Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – Concepts | finette.co.uk » blog.

nice project on representation of tabbed information over time; it would be a nice tools in association with OnLife for personnal timetracking…

Tutorial: Image Stacking for Star Trails and City Air Activity at Night

Our previous tutorial on setting up a Waterproof webcam timelaspe system via a torch and USB extension leads also lends itself to capturing star trails or city activity at night. Being Central London based light pollution filters out the stars to a large extent but with very little effort some interesting images can be captured and if you are located in area with lower light pollution it is perfect for capturing star trails.”

(via Digital Urban.)

Watching the Street

The recent Dorkbot show seemed to go off nicely – it was great to be part of such a strong show of local work (some documentation). I showed some prints from Limits to Growth, as well as a more experimental process piece, Watching the Street – a (sub)urban remake of Watching the Sky.

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(via (the teeming void).)

Martin Frey: looking at a conventional watch very often a “mental dialogue” happens:

• What time is it right now?
• When is my next appointment?
• Where does the appointment take place and how long does it take to get there from here?
• Thus, when should I leave?
• How much time is left till then? Should I leave now? Am I already too late?

JITWatch

Via Pasta & Vinegar

georectifying: ”

I amused myself this weekend by pulling maps from the Online Archive Of California and grinding them up with Python and gdalwarp to make map tiles:

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(Via tecznotes.)

A night which looks like a bright day: “

While in Paris i checked out Airs de Paris, an exhibition that runs until August 15 at the Centre Pompidou. The show is really good. Looks a bit like one you could see at the Palais de Tokyo. Except that you are not allowed to take pictures, people don’t seem to have as much fun, the gadget shop is bigger and less tempting. But that’s just trifle and i’ll come back to the exhibition soon.

I headed there after having read on variable environment that Philippe Rahm had installed a room called Diurnisme.

The introduction of the street lighting in the beginning of the 19th century has wipped out the day/night rythm from the city. With street lighting emerged new behaviors, such as noctambulism, sauntering the evening on the boulevards, dancing in the balls.

Rahm put the idea upside down by trying to introduce the night during the day. It’s a perverted answer to the perpetual day created by the modernity, Internet and the contemporary globalization. The room is bathed in a very bright orange/yellow light which wavelengths, upper than 600 nanometers, are perceived by the body as the night. The paradox is caused by the fact that our perception of day and night is guided by a hormone called melatonin. The peculiar light of the room triggers the production of melatonin, fooling the body into thinking that it is nighttime.

Verdict: it does work. I felt a bit sleepy in there and some people were having a nap on the benches. The music might help too, as speakers were broadcasting 18 Diurnes, some inversions of a composition written by John Field, known for being the first composer to write nocturnes.

Arte has some interviews in french of Philippe Rahm.

Photo: © photo Adam Rzepka, Centre Pompidou.

Related entries: Responsive Environments: Architecture, Art and Design; Christophe Guignard’s talk at LIFT07.

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(Via we make money not art.)

Hack Turns iPhone Camera Into HD Camcorder

An anonymous reader writes “Monsters and Friends has just released the beta of Drunknbass, a new iPhone hack that allows the unit’s camera to capture video. ‘While the iPhone’s 2.0 megapixel camera resolution may be mediocre for a still camera, it is excellent resolution for a consumer video camera.’ A standard definition Canon digital camcorder uses a 680K pixel sensor chip (because a standard definition TV’s resolution is only 520 x 360), while one of Canon’s HD camcorders uses a 2.9 megapixel sensor. The beta presently allows 5 second clips at 10 frames per second, but the finished version will soon allow infinite recording at 45 frames per second. Video of Drunknbass in action can be found on YouTube.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot: Apple.)

Half of the oxygen we breathe are coming from the oceans.

Earthdesk

Whether the standard wallpaper options (picture of your pet, swirly thing) bore you or you just like having a global perspective, Earthdesk takes your desktop to the next level by making it into a constantly updated view of the earth. The app uses geographical and time zone stats to create a customizable, info-rich image.

The most striking part, of course, is that Earthdesk provides a visual of time passing, with accurate shading delineating night, twilight and daytime. It also (seemingly almost magically) shows real clouds, light emitted by cities and moonlight (which can be adjusted to show more or less city light). Other customization options include political and natural views, as well as the ability to lock the map to a city, the sun or the moon to get a different perspective. We don’t say it a lot around CH, but this one is truly awe-inspiring.

(Via Cool Hunting.)

Site as Cave

The notion of the site being a window, or a frame, or a painting, or… just a site…

But what about a cave?

I’m going to ask a few friends who code if they could help me build a cave site. Maybe it could be something like:
1) user registers, they thus get there own unique cave with url being something like www.mycave.com/marc
2) users input a few very basic parameters maybe there fave colours. maybe not even, perhaps its just automatic.
3) over many many years, or — weeks, stalactites and staglamtite begin to grow. Complete with very dull sound effect of the drops hitting.
4) the interesting part: i was thinking wouldn’t it be cool if these things were made with paint dripping, rather then water. this would effectively make these a very strange hybrid conceptually, it would be part painting, part sculpture, part place, part nature.
- If every few days the colour of the paint that drips changes colour the resultant stag or stal icite would become a kind of crazed multi-coloured flapjack pile. It could look really exciting.

(Via text.)