I currently find myself redesigning an HD PVR service with a rather limited graphical specification for the on-screen display. The set-top box can only handle images with four bits per channel, giving a total of 4096 colors to work with. Not quite what one would expect from an HD set-top-box…
A company called Telegraphics have previously provided the 12bits filter for converting images from 8 bits/channel to 4 bits/channel, but they have not updated the filter for Photoshop CS3. The reason for this is probably very low demand for a filter like this. But if someone else out there are stuck with 4 bit images for some reason, you know how useful this filter can be for tuning images. If you are not one of them, you can safely stop reading now. Read the rest of this entry »
National Archives in the UK have released previously classified files on UFO sightings in Great Britain.
Some have already dismissed this release as a whitewash. I am inclined to agree with the skeptics on this one, since I have not found any reference to Elvis or cattle in the material..
I got the idea for the Alien Abduction Lamp late in the summer of 2006, and I finished designing the lamp during a holiday in Italy in May 2007. I published the 3D renderings on June 4. 2007; - with low expectations, and without any plans for taking the project beyond the concept stage.
High demand
Shortly after publishing the lamp, the response was overwhelming. International press and blog press wrote several articles about the lamp, and I got Stumbled, Dugg and Boing-Boing-ed. Messages were ticking in daily, and they continue to do so today. I have also been contacted by several manufacturers, distributors and resellers. The massive demand made me change my mind, and I started to feel a personal responsibility to take the Alien Abduction Lamp from concept to product.
Macheist has a limited time offer for a great bundle of 11 mac apps that I highly recommend. The bundle now includes CSSEdit that I have previously mentioned as the best tool for easy and elegant creation and editing of stylesheets.
It also includes AppZapper, and if you buy the bundle, you can use it to Zap slow and heavy applications like Dreamweaver from your harddrive.
CSSEdit and AppZapper together cost almost as much as the whole bundle, so the rest of the apps are a pure bonus. I have already become very fond of 1password, a small program that lets you securely share passwords across different browsers.
Eirik Solheim asked me to provide a list of five favorite blogs after listing herrklein.com as an awesome blog on eirikso.com.The rules are as follows: no community blogs, and they must be written in English. Here are the five blogs that I ended up recommending:
Information Aesthetics
The beauty of visualisation and visual communication by Andrew Vande Moere.
Geisha Asobi Blog
I love Japan and (almost) everything japanese, but I have yet to go there. This blog by Asobi Tsuchiya features beautiful, fun, weird and crazy japanese stuff.
Technabob A blog for new gadgets, games, gizmos and other weird science by Paul Strauss.
Future Perfect
A blog by Jan Chipchase, a developer of future mobile services for Nokia.
Eirikso.com has been mentioned earlier, otherwise he would surely have been on the list. And I would like to second Eirik’s recommendation of Øyvind Solstad’s brilliantdays (and the Norwegian blog NRKbeta).If we put the rule about listing only non-community blogs aside, there are many others that I would recommend. And without repeating the ones already mentioned elsewhere, here are a few of the community blogs that I subscribe to:
Core77 Blog
Industrial design supersite Core77’s blog.
Signal vs. Noise A blog about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more.
Brand New
Opinions on corporate and brand identity work.
TechCrunch
A weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.
