Cool Hunting
Whether the standard wallpaper options (picture of your pet, swirly thing) bore you or you just like having a global perspective, Earthdesk takes your desktop to the next level by making it into a constantly updated view of the earth. The app uses geographical and time zone stats to create a customizable, info-rich image.
The most striking part, of course, is that Earthdesk provides a visual of time passing, with accurate shading delineating night, twilight and daytime. It also (seemingly almost magically) shows real clouds, light emitted by cities and moonlight (which can be adjusted to show more or less city light). Other customization options include political and natural views, as well as the ability to lock the map to a city, the sun or the moon to get a different perspective. We don't say it a lot around CH, but this one is truly awe-inspiring.
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Pulse is a live visualization project by Berlin-based artist Markus Kison. It's based around a shapeshifting, heart-like object that reacts to the emotions expressed by the authors of private weblogs on blogger.com. A program aggregates words in blogs' text and scans for synonyms that correlate with the emotional concepts in Robert Plutchik's three-dimensional circumplex model describing the psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. The more one...
One problem that comes with the internet's high level of data fluidity is how to keep your most private information private. Black Box Innovations attempts to ameliorate the issue with the Tâke Personal Pocket Safe. What appears to be an average flash drive is loaded with unique software to help organize all of your personal records. It includes fields for everything from your credit...
by Russ Lowe Boone Speed is his real name. Whether the Portland, OR-based photographer's brand of photography is the result of natural-born talent or sheer determination, his aesthetic likely has something to do with his father, Grant Speed. Known for his sculptures depicting Western life, the senior Speed split his West Texas home at the tender age of 12 to ride bulls and earn a...
"I Want You To Want Me," an interactive piece on the subject of online dating and relationships by perennial CH fave Jonathan Harris and his collaborator Sep Kamvar, and one of the standouts commissioned for MoMA's recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit, is the subject of this m ss ng p eces produced video. For anyone who missed the show at MoMA, the short...
The World Clock Project is a website that displays the current time (in your time zone) using photos of clocks shot around the globe. They're always looking for more shots to fill the empty time-slots and anyone can contribute images (preferably) of public clocks. Submit either using Flickr or email (methods described below). The brainchild of Shawn Liu and Danny Wen, two New York-based...
For issue 72, Colors, the global and socially conscious magazine, has gone without, well, colors. Why? "There are 40 million blind people in the world. Colors devotes a black-white-issue issue to them." For a demographic that doesn't usually get to enjoy magazines, this first colorless Colors includes inspiring first person stories from blind people and a four-language CD with audio of the entire issue...
