Really neat hanging solution. Love it!

[toda](http://designsponge.blogspot.com/2005/05/toda.html): "






[![DSC02030](http://photos9.flickr.com/14366826_b6a468784f.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/91491847@N00/14366826/)






i like creative storage and hanging solutions and so...i like [toda](http://www.notchdesign.com/toda/animation.htm)."






(Via [design*sponge](http://designsponge.blogspot.com).)

Quartz Composer Programming Guide: Introduction to Quartz Composer Programming Guide: "Introduction to Quartz Composer Programming Guide

Note: This

document was previously titled _Visual Computing With Quartz

Composer_.

Quartz Composer is a development tool provided with Mac OS

X v10.4 for processing and rendering graphical data. You should

read this document if you are a developer who wants to:

• Experiment

with the latest Mac OS X graphics technologies
Get an orientation to the Quartz Composer development environment Create compositions that process graphical content without

writing a single line of code
* Learn how to use a composition programmatically—from within

a Cocoa application

• Get tips for using Quartz Composer effectively
  "

The project looks interesting, but to me the nicest thing about this is the diagram! I absolutely love diagrams like this!

Loopcity, our repeated use of space: "One can often sum up the ‘Social architecture’ - the spatial / temporal organisation of everyday life- to: people do the same things at the same time, living in ‘loops’.

loopcity is a subjective description of the city as a set of repeating actions and events. ‘A space composed of closed loops, intersecting each other. Each loop is a thematic entity, a story: a stroll through the shelves of a local supermarket. Looking for a free place in a parking lot. A tourists guide round through a district. A hotel maid’s morning round.

loopcity‘s concept of space is topological and relativistic - the lengths of each strand don’t have to correspond to its accurate metric length in real space. They can be scaled by its temporal length or by the amount of information contained within.'

Contributions are welcome!

Author: Dietmar Offenhuber. His works are part of Randonnee (A Walk Through 21st Century Landscaping) which analyzes the margins of actual possibility of landscape through new media. June 16-18, Sonar Festival, Barcelona.

"

(Via we make money not art.)

PoE (Power over Ethernet) How To - NYCwireless: "A number of Access Point manufacturers (Lucent, Symbol)

are now offering Power over Ethernet add-on's for their Access Points.

A PoE module inserts DC voltage into the unused wires in a standard

ethernet cable (pairs 7-8 and 4-5). The idea is to supply the AP's

power and UTP ethernet connectivity requirements via a single ethernet

cable. This works great in areas where you may not have power and/or

ethernet easily accessible, like a roof. This also allows you to more

easily place the AP closer to the antenna, thus reducing signal loss

over antenna cabling. Ethernet signal travels well over CAT 5 cable;

2.4ghz signal doesn't do as well over antenna cabling. Also ethernet

cabling is much cheaper than antenna (LMR-400) cabling. There are

currently two types of PoE adapters: a module jack or hub-like device

for multiple access points. The following hack creates a simple PoE

module pair."

A few technologies I have come across that seem an obvious match for doing ubicomp (tdf) etc.

1. SOFTswitch Electronic Fabrics - About: “SOFTswitch makes fabrics touch sensitive and interactive. Imagine a roll-up QWERTY keyboard, a jacket that interfaces with your mobile phone, a television remote control sewn into the arm of a sofa or light switches embedded in curtains and carpets.”

2. Luminex - idea -: “LUMINEX is a new fabric (nonreflective) that can emit its own light. It is created with threads of every type and nature that emits light in different colors”

3. Sensitive Object - Extending interactivity to everyday life environnement.: "The Sensitive Object solutions enable extended interactivity with almost all objects of our everyday life environment, by a simple finger-touch contact! Indeed this new process makes it possible to develop interactivity with any type of object whatever the material or the form. The great flexibility of the solutions (only one sensor is needed) allows a wide range of applications in particular in house automation, interactive commercial windows shops, animation of public places, education, leisure and the artistic field. "

4. GPS and Director MX: "The primary hardware piece is a GPS receiver.

GPSy is a software interface for a variety of GPS receivers including Garmin. GPSy is AppleScriptable, meaningthat the data it captures can be passed through AppleScript to other applications,such as Director MX."

Bubble House for sale: "Inspired by Finnish architect Antti Lovag (see his own Palais Bulles) in the mid 70's, the Bubble House with its an indoor river, bubble kernel and cactus garden is for sale.

Lovag invented the bubble-house concept in the 1970s when he noted that primitive dwellings, such as caves and igloos, better reflected the way humans move (which is maybe correct but i lived in a ‘bubble’ house once and it was a chore to find ‘bubble’ furniture to fit there).

The Bubble House current owner, Daniel Bord, fell in love with Lovag‘s creations, took himself off to a week-long bubble-house-building course at Lovag’s workshop near Nice, came back in Festes-et-Saint-Andre, in south-west France and started work.

There are some 20 bubble houses in France, the price of this one is set at €2,440,000 ($3,000,000).

Via BookofJoe. See also The Telegraph.

"

(Via we make money not art.)

SmarterChild: "SmarterChild is an interactive agent built by Conversagent, Inc. Interactive agents are software applications, often called ‘bots,’ that interact with users on Instant Messaging or other text messaging services. You can ‘chat’ with an interactive agent, whether on the web, over IM, or on a wireless device, the same way you talk to any other contact. To talk with SmarterChild, just send him a message saying 'hi!'"

Just saw these and thought they were pretty funky looking!

Materialise, well known in the industry for its STL correction software Magics, now has a line of lights produced using SLA machines called MGX. The rapid prototyping process allows designers to produce complex geometries such as spheres within spheres with a push of a button.

Grow is an ingenious concept by Samuel Cabot Cochran from Pratt Institute. The modular panel system consists of solar panels and piezo-electric crystals, capturing energy produced by wind and light. The panel's are rented or leased to maintain control over its life cycle.

Yorgos architectural glass art

Omni directional suspended speakers by NACsound

"

(Via Future Feeder.)

A few neat javascript/css techniques, posted here as much for my records as anything else; but someone may be interested!!

1. domCollapse: "domCollapse allows you to collapse and expand parts of page by activating other parts of a page.

To define a element that expands or collapses others add the class trigger to it as an attribute. This will automatically collapse the next following element in the document tree and add the functionality to alternately collapse and expand it.

The collapsing and expanding is achieved by adding and removing classes from the elements. This means you do not need to know any Javascript to make domCollapse behave differently."

1. Drag & Drop Sortable Lists with JavaScript and CSS: "In Web applications I've seen numerous - and personally implemented a few - ways to rearrange items in a list. All of those were indirect interactions typically involving something like up/down arrows next

to each item. The most heinous require server roundtrips for each modification…boo. Then I came across Simon Cozens' example of rearranging a list via drag & drop. I was so inspired I had to try it out myself."

1. Showing and Hiding a DIV using CSS and Javascript: "A while back I came across some websites that had sections of the webpage in a div that could be hidden and shown by the click of a link. I set out out on my own to learn how this worked and this is what I discovered.

There are many situations encountered when designing a webpage where showing and hiding a div using a link is useful. For example, if you were making a blog you might want to have a form at the bottom of each entry that allows users to add a comment to your blog entry. It is not necessary to show this form all the time because not all users will want to comment on your entry. You could have a link that says ‘Add a comment’ and when that is clicked it will display a div containing that form."

1. resizable textareas: "he trick is that with the wz_dragdrop.js script, we make the enclosing div resizable and then make the textarea‘s size relative to the enclosing div. this is far easier than trying to capture the keyboard and mouse events directly from the textarea. user’s don't really have to click on the resizer graphic to resize things; anywhere within the div will work. but the graphic gives them a nice clear target."

2. HoverHelp: “Small script to easily display hover tool tips. You can attach a popup to anything by simply giving it a class of ‘hasHelp’ and an id. Then adding the help text to a blockquote and giving that a class of ‘helpContents’ and an id of ‘xxxHelp’ where xxx is the id of the element it's related to.”

3. [brothercake] Docking boxes (dbx): “Docking boxes (dbx) adds animated drag ‘n’ drop, snap-to-grid, and show/hide-contents functionality to any group of elements. And … in what might be another world-first for brothercake - dbx is fully accessible to the keyboard as well as the mouse, an action I‘ve dubbed press ’n' move ”

4. JavaScript-enhanced image replacement | clagnut/blog: "JavaScript-enhanced image replacement posted 12th May 2005.

Most image replacement (IR) techniques work by displaying a background image of text and shifting the real text out of view. This is fine unless you have images turned off, in which case you will see neither the graphical text nor the real text.

So the requirement is to disable the IR if images are turned off. This can be accomplished by a short piece of unobtrusive JavaScript supplementing existing IR techniques"

TOOOOO Good! Microsoft instant messaging VIA iChat! Won't go into the how, this is just a heads-up - it can do it; and it works AOK!