Johannes Kreidler's "Product Placement" (above) a 33-second remix that uses 70,200 samples to create a glitch-heavy masterpiece. (I'm not sure what the criteria are for "masterpiece" in this genre, but Kreidler's clip makes Girl Talk seem like lazy muzak.) Create Digital Music has some background as well as a video of the phone call he made in his attempts to clear copyright for the samples for his work (the licensing agency requires an individual request form to be completed for each sample).
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I spent the morning winnowing down my In box, but now Apple Mail tells me I have more than four billion messages in my In box that I need to deal with. Where to start?
As best I can tell, there are actually only around 20 messages, and the status line is an error. But I feel like I now have this enormous, heavy, dark cloud of incoming mail hanging over my head.
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The messages are, as far as I can tell, legitimate PayPal emails--they come shortly after I actually log into PayPal and complete a transaction, and they're the only confirmation I get from PayPal that my transaction has completed. Does PayPal really think I'll click on a link URL that starts with SECURE.UNINTIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM? Perhaps this is some elaborate phishing scam, or PayPal checking to see how gullible is customers are. Or Apple Mail is processing the link in an odd way before displaying it. In any event, it seems to contradict all that advice PayPal and parent company eBay give users about avoiding scams.
I thought this might be a one-time thing, a bug in a server somewhere. But it's happened both times I've transferred funds in the last month. And I haven't, obviously, clicked that link. Ever.
]]>Display an unwieldy mass of data in clever visual form and you may gain über-insight into questions you hadn't yet put into words. That is the promise of information visualization, infoviz for short. The field has long helped scientists, engineers, and businesspeople see the unseen as it emerges from complex data: Users may spot promising molecules for pharmaceutical testing, for instance, or pinpoint glitches in a supply chain. As infoviz has matured, it has also caught fire as an art form, its center of gravity edging further from the pragmatic and closer to the expressive or the whimsically profound.
[via Fimoculous.com]
]]>Six-year-old boy: Words, words, words, words! One day, there will be no words.
Seven-year-old sister: That will be a beautiful day.
--2nd Ave & 7th St
[via Overheard in New York]
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In "Write Me a Love Letter in Mrs. Eaves Ligatures," Squid and Beer considers (based on personal experience) the use of Comic Sans in email .sigs as a serious romantic incompatibility marker:
I was having dinner with the aforementioned Matthew a couple weeks ago when this topic, and that of an ex boyfriend came up. “He signed his emails with Comic Sans,” Matthew said. I nearly fell off my precariously perched barstool. “What?” he followed, “I thought you knew and liked him anyway.”
[via Typophile]
]]>David Byrne & Brian Eno's new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, is streaming for free until the physical CD comes out this fall. It's very nice.
]]>[via To the Beat]
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John Curran's Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, & Social Theory Flickr group is interesting browsing. Appears to mostly be clipped from a wide variety of sources (a Far Side cartoon about anthropologists, the much-reproduced Post Modern Toasties, a model of face-work based on Goffman, etc.).
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Pencil is an open source (GPL v2) sketching/mockup/prototyping environment that works as a plug-in for Firefox 3. Includes stencils (standard or custom), on-screen text editing, alignments, drop-in import of image and text, and image export for finished sketches (which, when combined with simple imagemaps, would make it a useful tool for generating interactive mockups).
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Society in Decline has a great Flickr set on old commercial signage, which might be used as evidence supporting Aaron Draplin's [nsfw] rant on contemporary graphic design]]>
[via createdigitalmusic.com]
]]>I found that once I got used to the idea that most things could be expanded to a size that required no window scrolling, I began to "think big" about a lot of things: my spreadsheets got bigger, my diagrams got bigger - and more unexpectedly: the size of the kind of thing I thought I could handle got bigger; and because I was much less often having to chop things into smaller pieces so that they could fit, things got simpler.
It's a no-brainer that more pixels is usually better than less for knowledge work, but the vertical (usually) gap between dual monitors makes it difficult to use them as a single space. Instead, multiple monitors are separate but tightly coupled spaces.
Here are the rough prices (via CDW.com and Dell.com) for some options:
Apple Cinema HD 20" LCD: $599
Dell EP207WFP 20": $229
Apple Cinema 30" HD: $1,799
Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC 30": $1,199
I'm not sure of the overall quality of the Dell displays above, since those are Dell's lowest-end versions of the displays in each size; the 30" 3008WFP is $1,9999. And as Malinowski notes, there's a fairly large pool of used monitors available at places like eBay to further reduce prices.
[via Cool Tools]
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