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This is absolutely adorable. Penguin jumps into a boat to...

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:30:32 -0400

This is absolutely adorable. Penguin jumps into a boat to escapes from Killer Whales

Extract first image attached to post in Wordpress

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:15:00 -0400

Well, I found about two dozens of different plugins and other crap that promised to extract the first image of every post in Wordpress. This feature was crucial for my upcoming portfolio webpage, so I went on digging deeper. Thankfully I found the Blog Mum blog which gave me a profound yet creative solution. However, I had to have the height and width of my images(divs with background actually) embedded into the div’s style in order for my slider to work correctly. Thats when I made some adjustments to the code. This is my first time messing with wordpress script on this level so please excuse my PHP.

Functions.php hase this:

// Retrieve the src of first image in a post

function bm_extract_string($start, $end, $original) { $original = stristr($original, $start); $trimmed = stristr($original, $end); return substr($original, strlen($start), -strlen($trimmed)); } function getFirstImage() { $content = get_the_content(); $pic_string = bm_extract_string(’src=”‘,’” ‘,$content); $imagesize = getimagesize($pic_string); list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize($pic_string); echo ‘< a href=”’.$link.’” style=”background:url(‘.$pic_string.’); display:block; width:’.$width.’px; height:’.$height.’px;”> ‘; }

and inside your index.php simply put this:

Little Girl ft. Aphex Twin We’ve seen Aphex Twin...

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:57:00 -0400

Little Girl ft. Aphex Twin

We’ve seen Aphex Twin incorporate little girls in his “come to daddy” video for a surreal effect. However, this video adds a whole new dimension to this concept.

Originally posted by “hellojed” and later on KN

Quake Live

Sat, 30 May 2009 19:50:20 -0400

If you’re an avid quake lover like me, you’d be happy to know that a fully online beta version of the well known Quake III Arena was made public recently. It is called Quake Live, and it is free to play and compete with anyone around the world.

Check it out ← www . Quake Live . com →

Fluid Sculpture by Charlie Bucket. Visit his domain page at [←...

Sat, 30 May 2009 16:13:47 -0400

Fluid Sculpture by Charlie Bucket. Visit his domain page at [← casualprofanity.com →] for many more samples of his liquid-tubing experiments.

When I saw this video for the first time I immediately though that this technique could be used to bend intravenous(I.V.) tubing into shape, for a more decadent effect. Something that Marilyn Manson might appreciate.

Michel Foucault, INFO.

Sat, 30 May 2009 15:16:00 -0400

Michel Foucault, INFO.:

Today I was happy to discover that many of Michel Foucault’s (on whom my thesis banks heavily) text are freely available “for educational purpose, under fair use of the Berne Convention”. The repository is “[o]nline since 1998 […and now welcomes…] 50.000 readers every month.”

For those that don’t know:

“Michel Foucault (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl fuko]) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian, critic and sociologist.”

[← read on at wikipedia →]

Defended at last

Tue, 19 May 2009 21:09:00 -0400

So, I defended my thesis at last and now in the process of doing minor revisions. A plethora of posts are about to hit this blog, as soon as I’m done. My thesis document will also be made public.

Throughout my university years I have learned a lot about the...

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:37:27 -0500

Throughout my university years I have learned a lot about the importance of light in architecture. In ancient Egypt it was used to illuminate some important hole in the pyramids. During the Roman time, in the Pantheon, the oculus would make a pretty cool monthly sun dial on the walls, plus it helped the Romans stay up to date with their wives’ menstrual cycle.

However, never did I truly appreciate the fascination with light in modern architecture. It is a cool effect, and it does remind us of our celestial neighbours, but I always thought that there is a lot more to nature and phenomenology than the use of sun bunnies and shadows.

Well, today I was proven wrong. This skillfully placed “building tattoo” can make anybodies day. This should have been in our modern architecture books!

Reblogged: nayfun:→ ak47:→ ginzuna:→ gkojaxlabo:→ Joe Baran-2photo.ru

Generative Architecture and Scripting

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:32:00 -0500

I have been always a little bit envious of the SCI-ARCH teaching methodologies while studying architecture at the Carleton school of architecture. Their use of generative scripting technologies has been an avenue that I would have definitely loved to explore, and intent to do so in near future.

Below are a few videos that I managed to gather around YouTube that display some of the SCI-Arch student work. Unfortunately, most of the scripting in these videos is utilized towards the pragmatic purpose of physical form. I’d like to believe the calculative abilities of a computed should rarely be utilized for the generation of form, since it is an unnatural adaptation of the computer’s strengths.

It seems that while in my earlier years professors often avoided talking about ergonomics and use or statistical data with regards to architecture. They found those issues boring and unfruitful in the process of designing and preferred to leave those for the engineers and sociologists. I however always believed in a potential in marrying those sociological and calculative aspects with my architecture. This is really where I would like to see the architectural scripting to go.

Formally this work is exceptional:

Andrew King Studio - Ottawa, ON, Canada

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:35:00 -0500

I’m usually very picky with my art taste. Nothing really suits my fancy. It is as if I am in my 100th time living as a human, and I have seen it all. However, this week I was very pleasantly surprised to find a very talented Ottawa artist Andrew King. The hints of humour or even sarcasm may seem shallow to some but I find those novel and nostalgic. I haven’t seen many works of art that can make one smile. [ ←Andrew King’s official homepage → ]

Andrew King’s work is now exhibited at the Terence Robert Gallery(TRG Sussex Drive, Ottawa.) [ ←link → ]

More more of his paintings:

This is a product of a converstaion between me and my friend...

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:37:00 -0500

This is a product of a converstaion between me and my friend from cookuntilbrowned. I will soon explain everything.

Mac vs. PC: or Apple's deathmatch

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:38:00 -0500

I’m an avid user of the computer. I have used it for over 8 hours a day, every day, for the past 15 years. I have thoroughly used DOS 3 to 6.22; Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, NT, 98, 98SE, 2000, Me, XP, Longhorn, and Vista; I used Mac OS 8 to 10.4.11; as well as Linux distros Ubuntu 6 to 8.10, Mandrake, and RedHat. When I say that I used the computer thoroughly I mean that I used: Word and text processors, games, video editing, sound editing, sound composing, image editing and composing, worked with a plethora of 3D modelers, played music, formatted, partitioned, installed, burned, anti-vired, dismantled the hardware, rewired, and upgraded hardware, watched films, chatted, blogged, surfed, programmed and coded numerous scripts, did web and graphic design, used torrents, p2p networks, hacked and customized every single bit of data in all of the above to the highest degree of my capability. Please correct me if I missed something here.

Having said the above I consider my opinion regarding the “PC vs. Mac” very competent. Therefore, I will try to review this issue from all the perspectives known to me. Feel free to argue with me, or correct me. If there are things i missed let me know. I’m open to criticism!

Typical Claims: Mac is better than PC:

Mac is Apple Macintosh, a registered trade mark of a proprietary computer hardware, software, and consumer electronics giant. P.C. stands for Personal Computer. This statement and suchlike are obviously made by an extremely incompetent person. Possible translations: 1. Current Mac OS is better than current installable PC OS; 2. Mac hardware is better then any available hardware used to construct PCs; 3. Windows and/or programs available for a Windows OS is less capable then that of a Mac OS. 4. Mac has the perfect balance between function and look. 5. Mac is Minimalist. 6. There are no viruses in Mac.

#1 Current Mac OS is better than current installable PC OS:

Currently, there are a hundred plus Linux distros available to be installed on any modern personal computer. There are Windows, Unix, FreeBSD, and many more others, including micro OSs used in handhelds, productions houses, design ateliers and etc. To claim that Mac OS is the absolute best then any other is to try ALL available ones. I believe there is only a hand full of people that attempted to try out at the most 50% of those. Most importantly, Mac OS is installed on a PC because Mac is a Personal Computer, by definition.

#2 Mac hardware is better then any available hardware used to construct PCs;

Once again Mac is a PC (personal computer), it is constructed out of available PC hardware. Today’s Macs run on Intel powered computers which means that all of the hardware available in a Mac is also available for a PC or an equivalent of such can be attained. In fact for the price of any current Mac a more powerful PC could be assembled. The only thing exclusive to a Mac is the box and a built in chip that acts like a key to allow Mac OS installation.

#3 Windows and/or programs available for a Windows OS are less capable then that of a Mac OS

One must be very bored to have tried all available software alternatives in both OSes. I assure you that windows by far has more software written for it than any other OS in existence. I love to hear what people come up with when they show off the capabilities of their Mac Books. Usually, these people just couldn’t or didn’t want to find that function on a Windows, or they don’t realize that Windows is evolving in parallel to Mac OS.

#4 Mac has the perfect balance between function and look(this one is the most popular amongst the hipsters)

While functions is comparable in both there are uncountable PC models and looks that one would discover if they made a thorough search. Moreover, you simply cannot beat the functionality offered by paying only one third of a price, which is what many clone PC vendors offer.

#5 Mac is Minimalist (i love this one)

Is minimalism a good thing or bad? I bet most people coming with this statement have no idea what minimalism constitutes. I’d say Mac’s design is usually economical, or even utilitarian, rather than than minimalist in comparison to many others. Most of the finer intricacies found in Windows and Linux systems are simply not offered in Mac OS, because those ‘confuse’ the casual user.

#6 There are no viruses in Mac.

Is this something you heard from a FutureShop electronics representative? So did I. I laughed really hard at their naivety. Viruses are an issue that come with a territory. Windows is more widespread and thus it is also more widespread amongst the community hacker and virus scripters. The more popular Mac would gets the more viruses there will be designed for it. in fact, Symantec is already manufacturing an anti-virus for Mac Os [Link]. Of course the Mac one costs more than the PC one, even though there are tens of years of experience of fighting with malware on a PC. Mac users are paying for quality? I don’t think so. More over, if Windows users payed for every bit of software on their computer and only used the Internet for professional needs the wouldn’t have encountered any viruses in the first place.

In conclusion, a person that prefers a Mac must admit that:

-either they are a mainstream consumer that judges the computer industry simply from what is readily available on a shelf in a computer store or from what is found in the first 4 items appearing on Google.com search.

-or They simply prefer the look of a Mac computer, or prefer the user interface of a Mac OS.

The problem, really, is that this choice is often made without making the slightest attempt to do any research! Many don’t know that there are lighter and slimmer laptops out there than even the Mac Air. That Mac OS can run on any PC, as well as Linux can run on any. They don’t know that Windows and Linux can be made to look identical to Mac Os in addition to an infinitely growing amount of looks and feels of UIs available; all that to no additional cost.

This is interesting yet completely useless. People’s...

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:03:00 -0500

This is interesting yet completely useless. People’s idealism, and naive belief in grand schemes sometimes pisses me off. Didn’t we learn yet that every tendency that we recognize is not longer a tendency or a pattern by the time that we identify it. We are simply incapable of recognizing a pattern while being an implicit part of one.

Wordie [wûrd • ē]

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:51:25 -0500

If you are a thesaurus addict and portmanteau word enthusiast like I am than you would certainly love this new service called ← Wordie.org →.

They say that they are “Like Flickr, but without the photos” but I think that they are better. I was always unimpressed with Flickr and FFFFOUND!, because - aside from their image storing capabilities - these are simply attention suckers with no productive return. You sit there drool over beautiful things that you could have seen and touched in real life and have no way to even know where the photograph came from or what meaning or context hides behind them.

In Wordie on the other hand, I always find myself hypothesising and appropriating the meanings of words that I came across, even if those are not found in a traditional dictionary. It makes one think, and be passionate about new meanings.

p.s.: I though that I had come up with a new word, infrastructuralist, when I was trying to describe Cedric Price in my writing, when I suddenly came across it in wordie.

From The Golden Rules of Filming: “Nothing is original. Steal...

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:07:00 -0500

From The Golden Rules of Filming: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination”.

This quote came up in an interview Jarmusch did for Moviemaker Magazine in 2004, the visual is Rule#5. (See more | Wikipedia). I will include this in my thesis as I believe it strongly relates to open source.

Remember Duke Nukem 3D? ← Pixelated girls of Jean-Yves Lemoigne...

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 13:41:44 -0500

Remember Duke Nukem 3D? ← Pixelated girls of Jean-Yves Lemoigne →

Chipping plates is fun now! ← Matthias Lange → (yet another...

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:06:16 -0500

Chipping plates is fun now! ← Matthias Lange → (yet another re-blog)

Blogging is Dead

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:46:00 -0500

I’m sure this was written somewhere already, but I swear that I’ve never found it. It’s just impossible to be original because we all take one another’s and think alike.

Blogging is dead now, or one can say that it became different, however, everyone is just reblogging somebodies content. Every blogging platform has a “reblog” button and everyone thinks they can come up with the zeitgeist blog of society, or simply a more appealing collection of other people’s stuff on their blog.

Blogging used to be about logging personal thoughts and finds and the web was merely a MEANS of communication. Now bogs are mostly about that which is found on the web. Internet is a closed body and we are intrinsic to it.

The Internet is now alive.

Why?

Well. If we call the millions of cells, microbes, viruses and micro organisms a human body simply because those are in a symbiosis with one another, then how is the Internet any different?

MP3's are evil !

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:50:19 -0500

A standard CD is recorded with an audio stream of 1411 kbits/sec, while most mp3’s found and purchased on the wed have the stream of 128-320 kbits/sec. It is regardless of what compression methods, optimization techniques, or filtering that were used to create the MP3, MP4, or WMA, the result will always contain only a fraction of the original information. It then comes as not surprise that many claim that they cannot hear the difference between a 128 kbits/sec and 320 kbits/sec MP3. It is simply because we are progressively loosing our ability to hear such subtleties the more we listen to lossy content.

We are becoming a culture that in not only incapable to appreciate a good pair of headphones but one that looses it’s ability to process natural sounds, as the listenership rates rise.

In a brief essay Pantelis Vassilakis describes in simple terms the consequences of listening to lossy music(mp3) and makes suggestions to avoid the degeneration of hearing:

← Read the source article →

Visions of Luigi Colani

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:43:00 -0500

“Form follows emotion, not function” - Luigi Colani

Although, these concepts may look clumsy they are rather inventive, and could challenge some of today’s ideals. How can one ignore these tacky but ingenious Mercedes windshield wipers?

Luigi Colani’s Mercedes Trucks:

Motorbike:

Piano:

T.V.:

Source article:

no.1: ← Dark Roasted Blend:Extravagant Designs by Luigi Colani →

no.2: ← Dark Roasted Blend:Concept Trucks by Luigi Colani →

no.3: ← the new cafe racer > society →

no.4: ← haha.nu - Luigi Colani’s Designs →

no.5: ← Luigi Colani -Telegraph →

no.6: ← Form follows emotion, not funcion →