portland-based photographer jim golden delivers a hearty dose of nostalgia in his series ‘relics of technology’, comprising animated gifs and still life images. geometrically placed in a palette of vintage tones, the documented objects are society’s ‘technological’ media devices from the past, brought to life in a collection of moving images
See all the images: jim golden animates vintage devices for relics of technology | designboom
As our primary computing environment gradually shifts from the desktop to mobile, so too will our interface needs. To that end, a group engineers in Mountain View, Calif. believe that they have the solution for the next phase of interfaces, and it comes in the form of a ring.
The Nod ring is a Bluetooth-enabled gesture controller that connects to your smartphone to accomplish a number of input and controller tasks all by using natural motions with your finger.
In addition extending the capabilities of your smartphone, the ring can also be connected to other smart devices, such as a smart television and other Internet-connected devices like the Nest. If a device doesn’t have Bluetooth capability, you can connect the ring to your smartphone, which will then connect to the device via Wi-Fi. Read more: Nod Bluetooth Ring Controls All Your Smart Devices | Mashable
Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, collected the provocative questions top designers, tech innovators, and entrepreneurs ask themselves to spark creativity. Read more: Find Your Passion With These 8 Thought-Provoking Questions | Co.Design
See also: Scared Of Failing? Ask Yourself These 6 Fear-Killing Questions | Co.Design
The Getty Research Institute has just added more than 77,000 high-resolution images to the Open Content Program from two of its most often-used collections.
The largest part of the new open content release—more than 72,000 photographs—comes from the collection Foto Arte Minore: Max Hutzel photographs of art and architecture in Italy. Foto Arte Minore represents the life’s work of photographer and scholar Max Hutzel (1911–1988), who photographed the art and architecture of Italy for 30 years. In recent years, the interdisciplinary use of these photographs has exposed their historiographic significance and their unrealized research potential.
Read more: 77,000 Images of Tapestries and Italian Monuments Join the Open Content Program | The Getty Iris.
Digitizing the Vatican’s 40 million pages of library archives will take 50 experts, five scanners and many, many years before the process comes to a close.
The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 and has around 82,000 manuscripts, some of which date back about 1,800 years. It will work in tandem with NTT Data, a Japanese IT firm, to convert the first batch of 3,000 manuscripts. It is expected to take four years to digitize the initial round, though some of those documents will be online toward the end of 2014.
via This is How the Vatican Will Digitize Millions of its Documents | Mashable
The good news? Coldplay fans can read the lyrics to the band’s new album before it hits stores. The bad news? They’ll have to find them, first.
The band announced today (April 28) they will hide handwritten lyric sheets of Ghost Stories from frontman Chris Martin in nine libraries across the world, creating a scavenger hunt for fans to discover.
Clues to each sheet’s location will be dispensed on Coldplay’s Twitter account. Once a page is found, a photo of it will be uploaded for others to see.
Additionally, one of the envelopes containing the lyrics also includes a ticket for a free trip to London to see the band’s July 1 performance at the Royal Albert Hall.
via Coldplay Announces Lyrics Scavenger Hunt in Libraries Worldwide | Radio.com
Back in the mid-1980s, Andy Warhol made a series of digital artworks on an Amiga 1000, a personal computer created by Commodore International. The artist, tapped by the company to be a spokesperson for the computer’s multimedia capabilities, created a few public pieces as part of a marketing campaign, but it was unknown if he had made any digital artworks on his own time.
Decades later, we now know he did. Stashed away on dozens of unlabeled floppy disks was a treasure trove of never-before-seen Warhol works that were slowly deteriorating. A multi-year, collaborative effort between a team of artists, museum professionals and the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club unearthed 28 works of art and a host of 1980s graphics software that Warhol used to create these digital pieces. Read more: An Amazing Discovery: Andy Warhol’s Groundbreaking Computer Art | Design | WIRED.
Building on the success of its existing job search and job training programs, the Queens Library recently began testing a new touch-screen job search kiosk at its central branch in Jamaica, Queens. The kiosk is driven by Apploi, a mobile app launched in April 2013 by recruitment software and services provider Innovate CV, and is fully funded and serviced by InnovateCV subsidiary Jobs4Five. Queens Library patrons can create a “passport” profile with essential resume information; search for job openings using a variety of filters including location, company, industry, posting date, keywords, or job titles; and record video responses to questions provided by specific employers, which are then included as part of their application. The kiosks can also be used for real-time video interviews.
Applicants and employers “don’t have to wait a week or two weeks for an interview” after submitting an application. “They can do it right then and there,” explained Joanne King, director of communications for Queens Library.
Read more: Queens Library Tests Job Application Kiosk with Real-Time Video | The Digital Shift.
McGill University’s new 3D printer could produce 2000 copies of the same object before you’d finally spot them without a microscope.
If you thought the tech industry had a strange habit of miniaturizing everything, know that the print industry is now fully capable of catching up in that department. Canadian researchers at McGill University recently put a new microscopic 3D printer through its paces by producing a 0.011 by 0.014 millimeter National Geographic Kids cover, along with a map of Canada measured in micrometers. Obviously these images are impossible to view normally and could only be seen with the aid of a screen projecter. In fact, the magazine printout is so miniscule that if you made 2000 copies, you’d have just enough to cover a single grain of salt.
Read more: 3D Printer Creates Magazine Cover Smaller Than A Grain of Salt | The Escapist.
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