Wrenz Birdies

These speakers are probably the most beautiful speakers I’ve ever seen. They’re definitely the coolest.

Via Yanko Design:

Urging us to take flight to a new dimension in sound are the chirpy Wrenz Speakers! Delightfully crafted as tiny birds, a bunch of them are good enough to make your place look swanky and entertain with quality sound playback.

Designer: Yvette Yeo for Gavio

The future of dance: WCO

Be prepared to be surprised. If you love Tron, you can’t dislike this:

Via This Is Colossal:

Wrecking Crew Orchestra are a dance crew out of Japan consisting of eight men who in these videos are seen dancing with perfectly synchronized electroluminescent light suits designed by iLuminate. Keep in mind, what you’re watching is live and unedited. The second video above is a recent commercial for Experia and here’s a little bit of behind-the-scenes footage from that shoot. So much fun.

The Macalope

Funny article about people who are anti-Apple for the sake of it.

As opposed to, say, those who are thought-slaves to lazy Apple tropes that absolve them from any obligation to think why someone might believe that Apple products are simply the better choice. No, it’s just blind obedience to a cult.

It’s astounding they keep writing this crap. You expect it from windowsluvrrr46@hotmail.com, but Forbes?

The Macalope has to type “GET IT? IT’S A CULT!” so many times that he really should set up a keyboard shortcut.

How a bit of geekery science can create some beautiful pictures.

I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.

Check Kim Pimmel’s Vimeo page for more experiments.

8 Star Trek Gadgets That Are No Longer Fiction

Sarah Kesseler on Mashable made this interesting list of gadgets from the Star Trek series. These gadgets that were at the time made up to impress and give a feeling of ‘the future’.
It’s interesting to see some of the gadgets that have become reality, like the iPad. We already take some for granted, like GPS. Some even became oldfashioned or even forgotten, like floppy disks, flip phones and the tricoder.

Optimised for Bad

Digital Music News reported recently that Rick Rubin mastered the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album I’m With You optimised for iTunes. This sounds interesting, but when you start thinking about it, what does this actually mean?

I don’t know what it means to Rick Rubin, but lets think about what the iTunes store means: compressed music, listened on iPods with bad earplugs. Why would you optimise an album for such a situation? People who listen to music with this kind of setup clearly don’t care about audioquality. Why take the effort to optimise your album for this? Or is it just a marketing stunt?
You wouldn’t try to trick us to push sales, would you, Warner?

Puzzle islands

Puzzle Islands
How cool is this. A futuristic looking piece of fantasy. But it’s completely real. Mashable reported that PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is investing in these floating islands.

The islands themselves would be movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure[s] with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens — perhaps even hundreds — of these could be linked together.

Jonathan Miles explains about the idea of these islands:

The islands are an experiment with new — ie. libertarian — ideas of government, free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050.

The iPad replaces, but what?

The iPad is more and more penetrating into our lives. Even though many people, me included, first saw it primarily as a scaled up iPod Touch, we can’t ignore the impact it’s making.

While many Android-tablet customers return their tablets, after just using it for one day, expecting it would replace their laptop, the tablet is capable of replacing a lot of other things.

iPad for the customers

NYC restaurant De Santos completely integrated the iPad into their workflow. Instead of a classic menucard, customers get an iPad on which they order. Orders automatically arrive in the kitchen, bills are calculated, and they check out using Square on the same iPad. Sebastion Gonella, one of the owners and co-founders of De Santos, explains:

Nowadays in New York City, the menus don’t list the entire specifications of each dish. With this software, you can show them exactly the dish itself and all the specifications for each dish, so people are really buying what they’re seeing and there’s no more confusion. It’s pretty important.

Not only is it damn trendy, customers get excited about the use of the tech, but the restaurant owners also claim it saves money.

Compared to traditional POS systems like Aloha, which will typically cost a restaurant at least $30,000 to install, De Santos’s tailor-made POS system for the iPad took a fraction of the price to produce. Between contracting Igel to build the customized app and buying the 8 iPads and credit card swipers, the whole shebang cost about $18,000.

Plus:

This technology frees up servers to see more tables, take more orders, serve more drinks, and chat with customers.

Win-win-win-win. And ofcourse being the first restaurant in New York to completely run on iPads creates a lot of free promotion.

iPad as cash register

De Santos wasn’t the first to jump to iPad payments. Many retailers are jumping to mobile payments on iPads. All Things D reports:

Lowe’s announced last week that it was rolling out 42,000 handheld devices at stores in the U.S. and Canada. That closely follows announcements by Home Depot, Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters.

While they may use the iPads for payments, they will also be used to help customers by looking up answers or product availability.

iPads in airtraffic

Another example of iPads replacing stuff is in the recent announcement by United Airlines to deploy ‘11,000 iPads to all United and Continental pilots’:

Each iPad, which weighs less than 1.5 pounds, will replace approximately 38 pounds of paper operating manuals, navigation charts, reference handbooks, flight checklists, logbooks and weather information in a pilot’s flight bag. A conventional flight bag full of paper materials contains an average of 12,000 sheets of paper per pilot. The green benefits of moving to EFBs are two-fold—it significantly reduces paper use and printing, and, in turn, reduces fuel consumption. The airline projects EFBs will save nearly 16 million sheets of paper a year which is equivalent to more than 1,900 trees not cut down. Saving 326,000 gallons of jet fuel a year reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 3,208 metric tons.

A 12,000 sheet manual. I hope they build in a quick search function.

iPad was the future

We currently live in the future. Samsung’s lawyers use Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to proof this wasn’t Apple’s idea. Kubrick was only 9 years off. Arthur C. Clarke even described it quite deeply in the book 2001:

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers…Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort.

2001Screenshot from 2001’s use of iPads, ehm, I mean.. tablets.

So no, it won’t replace a laptop just yet. But it replaces a lot of paper, magazines, payment systems, a lot of weight, the need for extra fuel to carry manuals, and opens up a whole new way of interactivity and connectivity between the different task we do on it.

The b-side of vinyl

I’m a vinyl lover, and already made a couple of posts about the topic. There’s ofcourse also a different kind of people who rather see it die a painful death. Digital Music News made a short list with reasons not to love vinyl. I’ll go through them one by one.

The static clicks and pops ruin the sound, and I haven’t yet seen a setup that didn’t have them. This far outweighs whatever alleged resonance it may or may not have. The static makes vinyl unlistenable.

This is part of the esthetics, an essential part of the experience. Many artists even add vinyl noise to make their music less clean, warmer. Even if they only publish in digital formats.

It is extremely fragile and degrades a little with each play even if you take perfect care of it.

Yes, actually the only point I agree with. On the other hand makes it that you’ll value your music even higher. Every listen counts.

Is big and bulky and heavy, and so is the equipment needed to play it. 

Vinyl was never meant as a portable medium. Your 50” cinema screen and hifiset are big and heavy too.

You have to flip the record for side 2.

Yes, it’s great, isn’t it?

No easy skipping of tracks.

Just drop the needle onto the next track, mate. Don’t really see what’s ‘not easy’ about that.

It’s harder to rip into your computer.

True, but would you want that? Many new vinyl comes with download codes so you can download a digital version of the record, which makes it even easier than ripping a CD.

I’d like to add a downside: You can’t put it on shuffle.
These disadvantages clearly miss the whole point why vinyl is becoming popular again. Vinyl is not because I want to hear some music while I’m working. Vinyl is for those moments I really want to sit down, and listen to an album. Flipping sides is part of that ritual, the clicks part of the fun.

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