Yet another thing I was slow to post, but I couldn’t let this one slide. These are images of places that are all the same distance from Ground Zero as the proposed “mosque”. The author has also posted some reactions to the photos.

08/27/10nyc

I’m a little late on posting this, but Gizmodo does a very thorough job of explaining exactly what Liquidmetal (the company Apple recently acquired) can do. If you really don’t feel like reading all that text, this sentence sums it up nicely:

To sum it up: Liquidmetal is useful anywhere you could imagine an extremely hard, somewhat flexible, easily moldable piece of stuff to be useful.

08/27/10Apple, liquidmetal, technology

Adam Saltsman is interviewed by Indie Game: The Movie and there are some fun tidbits about the making of the game. Here’s a direct link to the video.

08/27/10Adam Saltsman, Canabalt, video games, videos

In my version of The Blind Side, Cee Lo Green is adopted by my Jewish parents in our Chicago suburb, grows up to be a phenomenal musician and protects me, his adopted brother, vociferously. Also, this song is so amazing; can’t wait for his new album. [via @tdominey]

08/20/10Cee Lo Green, videos

Boing Boing brought them in to play the game and they seem to enjoy it and find it authentic. I particularly enjoyed this back-and-forth:

K: If they had shabu (crystal meth) as a power-up item, that would be realistic. It’s a yakuza game.
S: They have sake!
M: Kiryu is an executive, right? We all know the guys at the top don’t drink or do speed.
S: Yeah, not anymore.
M: Can you smoke in the game? I forget. That should be a power-up.
S: Cigarettes and shabu should be in every yakuza game.

08/13/10video games, yakuza

Sam Smith paints a portrait of Scottie Pippen on the eve of his induction into the Hall of Fame. Here are some choice nuggets.

It’s told famously by his high school and college coaches, but truly defies explanation. The supermodel skinny kid who didn’t play much in high school and wasn’t even sure he wanted to play in college, even if he could. But his high school coach called in some favors just to get him a look at NAIA Central Arkansas. Pippen, maybe 135 pounds then and 6-1, couldn’t get a scholarship and wasn’t recruited by even a junior college. He became team manager and went to school on a Pell grant before a scholarship came open late in his freshman year and he got it in more a charitable move. He cleaned the locker room and handed out the towels. He said he enjoyed that because he could just hang out with the guys.

And now he’s going into the Basketball Hall of Fame. C’mon, you cannot even make that up.

and…

[Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant’s] friendship was legendary at the time as they were inseparable. They’d call each other a dozen times a day and agree on clothes to wear to the game. They purchased the identical cars, dogs and lived on the same street. They were each other’s best men at their weddings, a few months apart. They had the same agent and vacationed together. In the Bulls’ yearbook in answer to the question, “Who would you take if you were going to the moon?” Pippen responded, “Horace Grant.” One of my favorite stories was when Pippen’s cat died and Grant called in saying he’d be late for practice because he had to mourn with Scottie.

08/12/10basketball, Scottie Pippen, sports

If I ever get back into client work, I will share this post with all of my clients.

Most people don’t need to buy design. And only about half the people trying to buy design should be. Your designer should be a partner, helping you solve your problem. You have a goal in mind; the two of you work together for a solution. Getting to that solution includes researching the people you want using your object, the market for that object and who, if anyone, is trying to sell that same sort of object. If all of that sounds like a pain in the ass, and it kind of is, then don’t buy design. Hire a production team. You’ll save money.

Also, I hope Mike enjoys that this post comes right after a huge Hitler poster.

08/12/10design, Mike Monteiro

Man, these are gold. This one is about taking up too much space (they explain all of them). [via @nickbilton]

08/12/10Japan, posters, subways, transportation

Kevin Kelley collects a list of the best magazine articles ever. It’s extra awesome if you think about how long this would have taken to compile 20 years ago.

08/10/10magazines

Fred Seibert, who (I believe) produces Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, has been uploading production art from the series to flickr. Dan gives some more background and a shows off a few of his favorite pieces.

08/10/10Adventure Time, television | 1

Eddie Jabbour, the author of the KickMap, explains (in great detail) the story of its creation. There is a lot of content here, but I especially like when he dives into the details of execution (e.g., straightening out roads, clarifying subway line crossings). [via Gil]

08/06/10Eddie Jabbour, nyc, subways, transportation

As you can see from the photo above, we saw this band everywhere. And yes, I am joining the group next year. [via dj]

Mr. Akimoto’s real genius is knowing the power of numbers. Keeping the group big is important. In addition to making promotional duties a breeze, it prevents individual members from becoming too famous and, thus, inaccessible or… perhaps, more importantly, irreplaceable.

08/05/10AKB48, music

You control a racing game using an arcade cabinet, but the car and track are real and right next to you. The video is pretty awesome.

08/05/10video games

It’s a little long (but way shorter than the 138 page ruling) and vey clear. This passage made me a little giddy.

So what happens next?

Nothing happens yet. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will review the case. After that, the U.S. Supreme Court will probably review it, regardless of what the 9th Circuit says. If the current ruling survives that, same-sex marriage will essentially become legal in every state. There was nothing to limit this holding to Prop. 8.

The author goes on to explain this is far from guaranteed, but it still gives me goosebumps. [via Marco]

08/05/10law, Proposition 8

China is developing a bus that would straddle two lanes of traffic and run on a rail system. Passengers would enter on the second level and it would be 10% of the cost of an equivalent subway system and reduce traffic by up to 30%. Also, it looks pretty Jetsons. [via Jalopnik]

08/04/10China, transportation

A playable recreation of Halo for the Atari 2600. The author, Ed Fries, also wrote about creating it. He apologizes about writing for a general audience, but I’m glad he did.

The thing you need to realize about the Atari 2600 is that it is an incredibly limited machine. It has only 128 bytes of RAM and without bank switching the maximum program size is just over 4000 bytes. There are just two 8 pixel wide monochrome sprites, two one pixel bullets, a “ball” and a 40 pixel wide background (and even that is exaggerating…). There is no memory to store the screen image like any modern console or PC, instead it has to be drawn a line at a time by changing the values of the registers that control the sprites and background. The processor is so slow that only 76 clock cycles occur while a line of the screen is being drawn, and the simplest 6502 instructions take at least 2 clock cycles. So just to draw an image of the Master Chief is pretty tough. To create a complete game while living within these constraints is much harder.

08/03/10Ed Fries, Halo, video games

Trippy video from Cyriak. [via waxy]

08/03/10Cyriak, videos

This re-imagines tab management using a tool that is part desktop and part Exposé. It’s built for Firefox, is available in a pre-release build and they hope to integrate it into a proper build later.

07/26/10browsers, Firefox

“The Chipophone is a homemade 8-bit synthesizer, especially suited for live chiptune playing. It has been built inside an old electronic organ.” The video is worth your time.

07/26/10chiptunes, music

You must read this in the next 10 hours because, after that, Lebron will no longer be a free agent. Here’s my favorite bit.

Red Flag No. 1: Wade and Bosh (who have the same agent, by the way) hired documentary crews to follow them around. As any reality-show junkie knows, if there’s no drama, you have to manufacture it. Well, how could a free-agency documentary (or reality show, or web series, or whatever they do with this footage) have drama if both guys decided where they were going weeks ago? You’d have to center it around Wade’s upcoming divorce, or Bosh struggling to decide whether to stay with his girlfriend or hook up with those gorgeous half-Cuban, half-who-the-hell-knows models that only exist in South Beach. And neither guy would ever do that. So what works? Indecision. Meetings. More meetings. A lot of “agonizing.” If this footage ever sees the light of day, I bet the acting is worse than your average episode of “The Hills.” You wait.

07/08/10basketball, Bill Simmons, Lebron James, sports