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Art/Design/Music

December 20 to 31, 2005

This is a working graphic design of a computer, the first I've seen. Have there been other designs like this, either recently or in the ancient past? I envision a lot of interactive modern art in this genre...

The "gallery of computation" has gotten both larger and more varied over the last year or so. Great stuff!

Amazing full-color turn-of-the-century Russian photos...

Cutting-edge graffiti art by Mr. Totem...

Detailed, richly colored scientific photography...

Beautiful photos of Alaska by Norio Matsumoto...

The New York Times' 2004 year in pictures...

The greatest opening song lines...

The Black Keys make some great lo-fi blues rock. Some say they're better than the White Stripes...

Mash-ups, or combinations of songs, are going mainstream and making big bucks for some...

In a pioneering survey, most artists and musicians think that file sharing is not a threat...

The RIAA and MPAA are intentionally putting adware into Windows Media files to thwart file sharing...

April 25 to May 1, 2005

Feeling creative? Bring in some new blood...

Click the face...

A simple, well-designed game - Guess the Google!

Mathematicians turn an Escher drawing into a trippy interactive experience. Check out the movies...

The all-wood musical door/doorchime based on the African tongue drum. What a great concept!

Training wheels, rethought...

Photo Stitching

Beautifully photographed abandoned structures in Japan...

Why is the FBI plastering notices all over CDs, to the dismay of artists and consumers alike?

The beautiful long-lost music of Red Hash, circa 1973...

21st Century Music Videos

April 18 to 24, 2005

Rethinking The Everyday Things

The sandal-combination-bottle opener! Perfect to wear with the TV/DVD-combination-beer fridge mentioned last week...

The scratchophone, the portable scratching bongo drum...

3D street paintings...

An impressive photographic archive of mistakes. Check out "lost my job" and "women live longer"...

Another example of how people see only what they want (or are directed) to see - motion-induced blindness (and many other nifty optical illusions)...

April 11 to 17, 2005

A reader poll reveals the ugliest cars of 2005. I definitely agree with the top four...

Portraits of normal, everyday people by Naomi Harris...

Give your photos the comic treatment with Photoshop...

Interactive textiles are changing the shape and texture of electronic gadgets...

Here's the lightest, smallest portable sound system any world traveler could want...

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails made a song available in Apple's GarageBand format. This is likely the first time a musician has released the editable digital raw tracks to a song online. Let's see more of this!

April 4 to 10, 2005

The found footage festival consists of movies retrieved from trash bins all over the U.S. Check out the preview trailer!

The neo-psychedelic art of Shawn Wolfe...

The work of graphic spin-doctor Glenn Feron. In case you thought those media images reflected reality...

Art made via electromagnetic fields...

New artistic ways to compose music...

Another elegantly-designed kitchen timer...

622 music videos...

March 28 to April 3, 2005

The world's ugliest car, made in 1957, was restored from a pile of junk to a polished, functional car...

More wacky, unusual album covers...

Jared Tarbell's Gallery of Computation continues to get more beautiful and eerily biological at the same time...

Sin City is the first true movie/graphic novel hybrid. Here's a comic-to-screen comparison...

Here's a crab-cracking tool that's well-designed due to looking at the problem from a novel perspective...

Kits turn Subaru vans into VW microbus imitations and more...

A small visual poem of a lonely Japanese street singer (may be down)...

An interview with the most influential woman in rock, Patti Smith...

March 21 to 27, 2005

A compliment to last week's interview with Robert Crumb, an interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his wife...

The out-of-the-canvas artwork of Paul Critchley...

Transparent screens - I want something that changes with the amount of ambient light...

A lot of people commented this week on Tom Waits' top 20 albums of all time, a great list worth hearing. Why isn't there an iTunes Music Store playlist of this stuff?

U.S. music sales rise, despite massive amounts of file sharing action on the net...

March 14 to 20, 2005

Take a break to read the underrated poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, "the German language's greatest poet of the 20th century". His unique style of writing translates exceptionally well...

Cropless circles, made on sand...

Beautiful aquatic creatures made from hubcaps...

Shiny handmade aluminum guitars...

Latte art...

Use this magnetic paint to make any surface sensitive to magnetism. No idea if it's eco-friendly though...

Peep surgery - this one's a classic, still funny, and just in time for Easter...

The Flickr postcard browser...

Merge 50 photos of any given topic, and you get artful atmospheric pictures of concepts...

This photographer is doing a booming business capturing 144 megapixel photos - they're so sharp that a picture of an entire building can be used to inspect cracks...

Some artists are slicing up billboards, recombining them into new images...

March 7 to 13, 2005

There's lots of great interface ideas and art in the Flash Film Festival finalists...

Drawn! A new groovy blog about "illustration, art, cartooning and drawing"...

The Colored Pencil Society of America's 2004 award winners...

Giant Steps - a great animated visualization of John Coltrane's classic jazz number...

An imaginative new Adidas commercial explores the world of dreamtime...

The video jigsaw puzzle. Let's see more of these!

Colorful photos of beetles and moths...

101 Zen stories...

"I don't see / the point of Haiku / in English" - the first(?) haiku poetry slam...

Book Art

The Flickr guide to the planet - beautiful photos from around the world, via Gridskipper...

The world's thinnest building, with a very colorful history...

The bottomless coffee table...

Historic video clips from the 1960's...

Listen to Dr. Demento shows online...

For the first time, a music festival has released its entire live content online - 2.6GB worth!

It's likely that Axl Rose's next album, which has been in the works for 10 years at a cost of over $13 million, is the most expensive album ever made...

New Order's new music posters beam music, art, and ringtones to nearby cell phones...

The blogosphere's raving about 27 year-old Maya Arulpragasam, daughter of a Sri Lankan revolutionary, who's mixing terrorist themes with pop art and music and causing an stir among critics as well as the international dance scene. Is this subversive art for the 21st century, or just a reflection of the times?

February 28 to March 6, 2005

Big art projects pay off - The Gates generated $254 million in economy activity, with 4 million visitors...

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery...

The online rerelease of the acclaimed animated short "Balance"...

Ancient computer ads. 32KB RAM, wow!

One of the better online color scheme generators I've seen...

Hm, I like this free font browser. Fast, WYSIWYG, and to the point, unlike many free font sites...

Fliker, an interesting image browsing interface...

More on the DJammer, the "next-generation electric guitar"...

Smithsonian Global Sound, their new online music store offering the Smithsonian's world music collection...

February 21 to 27, 2005

The cool trailer for the new movie based on the Philip K. Dick novel "A Scanner Darkly". In nine years, everything you do will be recorded...

Canada's Oscar-winning animated short film "Ryan"...

This quality photoshop contest shows real life, cubed...

A Londoner's house is full of wall-to-wall collections...

This design concept shows a great way to recycle water bottles...

The elegant Eva Solo magnetic (kitchen) timer...

How to build a beautiful 136 foot-high ice wall. A picture...

Bored? Try pixel art, using Post-Its for pixels...

Stuff For Web Developers

Turns out Google Maps isn't that new. Here's its predecessor, an amazing zooming map of Switzerland...

It isn't perfect, but I like the clean, no-frills information design of Metacritic...

The first Grammy winner in the Best Hawaiian Music Album category, "Slack Key Guitar Volume 2", hit number one on Billboard's World Music chart and number two on the New Age chart. If you buy it, keep in mind that it nowhere near represents the best in Hawaiian slack key guitar music...

February 14 to 20, 2005

Central Park's Gates - here are QuickTime VR panoramas...

The Grafik Dynamo assembles random words and images from the Web into strangely compelling and surreal comic strips...

Intricate snow sculptures from the International Snow Championships 2005...

A trippy 3D kaleidoscope...

Funny finger artistry. Select "GB" and then "videos"...

This is not new, but I must have forgotten to mention it here last year - the elegantly designed Toro(tm) tissue ring!

Lots of retro album cover designs here at the Mod Pop Punk archives...

Jazz composer Maric Schneider is likely the first artist ever to win a Grammy for an album that was solely distributed on the Web...

February 7 to 13, 2005

View all of the 2005 Super Bowl ads here, including the rejected and/or censored ones...

A new digital animation technique - making people dance in a robotic pop-lock style. Here's an amazing remix of Gene Kelly in "Singing In The Rain"...

Reality Is Subjective

The super-cool baby name wizard. How popular has a name been over time?

The mushroom version of the Game of Life. Let's see more visualizations that take time into account...

This surreal 1980's Estonian TV commercial for minced chicken meat has been making the rounds...

Recording an album? Here's how to make an inexpensive yet powerful music studio out of your Mac mini...

Writing a screenplay? Here's why movies go bad, written by an industry insider - too many writers!

Designing product packaging? Here are professional competitive analyses in a number of categories...

A transcript of Gene Simmon's very funny interview with Terry Gross on NPR, which was replayed last week...

Lawrence Lessig writes on why Wilco represents the future of music...

January 31 to February 6, 2005

Art must survive to nourish the spirit. Here's blast wall art in Baghdad...

Brian Dear wrote a funny review of a Laurie Anderson concert he went to recently, in the form of a Laurie Anderson monologue...

Modern artists remix thrift store art...

Yet even more bad album covers - here's a top ten list...

The McNipple, from artist Casey Weldon...

Cool little animated movies from sheepfilms...

Fantasy coffins in Ghana...

Music band fonts...

A film about Nomi, the strange yet influential bleeding-edge 80's artist...

Turn your Mac into a streaming music station with Nicecast...

January 24 to 30, 2005

The Pack 'n' Chair, a foldable chair/backpack/cooler...

Photography by Misty Keasler: Japanese love hotels, deep East Texas, Russian orphanages, holy places, and Guatemala city dump...

Here's how to make your own Life Poster with iPhoto...

Generate, print, and cut your own 12-sided calendar...

The 2005 Lunar Wheel calendar...

This Target ad is a clever look into how design shapes our culture and environment...

About the production of Richard Linklater's new movie

Here are the best images from recent sunspot activity, from January 15 to 21...

Bembo's Zoo, which makes animals out of letters. The site is fun for kids and designers...

The top 100 soundtracks of all time...

January 17 to 23, 2005

License to sit - this art piece reflects on our ever-growing "culture by permission"...

The digested read - popular novels condensed to 100 words. It sure has saved me some time!

Learn Disco!

Images of dense Hong Kong living - reminds me of the Matrix...

Were Robert Johnson's recordings deliberately made faster? Slow his music by 20% to match actual guitar pitch and you get a whole new perspective on his amazing talents...

January 10 to 16, 2005

For geeks only-the makers of Mr. Potato Head have come up with "Darth Tater"...

The public domain USGS digital data image archives. Nice, quick stock imagery for all kinds of uses...

The detailed and pretty scientific art of Ernst Haeckel, 1899-1904...

A few months since its launch, allofmp3.com seems to be gaining credibility and customers. Tracks are one-tenth the cost of those in the iTunes music store and are offered in a variety of qualities and formats...

January 1 to 9, 2005

Dana Countryman's Virtual Museum of Unusual LP Cover Art!

Here's a selection of artful LP cover art, with thoughtful commentary...

The Museum of Food Anomalies. Ick.

The results of the second holiday champagne chair contest, in which designers made chairs using only the material from one champagne bottle...

Vintage turn-of-the-century postcard images of Tokyo...

Biojewelry - grow a ring from your own bone tissue...

Pitchfork's top 50 albums of 2004...

The StroboPick, perhaps the most accurate (and smallest) guitar tuner ever...

CD sales rose by 2.3% in the U.S. in 2004, yet pirated CD sales have hit a record high. So why is the RIAA still suing music downloaders instead of going after real pirates?

December 13 to 19, 2004

Real Artists Speak Out Against Mediocrity

The most hated advertising techniques on the Web - background music causes "visceral reactions" in people...

Punk rock flyers from 1982 to 1984...

The ten most accurately rated artists in rock music history...

A slice of life - 48 favorite (digital) photos...

Create your own mini office cubicle hell with the Cubes plastic figure set...

Clever design by necessity - prisoners' inventions...

Japanese death poems, from a classic Salon article...

Recording Academy members voting for the GRAMMY awards will now be able to listen to all nominated songs in the "Record of the Year" category via iTunes...

December 6 to 12, 2004

Beautiful photos of all the national parks in the U.S....

I'm intrigued by the clean design of this design magazine - it seems to be getting raves...

It's still a little early to call, but here are some pictures of the year, more worthy for their subjects than aesthetics...

The Eiffel Tower has a skating rink for the first time in 115 years...

Mark Morford details the long history of rock and roll selling out to corporate interests...

An essay on dysfunction in popular music. What did you expect from kids who were products of the highest divorce rates in history?

November 29 to December 5, 2004

The most influential piece of modern art. Much progress can be made when you don't take yourself seriously...

The zoom quilt - I've love to see this with lots more participants!

The anti-consumer revolution, in pictures...

This is great! The combination rug/laundry bag...

Artwork that comes with its own URL - the URL has become a work of art in itself...

The LED artwork of James Clar...

Exotic guitars...

An interactive surface with virtual squiggly worms you can "pick up". I've always wanted to open a bar where the entire floor is a virtual interactive koi pond myself...

November 22 to 28, 2004

Combine color and astrology - colorstrology!

The best micrographs of 2002, only nanometers wide...

Cool underground pictures of the massive G-Cans project in Tokyo...

Bill Dan, rock balancer...

Build your own gramophone with these Japanese kits - etch grooves on CDs and plastic cups and play them back...

An account of the rough security screening at movie theaters these days...

Reality Literature

November 15 to 21, 2004

Beautiful new holiday cards...

The coolest fractal art I've seen online...

The Man Behind the FedEx Logo

The latest design proposals for the latest high-tech Antarctica research station...

A bookstore arranged by book color...

The can octopus...

The band Wilco had so much success with giving away their first album online, they've done it with their second. Here's an enlightening interview...

Elvis Costello interviews Joni Mitchell...

November 8 to 14, 2004

Get your iBook painted - someone should do this locally...

A multimedia account of a trip to Tibet in April 2004...

An interesting interview with a man that has collected over 900,000 mp3 files online, for posterity's sake...

November 1 to 7, 2004

A photoessay on how "The Incredibles" was created...

Interactive 360-degree panoramas from around the world...

A cool new music video made with 1972 video synthesizer tech...

A time-lapse image of a lunar eclipse...

Interactive wallpaper is going commercial...

The sound shaker (movie)...

Brown Paper Tickets, a cheap alternative to Ticketmaster...

October 25 to 31, 2004

New autostitching algorithms make seamless panoramas a snap. Now will someone please make a Photoshop plug-in or simple OSX GUI for this?

Some cable companies now broadcast signals that prevent you from making copies of recordings...

A series of funny, thoughtful short films about people and technology...

A smiling stingray...

The great history of Sun Studio, the most influential recording studio ever...

A new singing contest in Korea has entrants auditioning using their cell phones. I hope entries are well-received...

The RIAA issues its first gold, platinum, and multiplatinum certifications for digitally downloaded music...

Billboard Magazine starts a new chart for top ringtones...

The rock band Marillion asked online fans to contribute money towards new albums - and has raised almost $1 million so far...

Publish your Creative Commons-licensed audio or video with this app and have it hosted automatically by the Internet Archive, which has massive amounts of bandwidth...

October 18 to 24, 2004

Contemporary Tibetan painting...

The photojournal of a modern geisha in Kyoto...

Flexible drinking straw creations...

A little animation of a drawing in progress...

"If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers..."

ASCAP seals a huge deal to "let stations legally stream their on-air content over the "Internet"...

October 11 to 17, 2004

Absolutely beautiful photography at File Magazine...

"The Sad Song"

"A Cunning Stunt"

For its 150th anniversary, Timex created a design competition for future timekeeping concepts. Here are the winners...

A design analysis of Kerry and Bush's campaign logos. I agree, the Kerry design looks wimpy and old school...

Wal-Mart is battling the biggest labels over CD prices. This is basically a lose-lose-lose-lose situation here... Wal-Mart drives the music industry, labels get squeezed, consumers get less choice, musicians make even less...

A good idea - lease satellite radio feeds and bring the public back into radio...

September 27 to October 3, 2004

Ever wanted to live on a houseboat? Here's some from Sausalito, CA, one of the best and oldest houseboat communities...

A beautiful contemporary mobile home...

Ooh, cool jellyfish lights...

Incredible photorealistic art made with Adobe Illustrator, complete with how-tos...

Computer-assisted streak photography...

Pioneering electronic art from Sweden, 1960 to 1980...

The latest, greatest singer/songwriters play the Hotel Cafe. Check out the CD!

Sarah McLachlan's video "World On Fire" breaks down the cost of making a music video vs. contributing to charities...

XM satellite radio seems to be taking off...

"Sony ditches copy-control CDs"...

September 20 to 26, 2004

The state-of-the-art in scientific visualization...

Art speakers...

Nifty two-story wind-powered walking sculptures...

Time-lapse road trip - LA to New York in five minutes...

"3 Myths About the Recording Industry Debunked"

A new business model for artists! Green Day sells blank recordable CD-Rs with album designs...

September 13 to 19, 2004

Hurricane Ivan from above...

"What the Bleep Do We Know?!"

Over 1,000 great (jazz) album covers...

Print-on-demand custom wallpaper...

Innovative recipe designs...

XM radio offers online streaming music...

September 5 to 12, 2004

Topical picture of the week...

More nifty pictures of the printed organic furniture mentioned last week...

The story of an architect who battled breast cancer to remake a minimalist home for $50,000...

Design Web sites? These eyetracking test results can help you make a more effective site...

Hip Japanese robot t-shirts...

The cool TRON-like environments of Stephen Hendee...

Lee Bontecou is one of my favorite artists - she pioneered works that addressed the connections between technology and nature, before H.R. Giger's time. Once the talk of the art world, she dropped out of sight for 30 years. Now she's back with an incredible retrospective. Have you seen this piece (at right) at the Academy of Arts? This photo was taken in 1963, when it was being made in NYC...

August 30 to September 5, 2004

"What is the face of this place?"

Do you like Jim Woodring's surreal comic Frank? Here's the first animated short based on same...

Cool watermelon carvings...

Watch the fascinating evolution of 100 years of Olympic poster design...

New anime films from the masters are coming...

The popular bottle opener fridge magnet...

3D printed furniture that mimics biological structures. A sign of unique 21st century design!

Put your DNA signature on a T-shirt...

For Web developers-ten CSS tricks you may not know...

"BMI posts record year, despite music industry doom and gloom"...

August 22 to 29, 2004

A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices

The groovy Web sites and photography of Sacha Dean Bryan...

Yay! "This Land Is Your Land" is actually in the public domain!

A Rolling Stone report on Clear Channel, which owns 70% of live events in the U.S....

Apple now offers songs in bulk via their volume discount program...

The hauntingly beautiful songwriting and sounds of Jolie Holland, ex-Be Good Tanyas member. Her demo album was lauded as among the best of 2003...

The White Stripes' guitarist Jack White teamed up with Loretta Lynn to launch what some are calling the best album of her career - and it may change the sound of modern country towards alternative and punk...

August 15 to 22, 2004

Cool monkey photos and great Web site design...

Art from 1920's Japanese children's books. Nice Web design here, too, despite tiny text...

Make your own mathematical fidget-toy from paper...

Forget Doom 3: Here's the state-of-the-art of video game graphics...

The smallest guitar amplifier...

Got a Mac, guitar, and a microphone? Here's the cables...

RIAA lawsuits causing agony, "unexpected twists"...

August 8 to 14, 2004

Lots of nifty rare retro watches...

The detailed pixel art of eboy...

This was popular last week - beautiful aerial photography...

In what may be a first, Warner Brothers encourages the distribution of online album tracks as part of a marketing campaign. Are they starting to get a clue?

The daily adventures of Mixerman are back, the true diaries of a top audio producer in LA. Get the inside story of how the industry works!

August 2 to 8, 2004

The Everyman Photo Contest - great amateur photography!

See how a family changes, via similar photos taken every year for 28 years...

Clubbo Music, a fabulously detailed and funny site about a nonexistant record label...

The African can guitar, made of old oil cans...

July 26 to August 1, 2004

A pilot creates a folding electric guitar...

An in-demand violin maker in Berkeley creates quality violins with 200-year old wood from Lake Superior. Also an acupuncturist, he sees the vibrational connections between his vocations...

This Land Is Apparently Not Your Land

How the RIAA shut down a respected, thriving music store due to the sale of popular DJ-made mixtapes...

July 19 to 25, 2004

Photo/video folks! Build your own bottlecap tripod...

Interesting comparisons between the latest digital SLRs and film scans...

Universities are giving in and paying an RIAA "tax" to avoid prosecution...

Canada's music industry is trying to bill dentists who play music in waiting rooms...

July 12 to 18, 2004

The popularity of the iPod is forcing makers of CD copyright-protection technology to switch formats...

What globetrotting Laurie Anderson is up to these days, NASA's first artist in residence...

Golden Apples of the Sun

Devendra Barnhart is a good example of this musical category...

The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra

According to European copyright law, Elvis' first big hit will enter the public domain in 2005, along with a lot of other still-selling music...

July 5 to 11, 2004

The Maui Xaphoon

Spider-Man 2, done with legos...

Abito

Sumo - a huge bed-sized pillow...

The incredible All Music Guide is getting a complete overhaul, really, really soon...

With this Mac application you can view the current top ten most purchased tracks from the iTunes Music Store in your menubar...

A new club in the UK invites people to play their iPod playlist for 15 minutes...

Steve Winwood's label "has seen a noticeable increase in record sales" thanks to putting a free track on file sharing networks...

June 28 to July 4, 2004

The evolution of fractal art. This is the next generation of fractal and mathematics- based design, folks...

This device allows you to swap out your car CD changer for an iPod and use it like a huge CD changer, with your existing controls...

The heartwarming story of independent, garage-based SomaFM, which broadcasts worldwide to 8,000 listeners a day...

A celebration of the 20th anniversary of Husker Du's revolutionary album "Zen Arcade"...

Radio 1 in the UK will now be broadcasting a chart of the top (legally) downloaded tracks...

June 21 to 27, 2004

Better than wallpaper - Blik!

Real-time file sharing music popularity results reside at BigChampagne - this blows SoundScan out of the water, or could if the RIAA doesn't sue everybody...

Now here's a secondary BigChampagne report that indicates that "artists receiving little or no radio play are still gaining very significant activity on file sharing networks". Meaning...

June 14 to 20, 2004

CD Origami

"Copy-blocked CD tops U.S. charts"

Independent music labels in Europe break negotiations with Apple over disagreements due to the length of their contract...

June 7 to 13, 2004

Groovy pictures of the transit of Venus...

A really nice page of digital photography composition tips...

Have you seen the live music archives at archive.org?

Where are the guitar heros of today? "Still searching for the next guitar hero"...

#8 - "Rock Lobster! Down! Down!"

The newest way in which labels pay to get songs played on radio - paid ads...

May 31 to June 6, 2004

Personal photos by the master Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky...

I recently saw Tarkovsky's 1983 movie "Nostalgia" - it is a masterpiece, but only for lovers of poetry, atmosphere, ideals, madness, and the sacred...

An article on Kyle Cooper, who's made the art-intensive opening and closing credits of such movies as Spiderman, Se7en, Sphere, Twister, and Mission: Impossible...

"L.A. To Oregon at Mach 9"

"Bad Hair Year"

"Breaking"

May 24 to 30, 2004

Beautiful photos from the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival, where it's below freezing over half the year...

I forget if I posted this before - the worst album covers, volume 2! My favorite is "HAPPINESS"...

The latest advances in animation as developed by the makers of Shrek 2...

"300 images from 1800 sites"

This site was down for a week or two due to popularity - it's better than the last "infinite spiral" picture I mentioned a month or so ago...

A unique habitat for your cat - the "scratching swirl"...

A new company helps traditional radio stations migrate to digital radio. A great idea, but receivers need to get cheaper...

The way the music died "What will it take for an artist to make it in the music business these days?" A Frontline special, view it online...

Computerless single mom gets busted by the RIAA, can't afford to settle...

Some of the hippest mp3 blogs out there. Mash-ups are really popular these days. The mp3 format actually got popular because of blogs like "Blex's Page of Good Mp3", seven years ago. I used to visit that site pretty often back in the day. Anyway, here's the cutting edge of (new and old) music. Here's the list...

May 17 to 23, 2004

The new Deck House (I want a Porch House)...

More pictures of the eco-prefab Glidehouse...

Seattle's new public library looks quirky outside but is astounding inside. May make you rethink the role of (public) architecture. And check out the great VR movies...

One of my favorite movies, THX-1138 (George Lucas' first film) is being rereleased on DVD. Hope he doesn't screw it up like he did Star Wars...

The beautiful abandoned island of Gukanjima...

Will the RIAA create artificial scarcity in the $3 billion cellphone ringtone market?

The New World Symphony uses Internet2 videoconferencing for orchestra training...

How iTunes sharing is creating music- based social networks in colleges...

Bought music from the iTunes Music Store? Here's the easiest tutorial I've found on how to remove the copy protection...

The entire Grateful Dead live music vaults are now online at the Internet Archive...

May 10 to 16, 2004

One of the coolest painting programs I've seen in years: Cosmic Painter! It's free and better than a Spirograph. (Sorry, for Mac OSX only)...

A nice aerial photo of a New York cab in winter. Also see Vincent LaForet's other aerial photos...

A wrought-iron covered VW bug...

Read the 2004 Hugo nominees online. My favorites - Vernor Vinge, Michael Swanwick, and Catherine Asara...

May 3 to 9, 2004

The Star Trek apartment...

The Volkswagen ball, from the Berkshire Botanical Garden. Sculpture by Lars-Erik Fisk...

Psychedelic Buddhistic art from Chalermchai Kositpipat, one of Thailand's most famous painters...

Funny lists from a publisher on sci-fi and horror plots that are submitted too often...

50 moments that helped shaped music history...

April 26 to May 2, 2004

Pictures of wacky Japanese vending machines...

Here's a cool (Mac and Windows) screensaver - an airplane window, with a moving aerial background...

A company records shows live and sells USB devices holding the recording after the concert...

An analysis of John Lennon's private jukebox provides a fascinating glimpse into his influences and musical rip-offs...

April 19 to 25, 2004

The winners of the 2004 "Lyttle Lytton" contest, for the worst opening line...

Some of the best entries in a Photoshop contest. Theme: merge two animals!

Here's two of the grooviest Flash-based movies I've seen in a while...

A new take on an old art form? Nifty homemade "lava light" movies...

If you listen to a CD I give you, will you be busted? As part of a nationwide crackdown, the FBI raided Deer Valley High School...

RIAA Radar has been around for a while now, but their tools are getting better - support non-RIAA labels and check out their top 100 lists - there's some great music here...

Technology has been developed that takes images of old, damaged vinyl records and produces restored music. Many ramifications for the historical preservation of recordings...

April 12 to 18, 2004

I've seen a lot of Web sites. This could be the worst-designed site ever made...

There's a lot of participatory art going on around the net these days. Here's the surreal result at the midpoint of one photoshop-fest...

A study shows that the most dangerous music to play while driving is "Ride of the Valkyries". Also, go light on the techno...

AT&T's new music identification service seems to work pretty well...

A scientist has been studying the sound of cells - they make noises and sound different when healthy or diseased...

The Pixies played together in public for the first time in about 12 years...

Some guy hooked up a music-generating apparatus controlled by six live hampsters. It's actually pleasant music...

March 29 to April 5, 2004

"Study: File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales"

Some bands find their fans are donating thousands to charities to make up for their file sharing...

March 22 to 28, 2004

"Citizen Kubrick"

Musician Kevin Shields created one of the most expensive, influential and highly praised albums of the last two decades - "Loveless". Here's his first interview in 12 years...

Banksy, who puts the "grr" back into graffiti - here's how to mix revolution with art...

"Music industry way off track with song and dance about falling sales"

Less is more A 3D art contest, made with code no bigger than 256 characters...

What you've always wanted to know: What happens to a gummi bear when soaked in water overnight?

March 15 to 21, 2004

Beautiful, free, colored 19th-century artwork of biological forms...

Incredible pencil carvings...

Apple sells 50 million songs over the Internet...

Some independent music stores are finding that "file sharing can help create a buzz online that can lead to more sales"...

March 8 to 14, 2004

Writing a screenplay? Here's a catalog of "narrative tropes and idioms". Learn about character archtypes such as the Anti Hero, the Evil Twin, and the Green Skinned Space Babe...

These fake tattoo sleeves look pretty cool - would be great for Halloween, parties, or fitting in at the local biker bar...

Topps' "Wacky Packages" (satirical stickers from the 1970s) are making a comeback, and will be updated for the 21st century...

The most comprehensive picture even taken from the Hubble Telescope was unveiled. It shows nearly 10,000 galaxies. They offer super-high resolution pictures, suitable for printing on large canvas at Kinko's and covering a wall...

Hit Song Science (HSS) analyses music for its "hit" potential, comparing a song's qualities to millions of others...

HSS claims to have already scored a hit on the charts with the single "Left Outside Alone" by Anastacia. I admit it's catchy...

Check out this video clip on HSS from NBC - it shows how musical desirableness is analyzed visually in a 2D graph of 2.5 million songs...

Elcodrive's debut album "Somewhere Between Now and Then" was enhanced with HSS technology. One critic says "Elcodrive has not put forth any newfangled ideas in their release, which translates into music that is uninteresting and hopelessly mundane." Another says "They write real choruses and melodies that are more than merely memorable... highly recommended." Who to believe?

A new sonic "construction set" has been released freely online which contains clips art and samples and breaks from the hip-hop artist Jay-Z. This allows people to create their own albums based on Jay-Z's work and could represent a new revenue stream for existing musicians...

George Michael will offer his songs freely online from now on, a music industry first for an established artist. Actually this is a great strategy for someone with an already popular back catalog...

February 16 to 22, 2004

Killing the Music: by Don Henley

Polaroid Warns Film Users Not to 'Shake It'

Some of the funniest, most creative uses of Photoshop I've seen in a long time...

February 9 to 15, 2004

(from Jan 3) Now that Oahu only has two art-house movie venues (with one whose fate is uncertain), will people be able to see movies like the ones below in the future? Or will we have to download them?

Pictures and information about Destino, the lost 50 year-old animated collaboration between Disney and Salvador Dali. It's been nominated for an Oscar...

Robot Stories

January 5 to 11, 2004

"You say you want a revolution? Iran bands rock on"

December 29 to January 4, 2004

Cool photos of Osaka, Japan. Seems a little crowded to me...

December 8 to 14, 2003

This Chinese video has been wildly popular this week: A great "new" way to fold your shirts (it's true, I learned too) the way professionals do in retail stores. You may be able to download it here (links for this are rare)...

The Second Coming of Nick Drake

A good interview showing his thoughts on the music industry: "The response I've been getting from real people is so much more enthusiastic than those people who just wanted to manage my career..."

Alexi has become popular on the strength of his self-made year-old 4-song album on cdbaby, two songs off which have already been featured on national TV shows. Many college/independent DJs and major labels now scour cdbaby regularly for new music by independent artists. When Alexi played to a festival of 7,000 last year, he was surprised that everyone knew the lyrics to his songs already - and he had only seriously worked on his music 18 months before that point, had no manager, and did all the touring himself. Listen to some of the best new independent music at...

I've mentioned cdbaby before, but it's becoming a force in the music industry to be reckoned with, thanks to the power of the Internet.

The String Cheese Incident is taking on ticketmaster...

Details behind the first National Geographic cover story ever to be completely shot digitally...

December 1 to 7, 2003

Have you ever seen a gigpixel image?

A great gallery of digital photography from Max Lyons...

The abuse of period typography in the movies...

CNN Art Sucks

A nice 24-hour time-lapse movie of Toronto (5MB)...