Little Logos

handwriting of typographers

lucb — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 07:28:07 +0000

a very cool article at The Man in Blue - where we get to see some handwriting examples of some typographers. Above is an example of Erik Spiekermann’s penmanship.

Trendrr

lucb — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:23:38 +0000

Hmm not sure if there is meat behind this buzz but does look interesting. Trendrr kinda does data visualisation, which I like. But not a lot new in terms of presentation. Upload and scratchpad looks interesting tho.

From what they say about themselves..

One of our goals while designing trendrr was to make data both easy to import and easy to export.

May post more on Trendrr laterr.

Eye-fi card

lucb — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:08:59 +0000

On loan to me this week is a cute little gadget - the Eye-Fi. This is a SD card with built-in wireless that you can program with your wireless network settings and account information from your online photo provider (in my case Flickr).

So all you do is set the card up by plugging into your PC and use the manager software to tell it about your wireless network and your online photo account. Then you put the card into your camera and it talks to your PC, your online account or both. Pretty simple and easy to set up.

It does just work, and it is pretty cool to see your photos suddenly appear online. But there are a few points that are worth making..

In a “normal” home-style wireless environment where you are using a passkey only this card will work as advertised. In more enterprise environments where you are taken to a webpage or you use an account/password for authentication then this card will not be able to be configured. So, in an environment you control (like your home or the home of friends and family) this will work fine but for roaming use you will have problems configuring the card for direct wireless access. Access to your own PC will still be possible.

Another point, I generally take a lot of rubbish photos (yes lots) and so an upload to my flickr page for all my photos is not something I want to happen automatically. But auto-upload to my iphoto while I am walking about is kinda cool.

Not sure if I will buy one yet. I may if the cost of the card is not much higher than a regular 2 gig card.

So the photo here was taken tonight, and untouched by cables, was uploaded to iPhoto on my laptop and to my Flickr account. Then I went to Flickr, edited the photo online to crop it and linked to it on my blog. Easy.

Making data beautiful

lucb — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:09:32 +0000

From a post in boingboing a very pretty link to some cool work on graphical textual analysis. Here we see Jack Kerouac’s book “On the Road” being analysed in a very cool graphical way by Stephanie Posavec.

The best link I found on her work was via NotCot - Stefanie Posavec “On the Map”. I especially like the Literary Organism view of the book. This is part of the Many Eyes project for shared visualisation and discovery.

Interesting to compare this with some of the work being done by IBM - yes big blue is having fun with Visualisations also.. One of the more interesting ones is a comparison of the State of the Union speech differences between 2002 and 2003.

Here is a link that Jake sent me of a presentation in 2006 where Dr Hans Rosling presents some of his findings on global trends (life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates ) using a series of wonderful animated slides. Watching this made me head over to Gapminder and a very cool link to a Gapminder World where you can play with some of these visualisations.

Snowies Walk redux

Luc — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:41:20 +0000

Off to the Snowy Mountains on a Bushwalk in a couple of weeks. This will basically be the same walk that I did with Marc (and Andrew and Thomas + the Beaver Boys) 2 years ago. This time I am taking both Marc and Ryan. Andrew is taking both Thomas and Courtney. Marty is joining us to carry all the gear that the kids cannot.

The last walk was pure joy and a great time with Marc. I hope we have as much fun this time.

Was off buying extra kit today for the boys. Love shopping for Camping gear but it all costs so much, especially when you do x2.