Author: smartpeopleiknow

MAKE magazine, IKEA hackers, or the rise of craft in North America


There seems to be a common idea going around, at least in North America. People who may have once been interested in hacking computers are looking past them to other areas. MAKE magazine is just one example of this need being addressed. Then there is this article in nytimes.com about people hacking IKEA. As the article puts it:

Ms. Lam, Mr. Csiky and Ms. Domanic have never met but they are nonetheless related, connected by a global (and totally unofficial) collective known as the Ikea Hackers. Do-it-yourselfers and technogeeks, tinkerers, artists, crafters and product and furniture designers, the hackers are united only by their perspective, which looks upon an Ikea Billy bookcase or Lack table and sees not a finished object but raw material: a clean palette yearning to be embellished or repurposed. They make a subset of an expanding global D.I.Y. movement, itself a huge tent of philosophies and manifestoes including but not confined to anticonsumerism, antiglobalism, environmentalism and all-purpose iconoclasm.

For the article, surf over to Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed – New York Times

Cook’s: for serious cooks and people who are serious about cooking

If you are serious about cooking, or want to know the definitive way to cook something, I highly recommend Cook’s Illustrated.
It’s a great magazine about cooking as opposed to a collection of recipes. You will get recipes, too, but you will discover a whole lot more about the process of transforming food.

Plus they have reviews of cooking tools, premade sauces, menus, and much more.

www.ihackcharities.org

When I first saw that URL, I thought: what?! I am happy to say the site is not about hacking in charities. Instead, it is:

about proving that hackers have amazing skills that can transform charitable organizations.

So if you know of some budding hackers who want to save the world and come up with some worthwhile hacks, send them
here.

Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer at the Art Institute of Chicago

In 2008, The Art Institute of Chicago will be putting on an exhibit of Edward Hopper (with a bonus exhibit of Winslow Homer going on as well). Here’s an idea of what you will see regarding Hopper:

The exhibition will be arranged chronologically and thematically, focusing on the work he executed in Gloucester and Truro, Massachusetts, Maine, and New York. Approximately 50 oils and 30 watercolors, together with literature and history of the artist’s own time, will show Hopper’s place in the tradition of American realism and modernism. Edward Hopper and its companion exhibition, Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light, will provide a survey of the American realist tradition and chart the growth of modern subject matter—from Homer, America’s first modernist, to Hopper, the nation’s best known 20th-century realist.

More on good, cheap wine under $10 from the LCBO and other places

The globeandmail.com has been good enough to set up a searchable database of wine recommendations based on Beppi Crossariol’s wine columns found regularly in their paper. You can search the database in a number of ways, including wines under $10 (you will find around 20 bottles). Some of them are wines I mentioned earlier (like Corten from Moldova) but others are new to me (including some tetra pak ones, no less).

The other nice thing about this is that you can find the wine, and then go to the article. Beppi’s a good writer with good and varied taste: the articles are worth a read, too.

Check outThe Wine Butler

The World is NOT flat

James Fallows over at the Atlantic.com reviews and recommends: “A Flat World, A Level Playing Field, a Small World After All, or None of the Above?” by Edward Leamer of UCLA. There is a link to the article, as well as a summation of it, as well as a critique of Friedman. Quote:

* When I asked Friedman on the show why he said on virtually every page of the book that the world was “flat,” when he knew very well all the reasons it wasn’t, he disarmingly said: In the columnist game, you don’t sell things 51-49. You decide what you think is right, and you push that all the way. So, he could have more accurately said that the world is “flattening,” but that wouldn’t have had the ooomph.

For more, see James Fallows (September 07, 2007) – Golden Oldies: the world is not flat

The world’s ugliest cars


Some of them don’t seem so bad now, while others are STILL ugly. Actually, the comments make you realize that the cars weren’t just ugly, but dangerous and deficient. Perhaps the article should be titled: The World’s Worst Cars.

It’s a fun read, and if you had one of these cars, you might cringe a little. 🙂

See The World’s Ugliest Cars over at BusinessWeek.com

An Appraisal of the great Luciano Pavorotti

Sadly, Luciano Pavorotti died today. A fine appraisal can be found in at nytimes.com, including this quote (I added the bold):

By natural endowment Mr. Pavarotti was essentially a lyric tenor, ideally suited to lighter roles in Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi requiring lyrical grace and agile passagework. Yet his voice, like everything about him, was uncommonly large. With that big throbbing sound, he was tempted into weightier repertory requiring dramatic power and heft, like Calaf in Puccini’s “Turandot.” Some opera purists maintain that Mr. Pavarotti erred by straying from the lyric terrain. Don’t tell that to anyone lucky enough to have heard him sing “Nessun dorma” in his prime, not just as a signature aria for televised stadium concerts, but in the context of a full production of “Turandot.” Wow!

See: Italian Operatic Artistry at Its Finest – New York Times

Before&After: How to design cool stuff…

…is the title of this web site, and it’s true. You can learn to design cool stuff at Before & After magazine. What’s more, if you read enough of their articles, you will learn how to communicate more effectively, and not just from a typographical point of view. B&A have a way of clearly describing how to make things better. If more sites were like this one, the web (and print) would be FAR better.

Civil Rights in the Middle East

I came across this site when reading about Facebook being banned in Iran. There are a number of other articles on the site talking about persecution of bloggers and others pursuing free speech and civil rights in the Middle East. See more at
The C.R.I.M.E. Report – August 29, 2007.
As I was click on the links, I came across this clip of dress code enforcement on Iranian women:


and here is a woman beating the crap out of another woman who looks like she was trying to attempt the same thing

Doo Wop / Hip Hop – Lauren Hill / Amy Winehouse

The incredibly beautiful and talented Lauren Hill juxtaposes Doo Wop and Hip Hop wonderfully in “Doo Wop (That Thing)”, and the video drives that point home. (Great tune – great video). See: YouTube – Doo Wop

P.S. It’s not that old a song, but already it is shaping up to be classic, as can be seen in this live version performed by Amy Winehouse:

P.S.S. I know, I post alot on Amy W…..what can I say…she’s great.

YouTube gets politicians in trouble around the globe…this time in Iran

FP has the story of how YouTube is making life difficult for Iranian politicians. Clearly no politician is safe anywhere these days. And this is not a bad thing. See:

Mohammed Khatami’s macaca moment | FP Passport

P.S. Some of you might think: whoa! what did I miss? Read the article in FP for the details. (It’s all relative.)

Making fun on beauty queens, the importance of context and the new propaganda

I have seen this clip on a number of sites recently:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww]

While I agree her answer is poor, I think everything has to do with context. Anyone asked such a question might have a tough time answering it without saying something obvious (and negative) like: the US education system is lacking. Or the people who can the survey did a poor job. Plus you are on stage, you have a set period of time to answer it, and some of the questions you may have been preparing to answer don’t come up.

So why the popularity of the clip? I think it is because of the context. I think it allows people to vent such things as envy or disgust or anger at the Miss USA pageant, and to do so in a simple way: displaying the clip.

One of the dark sides of Web 2.0 is the ability for anyone to create propaganda. Now this clip is a fairly benign example, but it is part of a recent trend of people trying to shape political messages and spread them via YouTube and other means. Just recently it was about using YouTube to expose the truth. Now it will be about using YouTube to shape the truth.

Focus on maximizing your time instead of worrying about the time you waste

Sprint has an interesting site called waitless.org about fast-forwarding through the boring parts of your life. It’s kinda silly. I mean, I may spend 15 minutes a day doing the dishes, but there’s not much of an alternative.

However, I thought of flipping the site and showing how even a little bit of time spent every day can yield results. For example, if I were to spend 15 minutes / day reading Shakespeare, over the length of my life I could spend over 9 months reading Shakespeare! 15 minutes seems hardly worthwhile, but if you were to add it up, it may not be scholarly, but it is not insignifigant.

Check out: Sprint Waitless

Branch – sustainable design

What is Branch?

Well, I could tell you, or I could brazenly reuse and recycle their own material.

Why we’re doing this (or, a manifesto of sorts) Like a lot of folks, we enjoy shopping. As a social activity, shopping gets us out into the various neighborhoods in our city, allowing us to connect with other people along the way. As a cultural excursion, it gives us a chance to discover what’s new and interesting in the world. And, of course, we derive some joy from finding just the right gift for someone, or for ourselves. At the same time, there’s an element to shopping that we find quite troubling. We buy things that appeal to us—we love a product’s styling, for example—though we may have little idea of where a product comes from. What materials went into its manufacture? Did the wood used to make that chair contribute to deforestation in Asia? Were toxic chemicals used to create the lustrous finish? The people who actually fabricated the product—were they paid a fair wage and provided a safe, comfortable environment in which to do so? How far did the product have to come in order to get to the store, and how much fuel was used in that process? And what of the lifespan of the products we buy? Eventually—sooner or later, but eventually—a product will outlive its useful life. What then? Does it get thrown away? Is it made such that it’ll sit in the landfill for hundreds (or even thousands) of years before it degrades? And in going through that process, will it release toxins into the environment? These are all some pretty heavy thoughts, and they can really sap the joy from a fun day of shopping. The fact is that many people are at least somewhat aware of the sobering factors of our consumptive lifestyle, but that doesn’t keep them (or us, for that matter) from going shopping. As a culture, we’re practically bred to be shoppers—it’s a habit that runs deep and strong. So in looking for a solution to the problems mentioned above, we’re taking a different approach. Instead of asking people to stop shopping (which is, of course, pretty darn impractical), what if we changed the paradigm of shopping itself? What if we could shop in a store that had already done the challenging thinking for us? A place where we could buy products that are wholly appealing—sexy, even—but that are also manufactured and brought to market in such a way that we didn’t have to feel guilty about buying—or, eventually, disposing of—them? This is the basis of the idea for Branch, a new online store based in San Francisco.

I came across it because there is a Daniel Michalik who does design for them.

It’s a great site.

Cool design — computer related and otherswise — at Yanko

Over at Yanko Design, they have a great assortment of well designed products. As an IT guy, I really liked this one. It’s a simple idea: backup your deleted files in case you really don’t want to delete them. This may seem silly to some, but I think I have a tendency to not delete files (and packrat everything) because of the need to insure things not getting lost. My hard disk might be alot cleaner with something like this.

See: Backing Up Your Trash » Yanko Design