randomosity

Thanks to Usama for this one. Glasses that have interchangeable parts so you can choose a colour to match your mood or your fashion. The toulch ONE eyeglass system has a series of arms and nosepieces in a variety of colours and patterns. The website itself is pleasingly entertaining. They aren’t cheap of course, but they do offer you the opportunity to make a little change to suit your taste every couple months rather than replacing the entire frame. The initial purchase lenses are custom shaped to fit your features.

Simply too absurd not to blog. Apparently there’s a new luxury condo planned for Dubai which is designed to resemble an Apple iPod (I probably don’t actually have to brand tag that do i?). Designed to reemble to that extent that the building rest on an iPod dock (hopefully size appropriately ;-) and is canted at 6 degrees a la the pod in dock itself. Yes, this is a bit much. The iPad project in Business Bay certainly sounds intriguing, but I was not able to find a single rendering…yet. The developer, Omniyat Properties, has quite a few renderings of their other *interesting* projects, but no this one.

Easily understood representation of the CIA factbook represented in a flash-based relationship browser. Very smooth and intuitively navigable. Relationship Browser from Moritz Stefaner is a very clever and robust implementation of the interactive bubble charts that are all the rage. He has a wide variety of other interesting projects which he has been involved in, including some amazing takes on tagging and word clouds.

It’s always good to be reminded of tips, techniques, both basic and advanced. I was shopping for new remote clicker for my Dad today and so as I am want to do did a quick survey of what the current state of the art is in clickers. I picked one up myself a few years back, the least expensive I could find, a Versapoint Wireless Remote but one which i am quick pleased with. But I digress. The PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques blog is a wonderful compendium of tips itself and links to a huge number of other sites. That’s the ‘chef’ of the site to the right. A site worth checking out.

This certainly seems like an appropriate place for an historian to be ;-) Ahh, but so much more, OldVersion is a website that is collecting links to older version of mainstream software applications under the principle that olde ris not always better. This one just had to happen. I have often thought about how I craved the very first verson of Microsoft Word for my 512K Mac. Oh what an exciting day when Microsoft introduced an industrial strength app to put MacWrite to the test. The wonder of this was that the application fit on a single 400K micro floppy (as they were technically referred to). If you had the single 400K drive you were subject to endless swapping of the system disk and the application disk, but oh, the power of the application and I restate…all on a 400K floppy. Now of course the average install of MS Word is somewhere in the range of 400Mb…and you know… that little 400K app had 80% of the everyday functionality of the bloatware we use today. This is all to say that I heartily agree that newer is not always better and a site that offer us the opportunity to use compact, efficient apps before they lost sight if what they were designed to accomplished is a very good thing.

According to the first statement on the page, ” Swivel is a place where curious people explore all kinds of data.” Cool! Its is a collaborative space in which people are free to share data and visualizations of that data that they have found interesting. This invites others to play with the same data and see what they can find out. Its an agora of ideas and a sandbox for interested participants to sift through interesting datasets to hone their own perceptions and to contribute to others ongoing research.

This was just too funny not to post…rather a cause to pause for second thought if you are thinking about lighting up in a public washroom.

On the subject of impressive focus on detail, comes this amusing exercise…Mapping the various timelines in the collection of back to the Future movies to allow for the creation of alternate timelines due to time travel. This Wikipedia entry charts the various characters, their ancestors and particular events and attempts to portray all the skipping around through time in a straight forward chart. The author does an great job…this is information distillation extremely well accomplished. The article is fun in its own right, but the imagining of the alternate timelines is particularly astute.

Here’s a thought provoking piece of technology in action…but what is particularly intriguing is that it is replicating the human action of turning pages “so as to avoid having to damage the binding.” It of course begs the question over how user-defined the nature of the printed media is, but certainly represents a wonderful adaptation of machine to the task at hand. Click the photo to go to the manufacturer’s site - there a really cool animated gif of the machine actually reading a book. A task it accomplishes at the rate of 2,400 pages per hour.

I have no idea how much these go for (I suspect a pretty penny), but what brilliant geometric implementation. Watch the videos and check them out. Double the seating capacity just by spinning the tabletop…DB Fletcher Furniture Design.