Posts by Scott

Awesome collection of covers from Totodo.jp, a Japanese vintage bookstore. I want the CITIES one just to scan it and blow it up on my wall. I can hear Alex’s bank account emptying.

Via Junkyard.Dogs

A novel concept and beautiful exterior make Martin Skelly’s Playlist Player vinyl emulation system a certified object of desire. The device — which plays back digital files in an apparently Serrato-like manner — attempts to simulate the classic ritual of the vinyl LP.

“There are two parts to the design: the player, and the record box containing five different coloured covers. Once the playlists are chosen and synced to the player with a memory stick, the user customises the outside of the sleeve with artwork of their choice. It could be photos of a memorable night or person or typed and hand drawn tracklists. Once the record is placed on the player, the music begins and the outer ring of lights illuminates. As the playlists plays rings of light visible through the translucent record move towards the centre of the disc, like a needle tracking on a record. These lights represent time and not the number of tracks, meaning your music must be enjoyed from start to finish with no distractions like the temptation to skip tracks, fast forward or rewind.”

Seeing people designing experiences like this is always nice, but it does illuminate the rather unsettling fact that the album format is dying. People are consuming media in ever smaller chunks and the LP experience is no longer the norm. I think this is a huge loss and an unfortunate consequence of the on-demand nature of the internet.

Although I grew up listening to 8-track, vinyl, cassette tapes, and then CDs — all of which tended to be enjoyed in album format more often than not — I must admit that I jump around a lot when consuming MP3s. I have recently begun rebuilding my music collection in lossless FLAC though and this has encouraged me to listen to more music as whole albums. If Skelly’s Playlist Player supports FLAC or WAV it might make the experience that much more enjoyable.

Just a quick reminder I’ll be speaking at FITC Toronto today. The talk starts at 2:30pm in Toronto 1 room at the Hilton. Hope to see some of you out there!

More information

Found these beautiful B&W images of the 1969 Mercedes C111 that I posted last month. These might just be big enough to make some prints out of (click for high res)

More images here

I know I’m always taunting you Mac users about your lack of 64-bit (I develop primarily on Windows 7 but have a few Macs for various purposes, mostly live shows). But now that CS5 is here you are free to bask in the unadulterated glory of full memory allocation that us Windows users have been enjoying since CS4. John Nack has put together some benchmark numbers that should give you a rough idea of the performance gains you can expect. As Nack points out though, these gains will only be seen by people working with larger files, tasks like web design won’t benefit much. You can check out the numbers here: Photoshop CS5 64-bit Benchmarked

On a side note, my overall experience with 64-bit has been favorable in the graphics realm, but for music I use a 32-bit installation. For music production there isn’t much of a benefit from 64-bit unless you’re doing a lot of sampling, it’s mostly about CPU and disk speed for recording and effects. The DAW software I use to record — Cakewalk Sonar 8.5.3 — still isn’t as stable as I’d like it to be when bridging 32-bit VSTs (many of my favorite VSTs have not been ported to 64-bit native yet) so I’m sticking with 32 for the production of this latest album I’m working on.

I met Christopher and Edward from The Silent Giants at a show a while back where they gave me this beautiful The National poster along with a couple even beautiful-er hand-screened business cards. Being firmly planted in the digital world, I’m always fascinated by artists going the traditional route. The Giants are all about screen printing and their work is oozing with hands-on goodness. I especially like their packaging work.

Check out their portfolio and blog for more (the blog is highly recommended for some nice process shots)

Found a few nice examples of gas company brochures/maps on Kaizen Verdant’s Flickr. Reminds me of one of my favorite’s, the Shell Nature Lovers’ Atlas (second one down).

See Related: Oil Company Ephemera

I love bikes. I almost love how a beautiful bicycle looks more than riding one, but not quite. In San Francisco we have a pretty solid bike culture so you get to see some nice ones around the city now and then. But of course it’s nothing compared to Amsterdam where bikes run the city and they know how to build them right. Sure, there are a ton of junkers but the overall style and pragmatic design of most is something I really appreciate. Every time I go there I resolve to find a nice bike in the Dutch style when I get home but I can never seem to find anything.

That’s why I got really excited when I first saw Vanilla Bicycle’s site. These handcrafted bikes from Portland, OR (of course) are beautiful examples of classic design and everything I’d want out of a bike. Vanilla’s attention to detail and reverence for classic styling is breathtaking. So yeah, I’m really excited at this point.

Then I checked out the ordering page. THE WAIT FOR ONE IS FIVE YEARS. 5. Of course. And of course, any time you have to wait that long for something you can go ahead and multiply the number of years times 2000 and you’ll probably get close to the price (but actually, probably nowhere near it). Also, if they don’t list the price on the site, you can’t afford it. So that’s settled, I’ll never own, see, or be within a mile of a Vanilla Bicycle, but fortunately they’ve provided us with some beautiful photos of the bikes shot with a Canon 5D so we can dream a little. If they sold posters of these I’d buy all of them. The site is a bit confusing but just click around and you’ll start finding some galleries of various custom jobs they’ve done: Vanilla Bicycles Site

There’s also a short documentary on them here.

P.S. Is anyone else getting all nostalgic lately for the original 5D? It might be the first classic DSLR. I need to get one. In 25 years indie kids will probably be hanging out backstage at shows talking about their Canon 5D MK1 and how it “just has that feel that you can’t get with holographic, man…” Then you can start picking up Hasselblads cheap on eBay and the cycle begins anew.

Saw this set of Cintiq unboxing photos on Engadget today and even though the concept of documenting a retail product unboxing seems ridiculous, I couldn’t resist. Ever since I saw a Cintiq (a combination LCD display and tablet) on demo in Barcelona (OFFF) a few years back I’ve been wanting one. I’m not sure that it would benefit me that greatly but it would be fun to find out. Maybe not $1,999 (msrp) worth of fun, but definitely something I’d like to try.

The problem is that this kind of device relies on a mode of interaction few of us are very familiar with so it’s tough to make the leap without knowing if it will work for you. It’s not like you find these on demo anywhere; the only place I know of that stocks them in San Francisco is Calumet and they have them tucked away in some back corner, there’s not even a floor model out much less a working display last time I checked. I wish they had some sort of trial period but I suspect that would be a bad thing for me; I’m pretty convinced if I really spent some time with this thing I wouldn’t want to give it back. The only drawback I heard was poor color representation due to the touch surface over the screen, hopefully they’ve remedied that issue with this latest iteration.

Some questions: Anyone using one of these? Care to share your feelings? Everyone else: Are you planning on getting one? If not, would you use this if someone gave you one? How much cheaper would it have to be to make you consider it? Current Wacom users, does this seem like an improvement or would you rather stick with your regular tablet? Discuss in the comments

Link

You may have noticed that I’ve posted quite a bit on the subject of SSD drives over the past couple years. The speed this technology can afford has the potential to finally set us free as artists so that we can focus on our work and not beach balls and hourglasses. The main bottleneck of modern computers is the hard disk drive, which has inexplicably been frozen in time at speeds which have remained constant almost as long as I can remember. Remove this bottleneck and a whole new world opens up.

The problem with SSD so far is it’s failure to truly deliver on it’s promises of speed. Sure, 250MB/s is fast, but only marginally quicker than a standard HDD. So I was excited to see the announcement from OCZ that a new version of their Z-Drive, the “R2” is due out soon.

The original Z-Drive was somewhat of a disappointment but — at least from the specs on this one — they seem to have learned some lessons from that initial attempt. The new model sports an 8 way RAID 0 setup (basically like 8 SSD drives in RAID 0 on a hardware controller — beats the heck out of my setup) — and speeds around 1.4GB/s. In case you didn’t read that correctly: 1.4GB/s. Insane speeds. And that’s both ways, read and write.

Imagine having this thing set up as your Photoshop swap drive (or, as the Engadget article suggests, editing raw 1080p footage in real time). In PS, I’d imagine you could tear through 24×36″ @ 300dpi with hardly a delay. And at 2TB (the largest possibly configuration), the Z-Drive is truly massive for an SSD. You could fit your entire OS and your data on there for quick file open/saves. And with 1.4GB/s of overhead, I wouldn’t think twice about using the drive as my OS and swap at the same time.

Now for the price (which hasn’t been announced yet): expect ridiculous. The original model ranged from $1500-$2700 and I don’t see this one coming too far down from that. But for performance like this, you have to pay. And when you consider the potential cost of eight SSD drives totaling 2TB and a hardware RAID controller the Z-Drive starts to sound a bit more affordable.

OCZ Product page
Further reading at Engadget & Hot Hardware