Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Near Future Laboratory Top 15 Criteria That Define Interactive or New Media Art

Here at Ars Electronica is where we did an unscientific qualitative test of the criteria devised to define New/Interactive Media Art. Now we deliver to you the conclusive results, and do so in the spirit of the David Letterman Top-10 Countdown, only with a Top-15 rather than 10, cause we found 15 things.

webdev.stephband.info

Parallax turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

Language Log: Red Sox win

Strunk had been born in 1869. That is, he was old enough to read the news when General Custer led his men to massacre at the Little Big Horn. Strunk was a grownup with a Ph.D. when Dracula was first published. By the time White was his student and had to buy the privately published precursor of what would become Strunk & White, the professor had reached the age of 50. It was 1919.

Language Log: Don't put up with usage abuse

The reason the question can even arise at all is partly that Strunk and White fail to make that connection. The Elements of Style offers prejudiced pronouncements on a rather small number of topics, frequently unsupported, and unsupportable, by evidence. It simply isn't true that the constructions they instruct you not to use are not used by good writers.

The End of Cyberspace: Rediscovering the virtues of the manual

Some engineers and designers are realizing that there are losses that come from virtualizing. There have long been stories of students who design things on CAD that are impossible to manufacture, or that are 10 or 100 times too large, because virtualizing the design process divorces it from actual things.

10 Futuristic User Interfaces | Monday Inspiration | Smashing Magazine

And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Innovative doesn’t mean usable and usable hardly means innovative. As usual, it’s necessary to find an optimal trade-off. And some user interfaces manage to achieve just that.

Mockup Frenzy #3: Game Boy De-Makes!

To sum up, de-makes are the inverse of the "next-gen" game update. Take a new game, and roll it back to an older piece of hardware. Only we're going to be rolling it WAY back; all the way to the original Game Boy! Goldeneye 2D is a perfect example, and the inspiration for this theme!

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

Surfraw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web

Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, babelfish, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.

micromov004 - Assemblage #1 on Vimeo

Assemblage #1 is music set to a repurposed industrial video found in the Prelinger Archives that shows a 40s telephone being assembled from individual parts. I didn't edit the video at all; it is as it is found in the archives. Rather, I timed the music to follow the video.

It Ain't Dead Yet: Webster Chicago Wire Recorder

This is a Webster Chicago wire recorder. It was manufactured sometime between 1945 and 1955.

[photos] White River Falls Power Plant (post 1 of 2) | jlake.com

Today tillyjane and I went hiking at White River Falls State Park, on the advice of ramblin_phyl. It’s a beautiful little park in a small canyon, which features an electric power plant built in 1901, expanded in 1910-1911, and abandoned probably sometime after WWII. The walk down to the power plant is a short, steepish trail with good footing in dry weather.

Nuclear Winter in Chernobyl | Stuck In Customs

I spent the day in Chernobyl. One of my Kiev game dev friends hooked me up with a private tour, so I decided to go for the day to check it out. Every woman in my life told me this was a bad idea. Every man said it sounded awesome.It was awesome, although I really usually fare better when I listen to the women. For the guys, here is a picture of me holding a Geiger counter at the main reactor.

www.toastermuseum.com - ABOUT - Collecting Toasters

...that a simple technical task - e.g. toasting bread - can be celebrated in so many different ways. I was deeply impressed, how much creativity engineers spent on flipping bread! Being a designer, this fact fascinates and inspires me every day.

Gallery: San Francisco Cable Cars Still Humming on 19th-Century Tech

The picturesque mode of transport narrowly escaped extinction after the 1906 earthquake, which devastated the city as well as the cable car barn and tracks. New tracks were laid and the system was rebuilt -- despite the advent of more cost-effective electric streetcars -- partially due to cable cars' superior ability to climb the steepest hills in San Francisco.