Perk up your Photoshop with MakePhotoshopFaster.com
It’s not the most advanced advice, but it just might be the most useful.
Personas is a fascinating art piece that takes a name and ‘scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data’.
Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important – if not more important – than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant – for now. Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.
So go ahead; give it your name and give it a shot.
[Personas]
The Eternal Moonwalk is a user generated, endlessly looping tribute to the late, great Michael Jackson.
Users from all around the world have submitted moonwalk videos, and the site stitches them all together and allows you to add your own sound effects as MJ wannabes dance across your screen.
Unfortunately, as proven by the videos, there can only be one Michael Jackson.
Mark Malkoff likes to live in places. Weird places. Corporate sponsored places.
Recently, he spent 30 days flying around on Air Tran flights to highlight their new in-flight wi-fi. During those 30 days, he transferred planes on the tarmac and wasn’t aloud to even enter an airport. He also set the Guinness Book of World Records for most scheduled flights in one month with 135.
Of course he had to keep himself entertained, so he took on a variety of challenges including this one:
Past experiences that Mark has taken on include spending 30 days inside of an IKEA, and visiting 171 Starbucks in a single day.
PopScopic is an interesting mashup that uses augmented reality to enhance your shopping experience.
On PopScopic, you can print out three symbols that are linked to the top ten lists for music, movies and games. Then, just fire up your webcam and put one of those symbols in front of it, and you’ll see the cover art from the top ten list projected in front of you. You can tilt the paper to change selections, and then just tap on the $ sign to visit a page where you can buy that item.
It’s not a world changing experience by any means, but it is a peak into the future of shopping, and it’s fun and easy to play around with, so check it out!
The Uniform Project is a campaign to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation (a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India) in which Sheena Matheiken will wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion.
Though she’s wearing one dress, there are seven identical copies of it so that she can have a clean one each day of the week, and each day, Sheena will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies.
[Via: Kottke]
PixelCase’s Aerial Virtual Tour of New York is an amazing look at the Big Apple from above thanks to the combined photography of Oleg Gaponyuk and Andrei Zubets.
Once inside the panorama you can look around and zoom in and out, and when viewed in fullscreen, it reminds me a lot of the intro scene from The Dark Knight that was shot in IMAX, including the slight knot you’ll get in your stomach if you’re at all afraid of heights.
[Aerial Virtual Tour Of New York]
Joobili is an interesting idea in travel: You tell them when you want to go, and they’ll tell you where.
The service keeps an active database of unique and fun events that are going on around the world, and then matches the dates you have available to the things you can go do/see. From there, you’re just a few clicks away from booking your trip and embarking on the semi-unplanned adventure of a lifetime.
[Joobili]
[Via: Zoomdoggle]
ExplosionsAndBoobs.com has a simple promise: Every time you load their website, it will give you a new picture of an explosion, and a new picture of boobs.
That’s it; just TNT and ta-tas, mushroom clouds and melons, and the occasional pair of bombs and breasts.
[Via: Geekologie]
It’s no speed demon, but when the Google Street View car was snapping shots of the roads around Laguna Seca, it also managed to grab some track time with a few of the ALMS race cars, including the Corvette C6.R, the Flying Lizard Porsche GT3 RSR, the Lola B08/86 Mazda, the Acura ARX-01b and the Audi R10 TDI.
[Google Street View - Laguna Seca]
[Via: Jalopnik]
Avid Liongoren is a man on a mission that doesn’t have an end: On his site, called Project 365, he creates daily illustrations that he then shares with the world.
The first year was sketchbook doodles, then monsters of the city, then a comic book of his life, and now, he’s drawing daily monsters that will haunt your dreams.
Check it out to follow along as he progresses through the project, and maybe it’ll inspire you to start a project of your own.
[Via: Drawn!]
The Box Doodle Project is a fantastic collection of boxes that have been artistically rearranged to make figures and objects.
The idea is to make the most with the least, and I’d say that the entries that have been submitted so far have definitely achieved that goal!
Plus, if you’d like to make your own Box Doodle, there’s also a Box Doodle Tool that allows you to design your own online and then screenshot it and send it in.
If you liked PostSecret, then you’ll want to check out IGotAnEnvelope, as it follows a similar formula.
IGotAnEnvelope is a continuous art project where people leave empty self-addressed stamped envelopes in public places to be picked up and filled by others, who then send them back.
To participate:
- Write the following message on a small sheet of paper:
Dear finder, put something personal inside the envelope and then return it to me. Be as original and artistic as possible and the content of the envelope will be submitted to igotanenvelope.com.
- Attach the sheet (with a paper clip) to the envelope.
- Write your address and put a valid stamp on the envelope.
- Leave the envelope in a public place and wait for its return.
Then:
Take a close-up picture of the content, or scan it, and email it at igotanenvelope@gmail.com (be sure to indicate where you left your envelope).
You can also check out the IGotAnEnvelope site for photos of the envelopes that have been returned so far, and there are some really fantastic results, so I recommend giving it a look.
[Via: Josh Spear]
Is This Your Luggage is a unique site in which the site owner goes to airport luggage auctions, buys lost luggage, photographs it, and then posts the photos online; turning them into a sort of biographical autopsy.
His hope is to find the original owners of some of the luggage and reunite the two, though for now, it just serves to satisfy the world’s weird voyeuristic passions.
So, is it yours?
Mr. Strings is an imaginative ad campaign for Cheestrings in which you create your own character and then explore a fictional world to find four hidden clues and unlock the mysteries contained within.
When Ken Block’s Gymkhana video debuted, it took the blogging world by storm, and now he’s dedicated an entire site to the Gymkhana Project, which hopefully means there’s more on the way.
For now, the site includes a bit of merchandise, the history behind the project, a gallery, downloads, and a bonus cut of the video, though hopefully more is on the way, so keep an eye out for future updates.
[Gymkhana]
If you think that “scans of sandwiches for education and delight” doesn’t sound like a deliciously good time, then you obviously haven’t been to Scanwiches.
The website itself is run by Jon Chonko, a thehappycorp global designer, and to make the images, he takes sandwiches from the lunch shops around NYC, cuts them in half, scans the results, and then adds the image along with a written description of the ingredients to the Tumblr account.
If you’re getting ready to visit the site, I have one warning for you: Don’t visit the site on an empty stomach, because monitors don’t like to be licked.
Believe it or not, Playboy has put 53 of their classic issues online for FREE for you to browse through.
The site uses Bondi’s new web viewer, so the whole experience is rather fluid, and the available magazines span the range from classic to current, so you can see how Playboy has changed over the years.
Moleskine has just unleashed a new website on the world, and in addition to their ever growing catalog of legendary notebooks, Moleskine has also introduced the ability to print out your life in the Moleskin format so that you can easily add content to your Moleskine notebook from a variety of sources.
For now, the site’s pretty empty, but with the new features that they’ve added in, the Moleskine community should be growing in no time, and before you know it, Moleskine’s own site will serve as the hub for notebook based creativity around the world.
Alltop is the “online magazine rack” of the web, and with Alltop’s recently announced MyAlltop, you can easily create a custom Alltop page that aggregates the subscriptions from all of your favorite blogs and websites into one area.
To build your page, just pick and choose from a variety of sites across numerous topics, order them how you’d like, and then publish the finished product for others to share as well.
You can even view the collections of various internet celebrities for a look into the sites that they’re reading on a daily basis.
Want to check out the list that I put together? Just visit: http://my.alltop.com/CoryOBrien
[MyAlltop]
