Today I went to buy some lights for our Xmas tree and came back with a Philips LivingColors, a beautiful lamp with high-power LEDs which combine to produce any color in the spectrum, controlled wirelessly with an Apple-style remote. Here’s our 60-second video review.

The first thing I saw was that, with a $215 price in Europe (which probably will be less when it reaches the United States next year,) it better had better psychedelic effects than LSD. However, while it may seem expensive at first sight, the LivingColors’s price is absolutely reasonable, given its design, wireless remote controls and it’s lifespan coupled with the very-low energy consumption: it has a 100,000-hour lifespan thanks to the use of LEDs and consumes a lot less than comparable incandescent lights, which obviously can’t produce the same kind of lighting (in addition, it’s not hot to the touch. It’s so cool that kids can touch it and probably lick it without risks.)

Philips Living Colors

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In other words, after all my playing with it, the LivingColors lamp is absolutely worth it if you are into lights (which obviously we are), with amazing controls, elegant design (the metal interior inside the clear bubble is fantastic) and awesome hues. If you are looking for an ambient light to your home or office, I highly recommend it. [Gizmodo Spain]

TAKEN FROM gizmodo.com

Part experimentation, part product design, all ironic and wickedly funny, “Off” is the latest from electrical-engineer-turned-designer Scott Amron’s Die Electric. We featured a handful of his other projects designed to cut back on energy use here, and think that the borderline subversive, tongue-in-cheek approach to mindful electricity consumption is great. Off is pretty much what it looks like: a fully-functioning, combination light switch/hook, and therein lies the dilemma. Do you hang up your jacket or turn on the light? — you can’t do both, and nobody likes a wrinkled jacket. Love it. ::Die Electric via ::Core77

TAKEN FROM www.treehugger.com

TAKEN FROM www.architectureweek.com

In 1996, the Internet Archive began archiving the web for a service called the Wayback Machine. They’ve now archived 55 billion web pages. That’s enough web pages that if you were to print them all out using your roommate’s printer while he was at class and tape them end-to-end, you could reach the moon and back 28 trillion times.

I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.

In their defense, the technology was different in 1996. Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs. Additionally, very few web designers had even the most rudimentary of aesthetic sensibilities, and nearly half of them were clinically retarded. The internet in 1996 looks like it had been created in its entirety by a panel of 13-year-olds with Geocities accounts who had about half an hour to spare each night before bedtime.

To prove my case, I took some screenshots after cordially adjusting my monitor resolution to 1024*768. I tried 1996’s recommended 800*600, but at that resolution a single word took up my entire field of vision. If you would like to visit these archived websites yourself, please click on the screenshots. In some cases you can then navigate parts of the website exactly as one would have in 1996, but do not do this. There is nothing interesting to find and you would do well to avoid prolonged exposure to this heinous baby of an internet. In fact, I can’t in good conscience even recommend you read this article.

McDonalds.com

This is the front page of McDonald’s, or as the company is more commonly known, “Your Dalmatian Location.” There’s not much of a point to this page other than to ask one very salient question: Did you know … more than 11 miles of thread holds the giant Arch Deluxe burger in place. (The web designer was unable to locate the question mark key.) No indication is given as to what a “giant Arch Deluxe burger” is, but it sounds pretty appetizing as long as you pick around all the thread. I am sort of disappointed they didn’t reveal exactly how many miles of ground-up Dalmatians were used to make this delicious treat, or ask a question I knew the answer to, such as one about how many inches of pubic hair are used to make a Big Mac sandwich (two inches).

This is page 2 of McDonald’s. Here we have the rare opportunity to read McDonald’s fine print, but if for some reason that doesn’t fascinate you there are a few other options. You may 1) Look at the (extremely shitty) drawing featuring seven retarded children pressing their face up against the window in an apparent attempt to escape McDonald’s, or 2) Decide whether you want to “enter the website” as a Grown-up or a Child. You mean to tell me we still haven’t actually entered the website? You realize that in 1996 each of these pages would have taken twenty minutes to load? Where is the actual website? Is there an actual website?

I clicked on both the Adult and Kids entrances, but they inexplicably led me to the exact same place, which is to another shitty drawing. By this time it was pretty obvious that I was being dicked around.

NyTimes.com

Web design in 1996 is very easy–you just format a page however you want and say, “Please open your window to the width of this line of text.” No, don’t worry what type of monitor your visitors have. They won’t be seeing any awkward white space so long as they manually line up their windows to a specified line of text like the little jackasses they are. If they’re so intent on preening around with their own specialty window size they can go make their own goddamned website. Looking for a professional web design agency or to improve your search engine rankings? Check out Teknicks, the leading SEO agency and Interactive web firm.

Accounting for disparate visitors is far too big a headache when you’re working with such complex variables as JPEGs, fonts, and hyperlinks. That’s why most websites from this time will also recommend which browser, operating system, and monitor resolution you use. Unless your settings are exactly the same as the web designer’s, you might as well go fuck yourself.

BestBuy.com

You’ll notice a few things about Bestbuy.com. The first thing is that although Best Buy has cornered the market on computers, their website looks like complete ass. The second is that they, too, are obsessed with Dalmatians, going so far as to include an “101 Dalmatians Holiday Savings Coupon Book.” Sounds pretty good, but not good enough to reward Best Buy with the annual “Your Dalmatian Location” trophy. The last thing you will notice about this website is that there is a pig on the left who is giving us a gift. When I actually visited the website, he was animated: he pulled out the gift from behind his back and then presented it to me, as if I was supposed to know who the fuck he was and why I had made his gift list. Next time I’m in 1996 remind me to never visit Bestbuy.com.

WhiteCastle.com

The highlight of this website is their “delicious time saving turkey stuffing recipe featuring….you guessed it! Slyders!!!!!!!” Wow, I didn’t guess that at all. What the hell is a Slyder? What I can guess is that if you would ever consider making your Thanksgiving stuffing out of White Castle food, you probably didn’t have access to the internet in 1996. In fact, chances are pretty good that you don’t have internet access now and that you are in fact a hobo.

Pepsi.com

Oh God. Oh dear God in heaven no. Your first instinct will be to repeatedly jab a pinecone in your eyes, but please try to understand Pepsi’s mindset. First, they were almost definitely drunk. Secondly, they knew that the internet was in some way related to computers, so the idea was to make their website very evocative of a computer. I’m not convinced they understood what a computer was, but when they closed their eyes and thought about computers, this monstrosity is what popped into their drunken heads.

First you have a background which looks like a piece of graph paper after it has been used to smash up a family of frogs. On top of this is a sort of three-dimensional computer terminal, as if the fact that you’re using an actual computer to view the website isn’t quite “computery” enough. In the center of this is something called “Pepsi World,” which has just exploded. All of these elements combine to give me a kind of headache that is very small but will never go away.

The only part of this website that I liked is the what’s new page. You can tell Pepsi knows what is new just by looking at their cutting-edge “what’s new” logo:

 

Clorox.com

You might be confused why I checked out Clorox.com, since such a website has no reason existing now let alone in 1996. It’s because there was a jug of Clorox in the corner of my eye while I was finding websites for this article. But it turns out that Clorox.com is a great website. If you were ever curious as to what the internet would have looked like had it been around in 1953, this is it. You’d have a funny little mascot whose body is whatever cockamamie product you’re selling, you’d have a few innocuous links for investors, and then you’d pretty much be done. And that concludes the only review of Clorox’s 1996 website that will ever be written in the history of time by any person in the world.

CocaCola.com

What font is this? Who are we kidding here, Coke? You’re not cool, you’re a big joke and everybody hates your website. I read the text and was amazed that Coke has the audacity to mock its old 19th-century slogans. The irony here is that “Drink Coca-Cola” is a compelling, understated motto, yet this very website advertisement is an affected, pandering display of inanity. They should really delete the entire thing and just include the sentence “Drink Coca-Cola!” in 12-point font because there is no value to CocaCola.com in 1996 or 2006, and to me their soft drink is the same shit Pepsi sells but in a different can and the only way to drink either is to mix them with rum so that you can forget for a moment that all you’re drinking is high-fructose corn syrup and water, and that every can of Coke you purchase merely encourages Coca-Cola’s shit-eating advertising agency.

Nick.com

 

As best as I can gather, the premise for Nickelodeon’s website is that Natalie is moving across the country and is feeling mighty gloomy, so she decides to set up the world’s first video podcast. Right, Natalie. Just tell me one thing: How in the hell are you going to put on a web show, from the back of a car, in 1997? And why exactly is it going to take three months for your family to move across the country? And isn’t it probably true that Natalie was conceived in the same backseat 13 years ago? Where’s that show, Nickelodeon? Why won’t you talk about that show?

Lego.com

There is very little I can say to rebuke this website. This is the best website I’ve ever seen. I navigated further into the world of Lego.com ‘96 and on every single page I was greeted by pirates waving swords, knights riding horses, and overarchingly wizards on bicycles. This page alone has three wizards on bicycles lined up in a very majestic fashion, with an additional bonus wizard on a bicycle in the upper-right corner. In 1996, while most companies were still figuring out how to properly scan their company logo so that it didn’t look like a joke, Lego had discovered the key to web design, which is that randomly strewing little Lego men around one’s website is hilarious and engaging. If you feel like you need to cleanse your palette after seeing all the other websites featured in this article, please enjoy the following line of Lego men:

                                               

From Left to Right: Wizard on Bicycle, Wizard on Bicycle,
Wizard on Bicycle, Wizard on Bicycle, Wizard on Bicycle

TAKEN FROM digg.com

View Ran Yaniv Hartstein’s map

 

Taken in a place with no name (See more photos or videos here)

Kevin Mitnick’s business card is a break-out lock picking kit. Photo taken by ProzacOD.

Shameless unrelated plug: RANH50 - coupon code for 50$ off at DreamHost web hosting.

If you arrived through Digg or StumbleUpon, welcome! Feel free to have a look at my latest photos, my personal favorites, or my sets. This is my profile.

This photo was Dugg (with about 7.5K diggs), and Stumbled, and I wrote about the whole thing on my blog (in Hebrew). As of January 26th, 2008, it has upwards of 320,000 views, and about 450 people marked it as favorite.

TAKEN FROM www.flickr.com

Timing is everything, particularly in the case of amazing photography. Sometimes that means waiting through a whole sports game and getting lucky to catch just the right shot. Other times than means trudging through nature for weeks to get the perfect environmental photograph. Here are 25 examples of perfectly timed images from around the world and in various genres.

With extreme sports it is the danger and challenge that tends to excite people. Often the most amazing and bizarre images are taken right at the moment when disaster strikes. Sometimes these are tragic and painful though some are just plain funny.

With conventional sports there is always the opportunity for comedy but also the potential for artful photography. The spray of sand during a long-jump or that moment before the splash when someone is diving both provide a moment of calm in a fast-paced sport that is normally impossible to see.

In war it is often hard to find or revel in humor or traditional beauty. Instead, it is often the images that capture grave or impressive moments in time that stir us most deeply. This can come in the form of a rocket frozen in space or the geometry of a cloud of smoke from a tank.

With people comedy tends to be the rule and other things the exception. Humans tend to be at their most interesting when they are at their funniest. Whether this means a young man falling into a fountain or an old woman riding a sled, it’s worth keeping your eyes open in public places for the perfect shot!

Nature images truly span the spectrum of artistic possibility. Sometimes animals are funny, sometimes scary, often tragic and sometimes downright strange. Whether they be shot in a conventional park or bedroom or taken deep in the wilds, environmental images taken at just the right time can provide unique insights into nature and the relationship of humans and animals.

TAKEN FROM www.sawse.com

Welcome Digg and Reddit users!

We love vertical farms and while they may not be as practical as green roofs, the idea of food being grown right in the city doesn’t get any more local than this. New York magazine asked four architects to dream up proposals for a lot on Canal Street and Work AC came up with this. “We thought we’d bring the farm back to the city and stretch it vertically,” says Work AC co-principal Dan Wood. “We are interested in urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles [food travels],” adds his co-principal (and wife) Amale Andraos. Underneath is what appears to be a farmers market, selling what grows above. Artists would be commissioned to design the columns that hold it up and define the space under: “We show a Brancusi, but it could be anyone,” says Wood. ::New York Magazine

Keep reading for more vertical farms covered in Treehugger.

It is a “Center for Urban Agriculture,” a building, located on a .72-acre site, that includes fields for growing vegetables and grains, greenhouses, rooftop gardens and even a chicken farm.” Mithun Architects’ Vertical Farm for Seattle

We present Gordon Graff’s Sky Farm proposed for downtown Toronto’s theatre district. It’s got 58 floors, 2.7 million square feet of floor area and 8 million square feet of growing area. It can produce as much as a thousand acre farm, feeding 35 thousand people per year and providing tomatoes to throw at the latest dud at the Princess of Wales Theatre to the east, and olives for the Club District to the north. ::Sky Farm Proposed for Downtown Toronto

“Cities already have the density and infrastructure needed to support vertical farms, and super-green skyscrapers could supply not just food but energy, creating a truly self-sustaining environment.” Imagine an urban highrise CSA where we just walk across the street from our highrise to the next to pick our dinner. ::Futurama Farming in New York

“Robots tend crops that grow on floating platforms around a sea city of the future. Water from the ocean would evaporate, rise to the base of the platforms (leaving the salt behind), and feed the crops.”:: Wayback Machine 1984: The Future of Agriculture

Daekwon Park designed this prefab system: “Clipping onto the exterior of existing buildings, a series of prefabricated modules serving different functions would be stacked on top of each other, adding a layer of green space for gardening, wind turbines or social uses to make new green façades and infrastructures.” ::Retrofitting our Skyscrapers For Food and Power

::Weburbanist has great coverage of Pierre Sartoux of Atelier SOA’s vertical farm.”r. A light-shading skin wraps around the structure and opens to admit sunlight at particular locations for various functional (and aesthetic) purposes. The building’s air, heating and cooling systems are wind-driven and circulate oxygen and carbon dioxide between growing and living spaces. The simple but reinforced structure is designed to handle additional dead loads from the weight of growing floors and also serve to make the entire building more durable (and thus sustainable).” ““Urban Design Proposals for 3D City Farms: Sustainable, Ecological and Agricultural Skyscrapers

TreeHugger Background on ::Vertical Farming – The Future of Agriculture? Mike wrote: I’m more excited about this concept as a way to help us stop the use of pesticides, herbicides, oil-based fertilizers, and to give a break to a lot of land that we have been stressing for decades than as an extra food source. Another advantage: the food would grow quite a bit closer to the consumers, something that will become more important as oil prices keep rising and transportation on long distances becomes a luxury (no more kiwis from New-Zealand in Canada during the winter).

TAKEN FROM /www.treehugger.com

Spider-Pig! Spider-Pig! He’s made of folders, Spider-Pig is! Can you make him into bacon? No you can’t! He’s foldspider pig! Lookout! Here comes Spider-Pig! Today a reader sent us an ad illustration made out of Finder folders and document icons, which gave me an excuse for two things: 1) organize a desktop clutter art contest for Mac and PC users, and 2) get out my head the song that I’ve been humming all morning. Full high definition Spider-Pig “illustration” and instructions about how to do it right after the jump.

Full resolution Spider-Pig desktop

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As I’ve discovered after making Homer and Spider-Pig, these things are not easy. Follow these steps to make one.

1. Clean up your desktop.
2. Get an empty folder (or a set of folders in different colors,) document icons, or whatever other thing is around your desktop. Don’t get big documents, as you will need to duplicate them to create your image.
3. Third, deactivate automatic snap-to-grid in the view desktop options in Windows or Mac OS X.
4. Optionally, load an image in the background to “trace.”
5. Start placing your folders/icons/whatever, always on a row and rendering the subject matter from top to bottom to ensure that no text from the icons on the top rows overlaps the icons on the bottom rows.

Please send your illustration to tips@gizmodo.com.

TAKEN FROM gizmodo.com

One of the most fantastic things about building a suite of tools around a community, instead of the other way around, is that users are always willing to pitch in and help out others with tutorials and forum assistance. It’s our plan to build our applications with a very deep set of community tools, built around forums, wiki-documentation, chat, user-made tutorials and sharable workspaces.

Aviary super star Meowza has already begun paving the way with more than a dozen “photo-phixing” tutorials for other users of Phoenix. Got a specific question on how to make a technique in Phoenix? Ask and ye shall receive.

Unzipping a Kitty

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Chocolatizing a Statue

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Cyborg Frog

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Smoking Woman

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Alien Overlords

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Correct Shadow Perspective

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Aging a Photograph

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Making a Snow Storm

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Popping Elements with Dodge and Burn

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Aging a Boy (or How we Faked Dodo)

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Genetic Cross-Breeding

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

How to Precision Select Custom Shapes

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Another tutorial on the same topic

Masking fur by Ziaphra

View the full tutorial | Full layered file

Using Blend Modes; Having Fun with Liquify and Mating Celebrities

TAKEN FROM a.viary.com

How Starbucks is using a special brown logo to evoke the chain’s beginnings and restore some goodwill for the brand

The new old logo: Starbucks is temporarily using a sanitized version of its original branding on new packaging.

Brown is certainly a color that communicates coffee. So, when you order a cup of the new Pike Place coffee at Starbucks (SBUX) this week, it doesn’t seem out of place to see a special brown logo on the cup and paper sleeve. Except that, as everyone knows, Starbucks’ iconic logo is green. So why change such a successful corporate symbol?

The image of the twin-tailed mermaid inside the brown medallion harkens back to the chain’s 1971 beginnings. The logo has evolved over the years, going from brown to green in 1987. This is the second time in three years Starbucks has trotted out the brown mermaid, inspired by a Norse woodcut. Back in 2006, she was resurrected to mark the chain’s 35th anniversary. This time, she is a messenger for Chairman Howard Schultz, who is trying to restore some of the goodwill and warm feelings for the brand that have gone by the wayside because of increasing coffee prices, machine-made lattes, and bad press.

Starbucks plans to use the logo on all its cups for about eight weeks. It will remain in ads and as the logo for Pike Place bags of coffee. The new blend, which will be available in every store, has been crafted for a smoother, cleaner finish than many of the rotating blends Starbucks has traditionally carried week to week. This was done to combat the chief criticism of the company’s coffee by reviewers, including Consumer Reports, that it tastes “burned.”

“Nostalgia Effort”

“Now that Howard Schultz is back at the helm, this is definitely a nostalgia effort and a strong push to get back to the core values of the company,” says Rob Giampietro of New York design firm Giampietro + Smith, referring to the reintroduction of an old icon. The tagline below the cup’s sleeve reads: “Roasting coffee since 1971.” Starbucks spokesperson Bridget Baker says, “It’s a good time to celebrate our heritage.”

Giampietro compares the move with those of baseball teams that have their players don throwback uniforms. The retro nods are meant to enliven the mood of patrons who, even while enjoying a visit to the ballpark, may resent paying $100 or more for a family of three to see a nine-inning game. “Old logos can engender a brand’s story and history, and spark or rekindle an emotional bond,” says independent Los Angeles-based marketing consultant Dennis Keene.

Tapping a logo change to convey a corporate strategy is not a fresh idea. In 2000, then-Ford CEO Jacques Nasser took the Ford Blue Oval logo off the headquarters building in Dearborn, Mich., and replaced it with a script rendering of “The Ford Motor Co.” that was also used in corporate advertising. The move was meant to convey that Ford (F) was not just blue-oval Ford products, but also Jaguars, Volvos, Land Rovers, and the myriad of other outfits Nasser was buying to diversify the company’s interests. After Bill Ford took over as CEO in 2001, he embarked on a strategy meant to take Ford “back to the basics.” He directed that the blue-oval Ford brand logo be rehung on the company’s building to convey that the brand was the one that would carry the corporation back to health. Ford has continued to struggle financially, but under a new CEO, Alan Mulally, the company has embarked on a worldwide reemphasis of the Ford blue-oval brand. In the meantime, it has sold Jaguar, Land Rover, and Aston Martin. “The move was done so no one inside the company, especially, would have any doubt about what brand will lead our recovery,” says Bill Ford, now chairman.

Giving Up Green?

Is there a danger that, by rolling out the old logo once again, Starbucks might overplay the authenticity card? “There is never a danger in reminding your employees or your customers of your authenticity as long as you also keep moving forward in new, surprising ways that are relevant to people,” says Brian Collins, principal of the New York-based strategic branding firm Collins:. “When it’s done right—and consistently—it can be the smartest way to market an established brand.”

It’s unlikely that Starbucks would ever consider going brown for good. The color is muddy and almost makes the cup look like it came from another company altogether. “As a color it’s so much less distinguished than the green, and the green conveys both a friendlier and more upscale image,” says Giampietro. “And it’s so Italian!” he adds, referring to Starbucks’ inspiration for the color, the Italian flag.

But Starbucks’ throwback logo is fodder for the bloggers: They’re poking fun at Schultz’s accommodation of conservative coffee drinkers. In the original logo, the twin-tailed Greek mermaid showed her navel and bare breasts. In 2006, when the logo was originally revived, the chain received complaints about the “decency” of the logo and, despite the chairman’s well-known liberal politics, the lady grew long hair to cover her indecency. That’s the version we have today. Italians would never have given in—or complained in the first place.

TAKEN FROM www.businessweek.com