Freshome were among the first to write about the Alien Abduction Lamp back in june 2007, and I have been following them since then. They have now included the Alien Abduction Lamp in their list of 40 of the most creative lamp designs ever. I recommend this article to get a look at the other lamps. I am very happy to see the Alien Abduction Lamp in such great company.
Two Alien Abduction Lamp prototypes arrive at Oslo airport
Standing before me on my desk at home is a fully functional prototype of the Alien Abduction Lamp – complete with lights and alien pilots.
As the designer of this lamp, I am not going to begin to describe the feeling of holding a physical version of the lamp that I have been working with renderings and models of for the the last year and a half.
I suppose that your first reaction is to want to see a picture or a video, but I am afraid that I can not show any images yet. This is after all a prototype, and as with all prototypes, the overall look is somewhat different from what a final product.
Please trust me for now when I say that the lamp looks fantastic! I am convinced that those of you who wanted a lamp after seeing the computer generated images will definitely want to own the real thing.
I sometimes watch youtube videos with my little daughter. Some of our favorites include include the elephant song, mahna maha and Beaker from Muppet Show singing “Mimi”:
This morning, however, we were rickrolled. Not in the usual boring way where you are unknowingly taken to the original Rick Astley video. This one was far better simply by being well executed and by keeping the rickrolling in context:
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.
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.
