MacUpdate Promo Bundle includes Parallels
After the disaster I had with MacHeist I decided to go for the new MacUpdate Promo Bundle, mainly because of Sound Studio and Parallels. The last MacUpdate …
97 Posts
General
Playpen Broke. Now Fixed. Sorry.
Apparently Playpen has been broken since yesterday and I didn’t notice (I was on a train from Hamburg most of yesterday). The robot running it got all …
No Agencies Please, You're Not Nice
Wandering off from a post by John Hicks about staff photos I ended up on the jobs page of my mates at Poke. They have a good tip for recruitment agencies …
Film Friends Forever Oscar & Bafta Screening
I don’t normally do straight plugs for things that aren’t interactive and that I’ve never heard of, but this screening at Film Friends Forever …
Philosophical 404
I know there are plenty of 404 pages out there, but I stumbled across this one today and quite liked its minimal, haiku style. That’s all. (This one is …
Got ripped off in a MacHeist? It's a UI failure.
No, not a hold-up in McDonalds, but the MacHeist Mac software bundle sale/game. Like many, I got charged ten times and received nothing and also heard nothing …
Is your cellphone company evil?
Mine certainly is. No Evil is a great viral microsite for Net 10 that plays on the idea that cellphone companies are a bunch of money-grabbing evil madmen. …
re/act 4th International Student Festival for Media Art
Monika tells me this is a great festival for student media-arts work. It looks good to me and I think I saw some work from it last year. It’s a good …
Moving Between Consulting and Academia
Jon Kolko’s article, Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Life lessons from consulting to academia, and back again over at Core77, was a particularly …
Manamana
Here’s something nothing to do with interactivity, quite a bit to do with play. It’s Christmas after all. I still find this funny for some …
Dear Rockers and Get a First Life
Iain posted posted a link to Dear Rockers, a website that encourages you to repent your music-stealing sins and send $5 direct to the musicians who have made an …
Greyworld's Monument to the Unknown Artist
Greyworld have unveiled their project, Monument to the Unknown Artist. Andrew Shoben showed me the maquette of it in Geryworld’s studio early last year …
Plumen - low energy, high style
My mate Nik Roope has been busily working up another smart idea to brighten up the lack of imagination in the marketplace again. This time it’s the Plumen …
Poke's Never-Ending Web Page for Orange
I meant to post this last week but was travelling and forgot. Take a look at the never-ending web page that Poke designed for the Orange Unlimited campaign …
Flash On the Beach Coda
I just returned from a fantastic time speaking at Flash on the Beach ‘07. I’ve been to quite a few conferences over the years and this was by far …
Purchasing Pleasure
I recently bought the very useful MarsEdit external blog editor from Red Sweater. I’d tried an earlier version and wasn’t so enamoured, but my …
Games, Play and Web Applications
[Dan Saffer’s](http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/new_archives/2007/10/presentation_ga.html] latest presentation called Gaming The Web: Using the structures of …
New magneticNorth website
Check out magneticNorth’s new website. As Brendan (mN’s Creative Director) says “Look beyond the site you see and you may discover …
Speaking at Icograda World Design Congress
I’ll be in Cuba this weekend (20th and 21st October) to give a presentation at the Icograda World Design Congress with my Omnium colleague, Rick Bennett. …
Omnium need a Sys Admin
Just a quickie to say that the Omnium Research Group with whom I work in Australia are looking to hire a sys-admin. So if you’re a Linux, Apache, PHP, …
Google Moon faked in a holodeck
I’m not actually a believer that NASA faked the moon landings but had an amusing moment looking through Google’s wonderful new Google Moon where …
Evolution of Dance vs. Titanic
I’ve just been chatting with my online students in Australia about emerging media and it led me to do some quick sums on the merits of Titanic, the …
The 12 Kinds of Ads in the World
I don’t really blog about advertising or marketing, though it seems to be one the most popular blogging subjects. I usually read Iain’s Crackunit …
Tiny phone. Not.
This e-mail flyer from Act Now contained this gem demonstrating not only a ridiculous fear of litigation, but also a lack of understanding of resolution …
A new set of design principles
The latest issue of Desktop is out with an article by me called A New Set of Design Principles. It’s based on interviews with Stefan Sagmeister and Milton …
Desktop 2007 Create Awards
A quick plug for Desktop Magazine (the home of much of my writing) as their 2007 Create Awards are awaiting entries. So, if you were one of my ex-students or a …
Macbook or Macbook Pro?
or I’m about to upgrade machines and it’s time to go Macbook or Macbook Pro (the 15"). It wouldn’t be a primary design machine, so the …
Drunk Deutsche Bahn Icons
](/images/2007/01/normal_dbsigns.jpg) [ Click to enlarge the images For a while I’ve been meaning to photograph this - unfortunately I only got them with …
Safari's experimental typography
When I was trying to access Apple’s website for the iPhone the other day Safari went all glitchy with its image rendering. I quite like the above smear …
The Power of Red Buttons
Having just mistyped a domain name and been sent to one of those really irritating ‘parked domain’ search pages, I saw this pop-up. Normally, I …
Yahoo! Mail Championships
A few months ago I spent a very fun couple of weeks doing some work for the folks over at Poke where my friend (and ex-Antiromer) Nik Roope is one of the …
Top Hat and a Tail
So of course Greyworld’s Andrew Shoben couldn’t let me name-check Antirom on YouTube without sending me one of his own. This one of him wearing a …
What's in a name?
] Okay, this has nothing to do with the usual subject matter of this blog, but it was far too amusing not to post. A long time ago my family started looking …
Bauhaus Blog
Not really a post that may be of interest to lots of you, but I have started a new blog for those of you who are/will be my students from the Bauhaus (or anyone …
Starting as Gastprofessor at the Bauhaus
I’m off to Weimar tomorrow to start a six-month stint as Guest Professor “Gestaltung medialer Umgebungen” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in …
Online Educa Berlin 2006 workshop
My colleagues and I from The Omnium Project will be conducting a workshop at the Online Educa 2006 Conference in Berlin on the 29th November and it will be …
Google Mars
As most regular readers (yes, you there) will know, I have a fascination with Google’s mapping activities. So it’s such a pleasure to see Google …
The Brain Behind Del.icio.us
I’m not sure how old this interview with Joshua Schachter, inventor of del.icio.us, is but it’s a fascinating insight into the Wisdom of Crowds. It …
Google and UNEP Map Environmental Change
Google and the United Nations Environmental Programme last week launched an addition to Google Earth called the Atlas of Our Changing Environment, which allows …
Be A Good Friend
What a joy to discover Steven Blyth’s My Social Fabric project (thanks to Mike Coulter at Digital Agency). Essentially the My Social Fabric project gives …
MTV vs YouTube
I’ve been catching up with my blog reading and thought Todd Dominey’s point about MTV trailing YouTube was worth a re-blog as it hooks into what I …
Hidden Gems in Apple's Announcements
Of course there is the usual commentary on Steve Jobs’ new Apple announcements and no doubt this will add to the slush pile, but I think there are a few …
Interactive Tedium from ISEA
I didn’t get to go to ISEA this year (not that I’ve been for ages) and I actually pretty pleased I didn’t. I really wanted to like the stuff I …
Fleabilly strikes again
Okay, so a pure vanity post here. A couple of wonderful photos from Fleabilly a.k.a Ray Lewis of me in London. Don’t ask about the mask. It was just lying …
New BMW 'Say No' Ad
Whilst writing that story about You Tube I spied BMW’s new “So No To Compromise” ad and website. It’s a US ad and is aimed at giving BMW …
Finland in Euro Monster Rock Shock
Once again I ‘accidentally’ ended up watching the Eurovision Song Contest. No really, I was reading and had the TV on in the background. Anyway, …
New theme
It’s about time I had a new theme I felt. Noodling around with themes is a great way to fritter away real working time. As usual I haven’t had time …
The Real World
Ever noticed that the usual world map you see in atlases doesn’t really reflect the land-mass of the countries (the Northern Hemisphere countries are …
Launching the Omnium Creative Network
I am very pleased to announce the launch of the Omnium Creative Network (OCN), which is what I will be spending quite a bit of my time on from now on. The OCN …
Being honest about your company
It pays to be honest, even when it’s all going wrong. A while ago I bought the very useful application, Spamfire after I went on holiday and came back to …
Perceived value in creative industries
I’m embroiled in an interesting debate about the perception of value of creativity versus (in this case) lawyers over at Greg’s Blog. I won’t …
Jenna Jameson in new Adidas spot by Tronic
New from Tronic Studio is an Adidas viral spot starring porn star adult entertainer, Jenna Jameson. From Vivian at Tronic: Jenna Jameson flexes her muscles as …
Some thoughts about life as a creative individual
This is a piece I wrote and read out in a lecture a couple of years ago, just before I left my teaching job to move back to Germany. Lots of students have often …
Ray Lewis in Village Voice
Nice to see photographer par excellence, Ray Lewis, featured in New York magazine, Village Voice. The article examines the bike clubs of NYC. Ray and Rachel …
Digital media discussion after the horse has bolted
Anyone would think owning a TV station was a good idea. The Australian’s Mark Day wrote a couple of insightful articles today about Senator Helen …
My 'Time Sketches' on display at the Powerhouse Museum
I’m very pleased to announce that two of my interactive works are currently on display at the Powerhouse Museum thanks to the wonderful people over at the …
More viral beer ads
Not that the advertising world is totally lacking in originality or anything (ahem), but following on from the success of Carlton & United Breweries’ …
Me in Suffolk care of Fleabilly
Suffolk Originally uploaded by fleabilly. A wonderful, weird shot of me taking a photo at my parents’ place in Suffolk thanks to the ever-brilliant Ray …
Our VW Polo for sale!
I don’t normally use my blog for my daily personal stuff as I try to stick to the themes of play, online culture, technology and writing. But we’re …
Last.fm - a replacement for Pandora (already)?
Not long ago I wrote about Pandora the service that allows you to find music similar to your own tastes. It trawls through the Music Genome Project database to …
Less Work, More Play - presentation at Neue-Digitale
I’ve just had a very enjoyable afternoon at Neue-Digitale in Frankfurt interviewing co-founder, Olaf Czeschner, for Desktop but also giving a presentation …
'Birds' - the new clip from Pleix
Paris-based collective, Pleix have just finished their new clip called Birds for Vitalic. The clip features extreme slow-motion footage of dogs jumping and …
Google Earth now for Mac
If you are a (the) regular reader of Playpen you’ll know of my fascination for Google Maps and Google Earth. Google Earth is a downloadable application …
WP 2.0 broken permalinks and 404 error
Ironically, the recent post I wrote about upgrading painlessly to [Wordpress 2.0](http://wordpress.org] had a broken permalink. This resulted in my trackback to …
Coldplay leave Mac users out in the cold
Arif over at Itch.in just posted the details of the DRM from Coldplay’s new album. Basically it looks like it won’t play in the following: MP3 …
Subscribe to Playpen with e-mail
If you’re fed up with visiting my site (boo hoo!) but still enjoy the content (yay!) then you can now subscribe via e-mail. Click on this link here or …
Playpen upgraded to Wordpress 2.0
Playpen has now been upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 largely without pain. In fact, without any pain at all, although I was particularly careful to back-up everything …
Wordpress 2.0 released
So, Wordpress 2.0 or “Duke” has been released. It now has a WYSIWYG Editing system using AJAX thanks to TinyMCE and a whole host new integrated …
Tried Pandora? Now try Tunatic.
I recently posted about Pandora, the online tool that looks for music that is similar to a track or artist name you enter. It’s great, by the way, and …
Kate Moss Interiors - vacuum those powders...
My COFA colleague, Simon Hunt, mailed me this very amusing pic today. He writes: Taken with my phone the other day, just off Elizabeth St in Surry Hills… …
Lost Pictures Found, Recoverd from Compact Flash
Like many idiots over the holidays I accidentally deleted a few pictures from my digital camera’s Compact Flash card. I was walking around repeatedly …
Christmas Zeitgeist news from Google
Gotta love Google. They’ve posted their 2005 Zeitgeist report noting our search trends around the world. The top Google News searches of 2005 are …
3D Graffiti
One of my (most brilliant) ex-students, Gaby, just sent me this link from a friend of hers in France who does graffiti. It’s a bullet-time style version …
New Omnium site - an online haven of collaboration
My friends and colleagues on the Omnium project have just launched their shiny new site. It is the outcome of over six years of work and research and they have …
Snaps for my students
Nice to see one of my students, Tim Rudder getting some interest on Tween for the music clip, Alicia, he’s just finished for his final year project with …
Adolf. Not a popular name after 1940s.
We were looking around at the popularity of names the other night and amusingly stumbled across this graph. What’s weird is the change of heart around …
Finally moved to WordPress
Okay, I’ve finally moved Playpen over to WordPress (hence the default-ish) theme (see footer for credits) for now. I have set up Alex King’s mt-wp …
Where Old Media Go To Die
Take a trip down Memorex Lane with Cassette Jam ‘05. I remember these Teac cassettes well. I thought they were the word in their day. Thanks to Toby for …
Food, Fabrica, Cameron
I just stumbled across the Fabrica blogs mainly due to the link to the old antirom photo that I blogged the other day. Then, of course, I found Andy …
More scary historical photographs
I also found this photo in the Videobrasil archives. Rather scary in places and we all look so fresh-faced. Check out the nerdy bloke with glasses sitting at …
Antirom at Videobrasil
I just got mailed by Videobrasil to say they have put together a database of all of their festivals. It was a very pleasant trip down memory lane to see the …
High Speed Photography of Balloon Popping
Amazing high speed photography images of people popping balloons at Make Magazine’s session at Foo Camp 05. It’s incredible how much of the …
Guitar Shred Show
I have just idled away far too much time playing with the Guitar Shred Show. Very amusing animation, nicely woven into a story and the most rockingly rock …
Creative Waves
I’m taking part in another online education project called Creative Waves - a collaboration between Icograda and the Omnium Project run by my friend and …
Where and how to donate to Tsunami victims
Anders Jacobsen has laid down the challenge that he’ll give $1 per trackback to his post of all the aid agencies. Seems like a good idea to me. So here …
Tsunami in Indian Ocean puts life in perspective
There’s nothing like a natural disaster to put things in perspective. When I heard about the earthquake and tsunamis I reacted in the way most people …
Off to India
I’m off to India for about ten days, so no blogging for me. I’ll be steering clear of Internet cafés too! Photos when I return. (This one from the …
Dog with flowers
] Saw this dog on some steps the other day. It looked like it was wearing flowers in its hair and posing. I couldn’t resist a photo.
Boring 3D far from boring.
I’ve just been checking out Jimmy Maidens’s Boring 3D website which is far from boring and has some beautiful 3D “cartoons” I suppose …
Playpen renamed and rebuilt
I’ve just re-built the entire blog with MovableType now instead of Blogger and renamed it Playpen, which I felt was more apt and less pretentious than …
Amazon goes back in time
I just ordered and had an album delivered to my God-daughter via Amazon.co.uk. Everything went fine, as it usually does, but check out the order status - they …
The iMac G5, a simple wow.
Jeez Jonathan Ive and his team are amazing. The new G5 iMac is simply rocking. Nothing more to say until I get my hands on one. In the promo movie, Ive talks …
Have fun with nuclear reactors
I just received this invite: Saturday, 21 August 2004 10:30am to 4pm New Illawarra Road, Lucas Heights Have fun and learn about the fascinating world of …
In the air and enjoying the Sky Bed
Finally in the air and enjoying the Sky Bed in the business class upgrade with Singapore Airlines after an incredible amount of hassle. The upgrade came through …
Turkey Bombing
Can’t say I’m too happy about the bombing in Turkey just on the eve of making my way over there. I’m sure it will be okay, I spent enough time …
Well this is finally up,
Well this is finally up, on the eve of heading off to Germany and Turkey for a break and the 2004 Design and Emotion conference. I’ll try and post a few …
Mobile Spam
This is an article that I wrote a while back for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia. The original link and title is Protecting the extension of …