http://iamtheweather.com/2008/07/24/id-magazine-annual-design-review/ http://iamtheweather.com/2008/07/24/id-magazine-annual-design-review/#comments Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:21:12 +0000 sean http://iamtheweather.com/?p=263

Every year the ID Annual Design Review highlights the best in design across several design disciplines. I took some photos of the items that really caught my attention. Click through the photos to go to the flickr set or go grab the magazine on the news-stand. You can also see the projects on exhibition in NY at Parsons School of Design until September 28th.

Flip up swim fins seem like an idea that should have happened so long ago its absurd. I know televison and movies are filled with frogmen wearing flippers walking all awkwardly and backwards due to the flippers. Will this be gone? Will anyone miss it?

All the objects that nest with each other got their own spread. The bits I liked here were the magnetically nesting measuring spoons. The rest are nice bowls mostly.

Johnson Banks designed beautiful stamps featuring Beatles covers. The beauty is that the stamps are die cut around the ’stacked’ albums, creating custom shaped stamps. Tedious/fun task highlighted – getting the layout to work with the pitch of the stamp perforations.

Resizable interlocking bed is really beautiful and a definitely a step up from the one-size-fits-all metal bedframe. You can upgrade from a bed for one to a bed for two (add another mattress) elegantly

Ribbon stools based on the elegance of an unfurled ribbon made with laser cut, cold hard steel.

Concept project showing the waterline in New York City – Office buildings on Park Avenue – once the polar ice caps melt due to global warming.

Twice a month I get an email from photojojo that shows me a few pictures from my flickr from 1 year ago in a Photo Time Capsule. As things move so fast, and, at least for me, time to reflect and revisit past events seems to be missing from my regular routine. This is why I like getting these emails so much. I can take a peek at a year ago, revisit some memories and generally brighten my day. At the bottom of the mail is a great little form to send yourself a message in the future that will be delivered with your photojojo mail a year from now. A message to oneself feels a lot different than a photo that was meant for both myself and others, but I am interested in reading what I said a year from now.

last week I received my muxtape-to-tape from russelldavies. I still haven’t listened to the tape (I cheated and listened to crusty.muxtape.com

Many thanks to Russell for this little gem of internet physicality.

The undersea cable that make up much of the long haul data transfer on the internets. This map from the Guardian details the incident where a cable was damaged by a ships anchored and internet traffic was significantly affected. Hacker Tourist’s may be interested in the story surrounding many of these cables as reflected by Neal Stephenson in Wired magazine a few years ago.

update: dropped in michael surtee’s weekley link drop on july 4 2008

RFIDs are usually hidden from view within a plastic card, an opaque sticker, or our passport. There is quite a bit of unexpected beauty hidden in the physical chips themselves and they project a level of personality where one expects bland functional uniformity. Ping Mag has taken a look at these aesthetic qualities of RFID chips and have classified several specimens with names such as Weather Satellite, Outer Space and Alien Sketchbook, seen above respectivly.

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