Paul Smith and A List Apart, the venerable interactive design publication, have a fantastic article discussing open source online mapping tools. In projects involving maps and related information I often wish for more control over the visual interface than what Google Maps provides. It’s nice to see some alternatives exist.

- Harrison, Erika.  “Roulettes in Spherical Geometry.”

These antique machines are absolutely stunning in their complexity, patina, and operation. The engineering involved in creating such a tool is mind boggling. Most are directly hand or foot powered with a gear reduction system similar to what milling and lathe equipment still use today.

After seeing the video below, I almost want to move to France for a year and ghost some old watch makers.

This afternoon I received an e-mail notification that the PCB for color swim‘s programmable video switcher has just been shipped. I put this design together a couple weeks ago, and if all goes well, it’ll be our first draft for an ongoing electronics/video project.

Radius from rAndom International on Vimeo.

I’m a sucker for light and color based installations. I find work that combines digital processing with physical and spatial qualities to be captivating. rAndom International’s Radius installation is a great example of this. Although the lighting is derived from fixed rods saturated with LEDs that are processed and sequenced through software, the visual strength lies within the spacing and arrangement of each light against a white background. The physical throw of each light creates a gradient, and together patterns, that produces a visually rich display. If Dan Flavin was still alive he might be creating work that was similar to this.

In a current project I decided to use mostly surface mount components to cut down on the PCB size and have a cleaner looking circuit board. While specifying SMD parts from data sheets I needed a quick visual reference. Although the image does not contain the majority of packages I found it helpful in being able to determine whether I could hand-solder these tiny bits.