Gas Prices Widget

Now OS X tells you where to fill up, get the best local gas prices at a glance...nice Gas Widget.

Podcasts in iTunes

In the latest version of iTunes you can easily subscribe to podcasts for iTunes and your iPod...short mp3 audio programming is a click away. Many commerical casts are promoted but many, many more exist. Find the cool nitche ones or add one you know about to iTunes by simply pasting in the link.

Roundabouts

Shapes fix traffic problems. Did you know that if you stick a circle in the middle of an intersection and put little red triangles on posts around the circle you reduce traffic accidents?



Pictured above, the Okemos roundabout in Ingham County, Michigan, USA. With roundabouts, traffic through intersections flow freely and the use of a courteous yeild sign keeps everyone polite.

In a recent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study of 24 intersections in the USA where stop control and traffic signals were replaced with Modern Roundabouts, there was a: 39% overall crash reduction, 76% injury crash reduction, 90% fatal crash reduction.

New Music

A rash of recent albums we really like...

Waiting for the Sirens Call - New Order
Guero - Beck
X&Y - Coldplay
Nightbird - Erasure

If you are in Phoenix, shop local at Stinkweeds...

Free Katie T-Shirt

This crusade was inevitable...though our personal take is Tom's really in love.

Quake-o-Meter

Shape of the Week honors go to the U.S. Geological Survey for the simple shape-driven display of recent earthquakes. Bigger the square, bigger the quake. Let's just keep those squares nice and small.

$14,948

When our friend John Park (understandingmaya.com) maxed out his Apple Store shopping cart recently he recalls a "very eager sales guy from Apple called my home and wanted to know if there is any way he could help out with my "purchase".

Well. It's good to know there are live bodies at Apple's online store looking out for our 'needs'...wonder if that 5th digit on the total is the trigger to get a 'real-live-human-personal-shopping-assistant'?

Update: To answer a few emails about this post, yes John managed to get the cost of ONE Power Mac G5 w/Display up to 15k. Impressive.

WWMD?

Wisdom from the 80's, still relevant today...

Bermuda Triangle

The Shape of the Week award goes to one of the fun mysteries of my youth, The Bermuda Triangle.

The seabed of the Bermuda Triangle apparently has methane hydrates that become unstable causing instability in the sea and a mixture of air and methane above it. Ships or planes travelling over the area could sink or catch fire.



[Link via Boing Boing]

Summer 2005 T-Shirt Preview #3

"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live."
—Mortimer Adler

The new site design is shaping up and photography is being shot. Here's a look at another T in the upcoming summer line. We'll have this design for Men and Women. Summer's here and the new Mister Shape shirts can't get here fast enough. Thanks to our first Wyoming customer tonight.

Beep Boop T-Shirt

Something about those 4-armed robots (or is it 6? or ???)..another fun tee from Defunker...

Millennium Falcon Xbox Modification

Behold the ultimate Xbox Modification...

Help us, Obi-Wan Ginobili

As a Spurs fan who recently had the privilege of watching the boys from San Antonio return to the NBA Finals in person in hostile Phoenix territory, I couldn't resist pointing out the rush of bootleg Emanuel "Manu" Ginobili worship t-shirts out there. There's everything from "Got Manu?" to the Star Wars themed shirts.

Wonder which will come first: The copyright police or Manu taking yet another charge for the team?

Go Spurs Go! (it's a stupid chant, but it's all we've got)

Apple Homepages

A wonderful Flickr Gallery of Apple Homepages created by Kernel Panic...



[Link via Brain Fuel]

Joss T

Coming soon to the PVP store at ThinkGeek.com, the super-cool "Joss Whedon is my Master Now" T-Shirt. Buy it in time for this Fall's Serenity release, or for late nights watching Buffy re-runs.

You've got to find what you love

Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Speech to Stanford University graduates [full text]:

"You've got to find what you love."

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

"I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

"Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Desert Living: Tip #385

Purchase one of the five homes in Arizona without AC? AC dies and you're out of cash? Roll your own!



[Link via Slashdot]

iPod Shuffle Skins

Cool wrappers for your iPod Shuffle from Solid Alliance

Pillow Fight T-Shirt

More fun over at Threadless..

How to be Creative

Good weekend reading can always be found at ChangeThis...

"MacLeod, an advertising executive and popular blogger with a flair for the creative, gives his 26 tried-and-true tips for being truly creative. Each point illustrated by a cartoon drawn by the author himself.

If you've ever felt the draw to do something creative but just haven't been able to pull it together, you'll love this manifesto."

Personal fav: No. 8, Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

Summer 2005 T-Shirt Preview #2

How are your listening skills? Five new shirt designs are now being converted to screens. We'll start pulling the new designs next week. In the meantime we'll redesign the site and provide a few more peeks at the line. Thanks to everyone for the emails and support. Thanks for the recent orders from Southern California and New York City. Looks like we may have our first retailer from Luxembourg, thanks Ture! We'll also have a big web-based retailer in a few weeks, stay tuned.

Opera Mask T-Shirt

Really great thinking from 70six. This SF label has roots in Hachioji and Hakodate, Japan and Beijing, China. Loving the Camouflage Beijing Opera Masks!

Nike ID

Nike's ID site allows you to customize the colorways of a few different types of shoes. Here's a link to our recently customized and purchased Nike Dunk Low Parque iD. Design your own!

Top 50 Tiger Widgets

Apple's Top 50 Widgets, our current favs: Wikipedia and Sunlit Earth...of course the rendering has the Sun beating down on us here in AZ..

T-Shirt Winner

Actually, you have to buy them. Very nice T's from The Instant Winner...

Naked and Angry

The Threadless guys have launched Naked and Angry. You submit and score tie designs, the winners are available for purchase on the site. You get this nice box too..

Ribbon T-Shirt

Neenoon has some great designs in poster form (check out the "Time to Fly" print) and on T-shirts. We love this Ribbon T.

Gorilla T-Shirt

Nice limited edition T-Shirts over at Concrete Hermit. The Gorilla was designed by Phlash (aka Phil Ashcroft).

OS X Screen Savers

A nice collection of Quartz Screen Savers for OS X found here..just download them and drop them in your Screen Savers folder, then select one from System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver.

Our favorites: Iron Wave with spinning marbles (big suprise there), the Dot Flag (pictured above) and the inspiring CNN Globe/20th Century screensaver showing news headlines and quotes from the past 100 years.

Dress Up Steve!

Tired of the blue jeans and black shirts? Dress up your favorite tech super hero with the Joy of Tech's Dress Up Steve Jobs Game and Contest!

[Link via Boing Boing]

Totally 80's

In tonight's Netflix Queue:

1- The Goonies
2- The NeverEnding Story
3- Willow

Those 80's movies had cool stories. We're working on storyboards for a short Mister Shape web video and fantasy and narrative our on our minds..

The Record Effect

Alex Ross in the New Yorker reflects on how the act of recording affects music, the musician and the listener:

"A few months after Gould published his essay (where he gloried in the extraordinary interpretive control that studio conditions allowed him), the Beatles, in a presumably unrelated development, played their last live show, in San Francisco. They spent the rest of their short career working in the recording studio. They proved, as did Gould, that the studio breeds startlingly original ideas; they also proved, as did Gould, that it breeds a certain kind of madness. I’ll take “Rubber Soul” over “Sgt. Pepper’s,” and Gould’s 1955 Goldbergs over his 1981 version, because the first recording in each pair is the more robust, the more generous, the more casually sublime. The fact that the Beatles broke up three years after they disappeared into the studio, and the fact that Gould died in strange psychic shape at the age of fifty, may tell us all we need to know about the seductions and sorrows of the art of recording."

[Link via Plastic Bag]

Invicid Shirt

Nice style hapening over at Invicid...

Brain Fuel

New Scientist has a great article on 11 steps to a better brain. Some of the usual suspects pop up like getting a good night sleep and eating breakfast but there's also some unusual praise for 'smart drugs' and eggs. Favorite Quote: “Junk food is implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders”

Special Tip: Need even more Brain Fuel? Check out Chris Tingom's Brain Fuel weblog. A nice mix of design, culture and business ideas, especially for the web design community.

Darth Vader Tree T-Shirt

It's got to be something to do with the whole feeling-sorry-for-Anakin-thing that Episode III induces. We bought one of these babies from Threadless immediately. Darth Vader shows his gentler side, trimming up a nice Death Star Tree while waiting for the copyright attorneys over at Lucasfilm to find him. If you want to score this shirt, we suggest you do it now.

Netflix for Designer Handbags

Bag, Borrow or Steal! Seriously ladies, grab your favorite bag for the weekend then ship it back and get another. What's Hot? Take a look at Bag, Borrow or Steal's Celebrity Handbag Watch!