As a commuter and a gamer, nothing is more essential to me than entertainment during the time I waste trying to get to places. If I can look stylish at the same time, that’s just bonus. Nintendo achieves both entertainment and style with their Nintendo DS Lite – a super portable gaming device that comes in a variety of colors with loads of stimulating games to pick from. Like the one we’re offering up in our giveaway: Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir. Not only do you get this game, but you also had a chance to win your very own Nintendo DS Lite in a sleek and stylish silver. In order to be entered to win, we asked you to tell us your favorite old-school arcade game and why. Will you be the one winning the Nintendo DS Lite? Just click READ MORE to find out!
Last chance to see United Visual Artist’s Chorus installation at the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds, which runs until the end of this month. These photographs of the piece, lovely as they are, don’t really convey the full immersive nature of the work. Commissioned by Opera North, Chorus is essentially an audio/visual installation featuring a series of mesmerising pendulum lights that each generate separate, but related, musical notes (created by Mira Calix) as they swing in and out of phase. Check out the video of the installation on UVA’s site and click through for some more technical info on the project (and a reference to the influence of composer Steve Reich)…
“Chorus directly references the mathematical nature of music, particularly how it applies to rhythm,” explain UVA. “Each of the pendulums functions as a metronome and the rhythms generated by each independently drive separate, but related, sequences of musical notes. The rhythms slip in and out of phase as the pendulums swing, and the tempo alters based on each pendulum’s period. One of the early inspirations for this project was Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain from 1965 [see footage below]….
“On a technical side, the pendulums are not physically linked, but they are controlled together in a closed-loop feedback system. Momentum is added by powerful motors mounted at the pivot points; with the pendulum arms swinging freely when the motors are not running. Accurate feedback to the control software is provided by optical encoders mounted on each pendulum, and a central computer system applies power based on the speed and angle of each pendulum.”
“Additionally, the effective length of the pendulum can be varied – the “bob” [containing the white led ring and speaker] can be shifted up and down by up to five meters, theoretically allowing alteration of the pendulums period of oscillation. The pendulums do not conform to the classic equation for SHM, the arm has considerable mass, so the shift in centre-of-gravity is less than the apparent change in length, and the friction is considerable. However, the shifting of the bob, combined with the motor control system allows enough control to deliberately shift the phase of the pendulums, for example to synchronise them or put them 180 degrees out of phase.”
Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain is discussed in this great South Bank Show special at 2.25 mins in
Chorus by United Visual Artists. Lead designers: Alexandros Tsolakis and Dave Ferner Additional programming: George Konstantinou, Tom Whittock and Greg Bakker Creative direction: Matt Clark
News hit Tuesday that 17 phone manufacturers have agreed to use Micro-USB chargers on all phones by 2012. According to ZDNet, “Companies signed up to the initiative include Nokia, Motorola, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, 3, Telefónica and Vodafone. HTC was not on the list of compliant companies in the announcement, but an HTC spokesperson told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that the manufacturer will participate in the scheme.”
I love the idea of a single charger being able to power multiple devices, but I worry that this announcement is a little too late. In three years’ time, devices like mobile phones might best be charged with cable-free technology, like “WITricity” or Powermats.
Another unsettling point is that many of the smart phone makers didn’t sign onto this agreement. Palm, Blackberry, and Apple aren’t among those on the participation list. I don’t see Apple changing their docking systems to Micro-USB in three years.
I definitely believe that this is a move in the right direction. A single power cord is a brilliant idea. However, I worry that Micro-USB may be an irrelevant standard in three-years’ times.
(Note: An astute reader pointed out that the image is a Mini-USB port instead of a Micro-USB port. Sorry for the confusion! There are so many standards, even I got confused. Ugh!!)
If you’re someone who regularly travels outside the United States, then you know that lugging around plug converters can be cumbersome. They usually come in a heavy, brick-like container, which takes up a ridiculous amount of space in your luggage.
The World Traveler’s Plug Set is a nice, compact solution to this problem. You can attach to the bright yellow base only the plugs that you’ll need on your trip, and you won’t have to worry about individual plugs getting lost in your luggage.
Additionally, the set is relatively inexpensive at $18. The World Traveler’s Plug Set is a clutter-free solution.
It’s been a while since we’ve trawled the iPhone app store, but trawl it we have and found, among other things, this graphic designer-aimed game, KERN. The idea of the game is to accurately position the missing letter from a varyingly sized, type-oriented word as it falls down the screen. A kind of Tetris for typophiles…
Footage of us having a go. Mmm… need some more practice!
Here are some more professional looking screengrabs:
Whilst the gameplay of KERN doesn’t stand up against that of other iPhone games such as the excellent Rolando, it is nevertheless encouraging to see playful apps made by graphic designers for graphic designers. KERN is, in fact, one of a series of design-oriented games available as iPhone apps by US design studio FORMation. And the more astute will notice, it’s designed on a grid using a clean an minimal combination of Helvetica Bold and Caslon only. But of course…
pimg src=http://www.productdose.com/images/products/draft_5176.gif alt= //ppI always thought of panoramic photos as gimmicky. There’s a reason you frame a shot; that’s what a good photographer does. Then I saw a href=http://www.davidbergman.net/blog/2009/01/22/how-i-made-a-1474-megapixel-photo-during-president-obamas-inaugural-address/David Bergman/a’s 1,474 megapixel panoramic shot of the Obama inauguration and the detail is astounding. You can pick a random person out of the crowd and zoom in on them to near recognizability. He used the GigaPan, which allows you to attach any point and shoot camera and it will shoot and stitch the photos together to create one gigapixel image. The inauguration gigapixel photo is composed of 220 images and took 6.5 hours for the program to stitch into a single image. I bet the Secret Service took a good look through these faces in the crowd post-inauguration. |via a href=http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/the-gigapan-epic-076654Apartment Therapy/a|br //p
A l’occasion du premier concours de cette nouvelle version, nous vous proposons de remporter un caméscope Samsung Camcorder HD ainsi que 5 souris Microsoft BlueTrack.
Pour participer, il suffit simplement d’être membre du site. Un tirage au sort sera effectué parmi les inscrits avant le 28 février minuit, et vous permettra peut-être de gagner l’un de ces six lots.
1 Samsung VP-HMX20C Camcorder HD
Captation en Full HD (1080p) Mode « Slow Motion » (250 images/seconde) Capteur CMOS 6,4 Méga Pixels Zoom optique 10x 3h d’enregistrement en HD
5 BlueTrack Explorer Mini Mouse
Nouvelle technologie de souris optique Moteur de détection du mouvement Forme ergonomique Compatible PC et Mac
Les gagnants seront annoncés sur cet article fin février. Prochain concours en mars.
Sustainability-minded designers have known about Life Cycle Assessment tools for years now, but it’s only lately that they’ve emerged from academia into something closer to their intended use: a means of letting manufacturers and consumers know the hard facts on the environmental impact of products. Stepping up the public notoriety for the process is this post from Friday’s NY Times’ Bits technology blog, in which an assessment from a research team at Carnegie Mellon is used to answer readers skeptical about the efficiency of LED lighting.
The results are no surprise (yes, they’re way more efficient, so there), but more exciting is the acknowledgment by a major publication that these are questions with real answers, and that we now have the tools to answer them. If this keeps up, maybe we start seeing LCA results in product reviews?
Okay, we know you’re a busy lady (or fella) and you may not think you have the time to play video games, but if you really think about all the time you spend waiting on a regular basis – even on your busiest days – you’re likely to realize that there are loads of occasions you’ve wished you had something to keep your hands busy. Whether you’re waiting in the lobby for your dentist appointment, stuck in a frustratingly long line at the grocery store, unable to sleep on an endless plane flight, or even up before dawn anticipating the start of a door-busting sale in the freezing cold outside the mall, this posh little portable entertainment system, appropriately named the Nintendo DS Lite, is the perfect time-killing addition to any handbag. Plus, with its sleek design and a pretty palette of colors to choose from, it’s hard to find an excuse to leave it behind! Nintendo‘s wide variety of stimulating games like Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir give women of any age or background a valuable “snack” of entertainment, and it might even spare your phone bill from all the meaningless texts you’d normally send just to keep busy when you’re idle. Even the busiest business gals are maximizing their down-time and giving their brains a boost by playing Nintendo DS! Click READ MORE to see how to enter to win your own Nintendo DS Lite in stylish silver, complete with an accompanying Mystery Case Files game!
In honor of Valentines Day, we’ve been saving our huge congratulations to Core77 writer Jeannie Choe and Bryan Haggert, who proposed to Jeannie by writing an iPhone app named Romantech and leading her on a video scavenger hunt around San Francisco.
We wish the iLoveBirds all the happiness in the world.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
News hit Tuesday that 17 phone manufacturers have agreed to use Micro-USB chargers on all phones by 2012. According to 
