Hasta La Ideas

My father, a photographer, put a camera in my hands at a very early age. I have taken hundreds, often thousands, of pictures a year for most of my life. And, as a result, I have boxes and boxes of print photographs taking up space in my closet.

One of my goals for 2009 is to have all of my old photographs scanned so that I can have digital copies of these pictures. We’ve talked previously about services that will scan your photographs (in addition to ScanMyPhotos, commenters also recommend ScanCafe and LifePreserver), and having my photos scanned is the first item on my to-do list for this project.

While I’m trying to decide which scanning service to use, I’m also deciding what to do with the photographs once they’re scanned. First up, I’ll be sure to backup the images; I’ll put copies of the digital image DVDs in my safety deposit box at the bank and I’ll upload the image files to my online storage system. I value these images enough to pay to have them scanned, so I should also pay to have them protected from fire and natural disaster.

I will want to organize the digital image files on my computer, but I haven’t yet decided which program to use. I currently use iPhoto, but with a hundred thousand more photographs, it will be overloaded. With the new version coming out in a couple weeks, I’m going to wait to see if it’s more capable and robust. If it won’t meet my needs, I’m considering the iPhoto Library Manager by Fat Cat Software for $20 as one option for improving my current system’s functionality. But, I expect I’m going to spend the $200 to buy Aperture 2 and revel in its powerful system. (If you’re on a PC, I hear that Google’s Picasa continues to be the most convenient photo manager.)

Finally, I plan to use Blurb to create a handful of albums that I want to store on the bookshelf for guests to peruse. I used Blurb in December to create four photo albums and was very impressed with their service. I’ve used the Apple system in the past, but the quality of the Blurb book is leaps and bounds ahead of Apple’s product.

The books I ordered from Blurb were hardcovers with glossy jackets, full color interior, and 100-pound silk-finish paper. With shipping, I paid less than $150 total for the four albums. It may sound like a lot, but their quality appropriately matches the price. Alternatively, if you decided to go with a paperback cover, no book jacket, and non-premium paper would significantly reduce the price per album.

(Off-topic tip: I’ve often thought that digital photo albums would be great for sentimental clutter photographs. Take images of sentimental items, ditch the actual item, and then create a photo album of all your sentimental things. Instead of a basement full of clutter, you can have a single book on your bookshelf taking up just inches of space.)

I will add that I do have one complaint about Blurb and that is if you use their templates you can’t move any elements around on the page or resize any objects. This isn’t an issue just with Blurb, though, a handful of other album printing companies have the same restrictions. You can import full pages from programs like InDesign (Mac and PC), but then you’re not able to use the templates. Inside sources have told me that there are some improvements coming down the pipeline, and I hope altering templates is one of them.

For those of you who have already gone through the process of scanning all of your old photographs, what have you done to manage the files? Please let us know your plan of action in the comments.

With Prezi (currently in beta), you can create presentations of maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present these in a nonlinear way.

Shown to me at Kitchen Budapest on Friday (more soon), it is a quite impressive tool.

What’s more, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.

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Ever wonder what one of IDEO‘s legendary “deep dives” looks like from the inside? The world-renowned innovation consultancy has gone open-source with their latest project, and Core readers are invited to observe and contribute, along with anyone else with an interest in design and prototyping.

The project in question examines an already cool product: the BUGbase customizable hardware platform, which charmed our socks off at last year’s Maker Faire. Developed in conjunction with New York-based ECCO Design, the BUG system is sort of Swiss Army Knife for the technologically-inclined, comprised of electronic modules that snap together to easily prototype an infinity of different electronic gadgets, all driven through a simple software UI on your home computer.

For their next round of development, BUGlabs has tapped IDEO, and IDEO has tapped everyone who cares to contribute. They’ve created a publicly-viewable blog where they’re showcasing their research and development efforts and soliciting hard for comments and suggestions.

Concepts presented so far include a Near-To-Eye micro-display…

a custom 10-segment font for E-Ink interface (prototyped here on an Amazon Kindle)…

and a segmented backlight display for turning the BUGbase into a portable rickrolling platform.

BUGlabs + ideo concept 3 – LCD display with segmented backlight from Jeremiah O'Leary on Vimeo.

There are also a few shots of process sketches and prototypes in progress — all in all a massively interesting read. Total blog lifespan is two weeks, of which one has already elapsed, so if you want to get involved, go check it out and let them know what you think.

>>See the blog here.<<

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Une innovation de la part de Philips avec cette nouvelle télévision Cinema 21:9. Une diagonale de 56 pouces/142 cm, pour une résolution Full HD de 2560x1080p. Disponible au second trimestre 2009. Vidéo à découvrir dans la suite.

Pas d’informations encore sur le prix de vente.

Anything that mixes the words “cute” and “doom” sounds like an interesting prospect to us. With their installation, CuteXdoom II, artists Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier have brought an immersive videogame-based art project to Amsterdam’s Maxalot gallery…

The piece is based on the violent first-person videogame, Unreal Tournament 3, which first came out in 2007. In Fontaine and Pelletier’s hands, however, the platform of the game is manipulated in order to address themes of obsession – with particular reference to Japanese “otaku” culture – complete with several missions that players must strive to tackle.

According to Fontaine’s website, “the modification hijacks the traditionally violent Unreal Tournament 3 technology to create a luscious and surreal gaming experience.” From the look of some of the game play, available to watch here, “surreal” seems almost an understatement.

“In the explanatory animation that starts the game,” Fontaine explains, “Sally Sanrio wakes up from her paroxysm to find herself in a familiar, yet changed, environment. Upon drinking a liquid nearby, she notices that the cute environment she once sought to enter is becoming increasingly strange and distorted.

She realises that she has been poisoned. Once sweet characters now appear malevolent, predatory; the landscape becomes surreal and sinister, graphic forms are elegant, and almost cruel. In this altered state of perception she realises that the cult of CuteXDoom was not what she thought it would be, and that she must fight the effects of the poison to find the antidote and escape.”

In the first level of Fontaine and Pelletier’s version, the player’s mission is to attempt to join the “supermodern religious cult” of CuteXdoom, whose main tenet is that worshipping cute material objects will result in happiness and enlightenment – an objective that has parallels to “kawaii” worshippers who engage in endless consumption of seemingly harmless “cute” products for an illusive sense of satisfaction.

It’s an immersive installation and interactive gaming environment – complete with customised pixel-based “ideology” wallpaper (shown above), a modified joypad (bottom image, below) and surround sound. A series of original and limited edition prints and unique, 3D printed sculptures based on the game’s conceptual framework are also on show at the gallery.

CR hasn’t has the pleasure of playing with the installation at Maxalot first-hand, but if these images are anything to go by, it looks to be a full-on assault on the senses.

The exhibition ends 8 March. More at maxalot.com