SteamSHIFT

Flickerminick, the electronic jellyfish: “Flickerminick is a jittery fabric jellyfish that contains fans to inflate and deflate the body, tentacles which twitch with stepper motors, LEDs that modulate the creature’s colour from bright white to soft purple with each breath, electroluminescent wire and IR transceiver to ensure that you get stung if you get too close.

Lots of cool videos.

Author: Christine Liu.

Flickerminick is at the Crawlspace Gallery in Cambridge, MA, on April 12 - April 18.

(Via we make money not art.)

I can see a whole load of exciting art style possibilities (as well as the obvious commercial applications) for this tech.

Gel interfaces: “The GelForce, engineered at the University of Tokyo, is a transparent deformable gel that measures the distribution of the magnitude and direction of force. The sensor is composed of a transparent elastic body, two layers of blue and red markers, and a CCD camera. Deformations of the surface -when pressed with finger, for instance- are then calculated in real time.

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Another take on the yellow arrow, and grafedia ideas

Polaroids on street corners: “Blockies allow camera phone users to post pictures on any public surface, using special stickers.

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freeSTYLE: “Sana Karwas‘ cell.SPACE application allows users to make a short live music video using SMS as lyrics and camera phone pictures as graphics.

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Post It Lamp: “The Post It Lamp is great. Why ship a lamp in bulky packaging when you can make a lamp from the packaging itself? Pop open the tube, flip out clip and roll-out shade, and unfurl the cord. The lamp base will still have the stamps and your address on it, but that’s even better. It’s on sale for about 23 bucks.

Post It Lamp by 2pm [TreeHugger]

“

(Via Gizmodo.)

A number of different sites with techniques for solving those CSS layout blues

1. glish.com : CSS layout techniques: “CSS Layout Techniques: for Fun and Profit”
2. The Layout Reservoir - BlueRobot: Please feel free to borrow, steal, abduct, and/or torture the documents contained in the Layout Reservoir. Though you need not give credit to BlueRobot.com, a comment in your source code would help other developers to find this resource. Enjoy.
3. Ruthsarian Layouts: Building CSS-based layouts can be a pain in the ass. In an attempt to save the sanity of myself and others, I offer these layouts that I’ve put together. Everything here is royalty-free, copyright-free, and warranty-free. Enjoy!
4. Layout-o-Matic: “We’ve already been through the pain of making our layouts cross-browser compatible, so you don’t have to! In the spirit of the wonderfulList-o-matic, here’s the first of InkNoise’s toys for the Web designer crowd.”
5. Little Boxes: Different Layouts

Just so that you can keep tabs on what is me and what is quotes, I’ve implemented a little styling … me is like this (10pt Courier if you’re interested and didn’t already know).

And quotes are like this (italic dontchaknow) - basically if someone else said it, it’ll be like this!

So there you have it.

As I see it there are some really cool applications for this little beast; sure the Media Centre idea is going to happen (and there are some spiffy looking designs beginning to appear), but check out all the companies out there that are looking at them as servers. Mac server without having to go for a big ole xServe - beautiful. I’m prolly gonna get me one as backup to said ‘big ole xServe’.

Anyhoo - here are the links:

MacMinServers
MacMiniColo

– SteamSHIFT

Secure wireless email on Mac OS X: “Know what happens to your usernames, passwords, and personal email messages when you use public wireless networks? Know that this data often travels freely through the air in clear text? And do you know how dead simple it is for anyone else on that same network to intercept your information and use it against you? On the flip side, did you know you can scramble this data to make it completely unintelligible, even if someone else does intercept it?”

macosxhints - Get the most from X!: If you are a mac user and don’t know about this site … well shame on you! It really is the best repository of useful mac tips there is!