Design

I’ve been looking to practice more calligraphy of late, so I’ve been on the lookout for short passages to transcribe. Here’s one. Original credit for the text goes to Eric Tortora Pato

Citymapper is a relatively new app that’s been brought to my attention recently and it’s what Android has been craving for a long time. Compared to most other ‘travel planners’ that are out there on the Play Store, this outshines them all by miles. It’s been argued for a long time that app developers really ought to be paying more attention to the UX design of their products, instead of being function-driven. ...

A while ago, I joined this awesome collaborative production company called HitRecord. It’s a little bit different. It’s a collaborative production company. Think open source, Creative Commons and a whole bunch of delightful humans rolled into one package. Anyone can join. Anyone can contribute. As long as it’s your own work. It leads to some incredible collaborations like this: …that arise from someone writing a short story, then someone else drawing a couple of character illustrations, then someone else recording a reading of the story, then someone else recording a live green-screened rendition ...

In sorting through my stepdad’s stuff, I came across, amongst other things, a collection of old cameras and lenses (film, naturally), in the M42 mount format. For some reason unknown to me, I hadn’t thought of the possibility of using these lenses with my 60D until a week ago. In hindsight, it was obvious, given that my friend and fellow photographer, Matt Schultz uses a SMC Takumar 50mm f/1.4 lens on his 5D MK-II to great effect. ...

Welcome to the life of more or less ever designer/front-ender/developer/creative ever. These guys truly are clients from hell. Via clientsfromhell.net

I have one of these Galaxy S3 things now. The phone is a technological marvel and is honestly one of the greatest pieces of Android kit I’ve used and I’ve gone through: Google G1 HTC Hero HTC Desire Motorola Atrix …so I’ve run the gamut of Android handsets, and have sampled one from pretty much each generation and watched Android develop.There are plenty of reviews on the internet that will go into technical details more than me but here are some important facts. ...

I never thought I’d post anything Hello Kitty-related, but these cakes are kinda awesome so I’m willing to lift my Hello Kitty embargo just this once!

Last year, I went to Burning Man, a festival quite unlike anything else on earth. To call it an ‘Arts Festival’ would be doing it a disservice. I won’t go into the ins and outs of it because it’ll take me several hours to write something satisfactory. Instead, check this out. It’s done the rounds on the Internet and has gone spectacularly viral since its release and is still one of the best Burning Man videos I’ve seen. ...

I came across this on this rather wonderful collection of awesome media. Pusheen makes me rather happy in the feelings! I love little things that cheer people up!

This is one of the most fun Tenori-On analogues I’ve come across. It’s really well done, too! Click the squares and put some headphones on. See you in 3 hours.

Every man and his dog is playing Skyrim, to the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth of spouses/girlfriends, howling in impotent rage as their man is sucked into a strange world. A world where the less armour a lady wears, the better her armour rating. A world where people don’t freeze to death standing in the middle of a stone courtyard being blasted by horizontal snow dressed in a vest and sackcloth trousers. ...

I saw this project on thisiscolossal.com and I’m determined to make this into a piece to go on my wall. This is so simple and elegant and, frankly, amazing. All credit goes to thisiscolossal and crafterall for finding and making this!

I have a whole bunch of things to share this time around. I’ve been largely ignoring this blog, except as a glorified link dump. Which has worked surprisingly well, actually! So today, I have not only music, but awesome miscellanea to share with the Internets. The first thing is Welder’s new track: https://youtu.be/pbRm5gis2nY It’s pretty relaxed and takes a while to wind up to full speed, but it’s wonderful to listen to. ...

The backstory So for a while I’ve been researching into making some new fire poi heads to replace my HoP 90mm monkeyfist heads that I got from Alien Jon. The monkeys are great but they’re heavy and because they’re spherical, they tend to smack into one another frequently which annoys me somewhat. Added to which, they have a massive I-bolt embedded in the core and the eyelet of the bolt is absolutely enormous – about 30mm across. ...

Hello!! After much procrastination, sitting around on my arse and pawing ineffectually at the screen like a slack-jawed Luddite, I’ve sorted us out a website after Jan poked me and bribed me with Pretzels! It’s essentially a blog and community site for the firespinning folk I’m friends with to hang out, post pictures, musings and so forth. Also, since we do Burn The Beach meets on a regular basis, I thought a website would be cool for when people invariably ask “Who ARE you guys? ...

Here’s a quick cross-post from a forum that I post on about how to design your portfolio site. You’ll have noticed that I will probably liberally ignore any and all of the tips that I lay out here, but still! So without further ado, here goes! I’ve been posting in a few “critique my site” threads of late and since I have time to kill, I thought I’d share my nibbles of information and tips that I have picked up over the years doing the odd spot of web design here and there. ...