The Lower Mill Estate in the Cotswolds Gloucestershire is a privately owned, former gravel quarry of 222 hectares with seven lakes and three rivers. 22 architects and a total of 48 modern homes are being developed Seen here is the inspiring and whimsical work of Sarah Featherstone.

"Our inspiration for Orchid House comes from the wildlife and landscape at Lower Mill Estate. A number of Orchid species can be found here, but it is the camouflage of the Bee Orchid that specifically generated our design.The house will blend with its landscape and environment. The organic form is created from laminated veneer lumbar (LVL) ribs and clad with timber shingles (tiles). The camouflage pattern is burnt to the timber." Read More...

GigaOM.com is an online news and weblog in San Franciso. Liz Gannes, who used to write for Red Herring did a good summary of the Web 2.0 Conference for them.

"Twice at the Web 2.0 Summit, we had funny conversations with people on the topic “what will be the online pet food of bubble 2.0″? Nominees on the floor are social bookmarking sites and mommy-oriented social networks." Read More...

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling all things handmade. Etsy lets you shop by color, place, time and material. Shopping by color is a very excellent for finding cool stuff for my pink obsessed sweetie. Looks like the site was started by 4 web nerds trying to prove something. They did, the site is great and people are making money. click the logo to check out their site. Read More...

Apparently this has been around for some time but I just stumbled upon it yesterday. The tool shadow is for those people who need all the help they can get in keeping their tool bench organized (I’m definitely one of those people). Just apply one of the 25 stickers of common tools to the pegboard in your work area and enjoy the improvement in productivity.
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" Innovation, research, coherence, new materials and flexible solutions have been the key concepts of Agape's business philosophy since it was established in 1973.

The company's mission is to make the bathroom a more comfortable and aesthetically stimulating space by rethinking conventional typologies." Read More...

Funny Mark Morford article from SF Gate about ZoomShop vending Machines that dispense high tech luxury items.

"No one seems to be quite sure what to make of these things, these giant shiny gorgeous nightmare boxes of consumer-sucking bliss, these beautiful massive vending machines custom built to dispense iPods and Motorola RAZRs and Sony PSPs, XM radios and noise-canceling headphones and all related accessories, machines that are distributed by an evil genius company called Zoom Systems right here in San Francisco."

click the pic to read the article.

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Our Mission

The Information Architecture Institute (formerly The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture “AIfIA”) serves to advance the design of shared information environments. We support a global community infrastructure that connects people, ideas, content, and tools. Through research, education, advocacy and community service, we promote excellence within our field and build bridges to related disciplines and organizations.

Operated by a dedicated, multi-national group of people volunteering our own resources, we aspire to build bridges to related disciplines and organizations. We invite you to join us in advancing the state of information architecture through research, education, advocacy and community service.
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Excellent and useful Ruby on Rails tricks for uber web nerds. I really love and appreciate that the web is getting populated with useful knowledge that is posted by people who have put in real sweat equity, in this case... the fine folks at Ruby Inside.

Ruby Inside is a weblog dedicated to Ruby and its associated technologies, including Ruby on Rails. It features posts about the Ruby language, tips and tricks, lists of resources and references, as well as automatically updating news from the 'Rubysphere' (a poor name for the universe of Ruby related blogs).

click the pic for the tips Read More...

LEDtronics TRF-G30 LED Bulbs that offers beautiful lighting in many versatile applications. The G30 series LED bulb comes in a globe covering that allows the LEDs to shine in multiple directions (three dimensions) while still being protected from the environment. This hardy bulb is perfect in any situation that allows for 25mm Edison screw base attachments. Applications perfect for this bulb include decorative lighting, lamps, tollbooths, low-level beacon warning lights, receiving docks, task lighting, cabinets, displays, concealed lighting, retail store shelves, and more.

These high quality and patented LED bulbs can directly replace Type 2 incandescent bulbs allowing a long lifespan up to 100,000 hours. Furthermore, these bulbs are resistant to shock and vibrations, and will not burnout from frequently being switched on and off. The best part of the G30 series bulb is they only consume 13 watts of power while still creating so much light! These bulbs require no retrofitting kits and will install like a normal bulb allowing you to replace old and outdated incandescent bulbs painlessly.

Prices for TRF-G30 LED Bulbs retail from $158.00 to $199.95 depending on color and size.



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The work is a combination of Marco Guerra's photographic figure studies and Yasmina Alaoui's pen and ink patterns inspired by her Islamic design heritage. Gorgeous stuff. Read More...

A lot of artists seem to be heavily sampling graphic design these days. Here is a small gallery of Beatriz Milhaze's work... fun and interesting, I wonder if it will hold up in the coming decades? Read More...

I love well designed, affordable prefab homes.

The LVL is an 1453 sq. ft home that is 25'-1” x 59'-6” and has a living room, dining room, kitchen, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and closets. The LVL home starts at $41,050 an is built and shipped from Perryville, MO.

The Architect, Rocio Romero is the owner of Rocio Romero LLC. She is the designer as well as builder of her prefab designs. Rocio received her Masters of Architecture from Southern California Institute of Architecture and her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Environmental Design with a major in Architecture from UC Berkeley.

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This is a modular sofa that is comprised of inflatable balls held together by straps. It can be configured into several different shapes and styles. looks blissful.


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Apple does a pretty good job with their top 50 widget list, but this site has a few I haven't seen before including a cool one called übertragen, which does FTP transfers AND P2P file transfers via Bonjour!

click the pi to visit the site. highly recommended. Read More...

one of the better (and more fun) web 2.0 sites to come along. A visual bookmarking site… it’s set up to let users to drop a picture of something they like with notes and tags attached. You can create your own wists list or just surf through other people’s stuff. it’s a little like playing a commerce slot machine… colorful, a little mind numbing, and then you hit it big! click the logo to check out their site... or click read more for a better explanation.
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The Hoover family is undeniably dysfunctional: Pop is an aspiring motivational guru, Mom's so perpetually distracted that dinner is invariably KFC, Grandpa is a heroin addict, Uncle Frank's a suicidal Proust scholar, son Dwayne is a sullen wannabe jet pilot with a passion for Nietzsche. And here they all are, in a rickety VW Camper, hurtling toward a beauty pageant that little Olive has her seven-year-old heart set upon winning. The problem is brown-haired, baby-fatted and bespectacled Olive (the exceptional Abigail Breslin), is not your typical Little Miss Sunshine contestant. A kind-hearted and thoroughly amusing rumination on modern America, the beckoning of the open road, and of course, little girls' tiaras. Read More...

When I was a kid, we had to use two white knobs to scratch out fuzzy drawings in magnetic dust. This is kind of like that... except better... and you can see how other people did it via animations of them drawing.

click the pic to go play. Read More...

One of the publics major gripes about OSX 1.4 Tiger is the Finder, it’s clearly outgrown it’s life, and it’s showing. Many cant wait for Leopard (including myself) to see what Apple does to the Finder. In the meantime, there is another app in town…

FileBrowse is a new, easy-to-use file/media browser for Mac OS X with many unique features, such as 3D icons/thumbnails, large in-context previews, and powerful grouping and sorting.

It lets you view files and media content on your Mac using features lacking in the Finder, such as thumbnails for most common file types, including images, movies, songs, PDF, RTF, Word documents, and Web pages.

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LEGO is busting out into the hipster market by offering ice cube trays, corkscrews and coasters. interesting. click the pic to visit the store. Read More...

Wooden hot tubs are an attractive alternative to the plastic tubs that have come to dominate the marketplace today. These traditionally styled tubs are built with wood that contains natural anti-bacterial oils. SeaOtter Woodworks build their tubs by hand with Western Red Cedar. They are one of the few companies in the U.S. making wooden hot tubs. They support sound forest management practices — much of the cedar is salvaged windfall and sustainably harvested by small family mills in the towns of Southeast Alaska.

The tubs can be heated by electricity, propane or wood heat. The wood heater is a "Chofu Fired Wood Heater" which is popular in Japan. This heater uses no electricity, has no pump and drives no jets. It heats water quietly by natural convection or "thermosiphon". The heater is constructed with a stainless steel water jacket surrounding an airtight firebox.

Prices range from: $1800-$4400, quite is quite reasonable for a hot tub in today's market. Read More...

Designer Rob Dobi has created line of T-shirts that are cool AND unbranded. He states on his site, "you pay enough money for a shirt, why have it act as a billboard?". Rob's stuff is distinctive and well done. $16 each

SF designer Kenneth Wingard's O Vases are very modern, but with kind of a retro feel. Their clean lines and simple shapes are really appealing.

You can group the handmade, glazed vases by color (white, blue, and brown), or mix 'em up. Either way, think how dramatic they'd look against a solid-colored wall. White vases against a green wall. Blue against a chocolate wall. Or orange. Or. . .you get the idea. Read More...

Igor is a naming and branding firm. I don't know a lot about them, but I have read and completely worship their free Naming Guide. Yes, it's true. They publish their process and make it freely available to the public.

"We created the Igor Naming Guide in order to demystify the naming process. In it we show how and why great product and company names work, when focus groups and standard ways of thinking about them might have predicted otherwise. Igor's own naming process is presented in excruciating but logical detail."

Brilliant. It really speaks to the idea that the real magic is the people who can use the process, and the process is just the structure that those smart and talented people use to get to the end product. Read More...

Ron Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in Great Britain.

Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo.

Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.

click the pic to see a nice set of images on The Washington Post.com Read More...

Alexander Shulgin is an American pharmacologist, chemist and drug developer of Russian descent.

Shulgin is credited with the popularizing of MDMA in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially for psychopharmaceutical use and the treatment of depression and Post-traumatic stress disorder. In subsequent years, Shulgin discovered, synthesized, and bioassayed over 230 psychoactive compounds. In 1991 and 1997, he and his wife Ann Shulgin authored the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL on the topic of psychoactive drugs. Shulgin discovered many noteworthy phenethylamines including the 2C* family of which 2C-T-2, 2C-T-7, 2C-I, and 2C-B are most well known. Additionally, Shulgin performed seminal work into the descriptive synthesis of compounds based on the organic compound tryptamine.

He is currently continuing his work at home in Lafayette, CA, and is writing a new comprehensive psychedelic drug index.

This site is a blog for answering questions from the curious. Click the pic to check it out Read More...

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. Her honors include an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mary Oliver holds the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, and lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Bennington, Vermont.
click read more for a sample of her work... or click the book to buy it from Amazon! Read More...

Wil McCarthy’s incredibly compelling book, Hacking Matter, has been released in a free pdf form. It’s great that the book can now be freely shared.” Hacking Matter is a science book about Wil’s research on “quantum dots”—configurable “mezzoscale” (larger than nano) machines that can be controleld with software to mimic the properties of different elements. click the picture to get the PDF.
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Oddica is a T-shirt company with a business model that support artists. Good stuff. Click on the monkey to go to the shop, or click on read more to read more about their 41% to Artists program. When you order shirts, they also send you postcards, buttons and funny old school "library card" ephemera. Support them, it's a great idea. Also a great place to buy me a gift. I'm a Men's Large. Read More...

Someone at Cyber Knowledge deconstructed a phishing scam and was able to pull a the phishing password file from the server. It was an attack on myspace... so the results netted about 20,000 passwords that he ran some Metrics on. Click the graphic to see the results of his research. The results may be skewed because some people presumably fill out phishing emails with incorrect info to mess with the system, still interesting data. Read More...

Those wanting to recapture the glorious joys of portion control can now do so without having to exercise any real judgment. Mesu bowls are lovely porcelain dishes made to hold specific volumes, from half a cup to two. Each bowl is decorated with a pretty yet functional pastel graphic — a circle stands for a cup, a segment of a circle is a fraction thereof — indicating which amount it can accommodate.

So now, instead of measuring your portions before serving them, you can do so as you serve. Mesu bowls are sold individually, but we suspect you’ll want to buy at least one of the nesting sets of six. Read More...

Have you ever seen a landscape or cityscape that looked hyper-realistic, or even fantastical -- a shot with amazing detail in the shadows, midtones, and highlights all at the same time?

It may have been perfect shooting conditions in the field, with a graduated neutral density filter or some other filter stacking combo, or maybe it was painstakingly crafted in Photoshop with tons of dodging and burning and layer masking.

Or it may have been a High-Dynamic Range Image (HDR), such as the lead image for this story. Often explained as "seeing more like the human eye," HDR imaging combines several shots of a given scene to overcome the exposure range limitations of traditional single-shot photography -- and the final results have much more detail from shadows to highlights, and everywhere in between. Read More...

The Useful and Inspirational Blog of Jeffrey Yamaguchi, 52 Projects is a site dedicated to thinking outside the craft. It's all about projects and project-making. Project ideas, projects to make, projects to check out, and projects to participate in. Projects, projects, projects.









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Pasted Graphic
The inspiring work of Rachel Wingfield.

"A Synetic building is an airy and lace-like basketry of thin arcs patterned in curvilinear triangulation. Bows of springy material are attached in tangency to one another in such a way that the tendency of arcs to spring outward is symmetrically restrained by the like tendency of other arcs. Synetic frames self-‘inflate'.

BioWall is a hand woven three-dimensional structure that can be crafted into lace-like walls of any dimension. Springy fiberglass rods are bowed into rings and woven into several dodecahedra that in turn are joined together. The woven fibres create a balance between the rigidity of sheet material and the flexibility of a textile. The structure is based on the principle of self-similarity enabling it to work from the nano to the macro scale. It can be seen in our natural environment in the formation of bubbles, living cells and water molecules."
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several flash and java based art generation toys for the creatively impaired Read More...

My apologies to whoever took the pic... i found it in a random sweep of my desktop stuff Read More...

We put a lot of trust in our plastic, we shouldn't. Here is an excellent soldering tutorial for people interested in hacking magnetic stripe cards. Read More...

Web giant Google is further expanding its online empire with the launch of the Google News Archive Search.
The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles and more recent online content, spanning the last 200 years.
click the T-shirt to go to the BBC article Read More...

Selenite Crystals

Deep below the surface of an isolated mountain range in Mexico sit two rooms of splendor: translucent crystals the length and girth of mature pine trees lie pitched atop one another, as though moonbeams suddenly took on weight and substance. In April 2000, brothers Eloy and Javier Delgado found what experts believe are the world's largest freestanding crystals while blasting a new exploration tunnel deep in the silver, lead and zinc Naica Mine of southern Chihuahua. After discovering a small opening about 300 metres down, Eloy squirmed inside and found an 8 metre cavern full of immense crystals. One and a half months later, another team of Naica miners happened upon an even larger cavern adjacent to the first one.

Selenite (chemical formula: CaSO4·2H2O) is a hydrous calcium sulfate, meaning it is composed of oxygen, sulfur, hydrogen, calcium and water. It is a glassy, well-crystallized form of gypsum and is often referred to as satin spar. Read More...

The Air Force is investing in robots that will have to find their way into underground bunkers, map unknown facilities in three dimensions and identify what’s in them while avoiding detection—all without any human control.
This is well beyond the capability of any existing system, but the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, is putting its hopes on new software that lets robots learn, walk, see and interact far more intelligently than ever before.
It’s based on work by Stephen Thaler, who came to prominence 10 years ago with his brainchild the Creativity Machine. This is software for generating new ideas on the basis of existing ones, and it has already written music, designed soft drinks, and discovered novel minerals that may rival diamonds in hardness.
The software is a type of neural network with two special features. One introduces perturbations, or “noise,” into the network so that existing ideas get jumbled into new forms. The second is a filter that assesses the new ideas against existing knowledge and discards those that are unsuitable. Current applications range from detecting intruders in computer networks to developing new types of concrete and optimizing missile warheads.
click the picture to go to the Wired.com story

There are many ways to go about making an iPhoto slideshow in iDVD, but you don’t get the same results with each different way. I discovered the best way to get a slideshow with the Ken Burns (photo panning) effect and background audio is to make a “Slideshow” in iPhoto and export to QuickTime. From there, you can import into iDVD and burn your slideshow.

click read more for the steps. Read More...

A man paralyzed from the neck down by knife injuries sustained five years ago can now check his email, control a robot arm and even play computer games using the power of thought alone, according to John Donoghue of Brown University, who led the work reported in Nature.
Electrodes implanted in Matt Nagle’s brain measure the neural signals generated when he concentrates on trying to move one of his paralysed limbs. Software trained to recognize different patterns of neural activity then translates imagined gestures into the movement of an on-screen cursor or a robotic arm.
In the same issue of Nature, Krishna Shenoy and colleagues at Stanford University report a way to dramatically boost the efficiency of brain implants in monkeys. Using software that predicts the monkey’s intention from only the first few bursts of neural activity, the animals’ implants were able to function four times faster than normal—a rate that could enable a paralyzed person to type 15 words per minute.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9540&print=true Read More...

Spiritual kin to Andrew Goldsworthy... Martin Hill works with nature to create beautiful work that uses only materials he finds onsite.

"The speed of industrial development and population growth during our lifetimes has resulted in the environmental crises we now face. All natural systems are under threat from the damage we create by our linear "take, make, waste" industrial model.
This does not need to be so. We know how to change our lives and redesign our industries on cyclical principles but the collective will to do so is lacking. A cyclical approach to the use ofthe earth's living systems and ecological services is our hope for the future. There is a large community around the world working towards making these changes. I support this movement by designing and publishing communications featuring our work.
We need to live in balance with the natural world of which we are a part and which we rely upon. After all, we are no more than water, air, earth and energy from the sun. The cycling of these elements is my source of inspiration for these sculptures.

All these sculptures are made from natural materials found at each site,their materials were harmlessly absorbed by the elements back into the landscape from which they came.
This cyclical process is the foundation for sustainable design protocol and it's adoption is our hope for the future." Read More...

I only wish they had a deeper database! Nifty little application that lets you move the sliders to find books with characteristics you desire in your reading material. Click the pic to visit.

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Another great T-shirt site, Go Ape carries the work of a few designers with a similar hipster aesthetic. Monkeys, robots and aliens abound. Nice work, great colors. $18 each. Click the pic to get to the store.

The regatta-fabric "petals" on the Lilypond cover move with the wind and provide a lighthearted option for garden parties and sunbathing. The lily pad–inspired 9-foot hexagonal cover in kiwi green and corn-silk yellow fits atop a Paseo umbrella, which sits in an eight-foot aluminum-and-stainless-steel frame. click the pic to go to the store.

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