Pumpkin Carving Ideas

Need some pumpkin carving ideas? Have a happy and safe Halloween everybody...

Husmusen
Extreme Pumpkins
Pumpkin Carving 101
About.com's How-to

Tags: pumpkin, howto

Antique Radios

Matt over at SVN points out this sweet collection of antique radios. Love those huge round dials.

Tags: antiques, radio

Powerbook and iPod Laser Etching

ETCHamac by Arizona-based Macmedia provides custom laser etching for your Powerbook and iPod. What is Laser Etching? A CO2 laser is used to laser etch an image or text onto your product. The process is done at low power and can not damage your iPod or Powerbook. The process is quick, clean, and permanent.

Tags: ipod, powerbook, etching

Inside: Doug Holst Interview (Pt.1)

Untitled from Pentomino Solutions Series 57 by Douglas Holst

In a new feature on the Shifter Blog, we interview Milwaukee artist Douglas Holst about inspiration, shapes and art. Doug is showing his recent work this week at the AAF Art Fair in NY.

MS: If you were a shape which would you be?

DH: Nothing too spikey, like a triangle. Definitely
something symetrical though. Nothing too random, or
unique. I'm drawn towards ideals. How about a
semi-circle? It is the best of both worlds -- a
straight edge and a curved one. Even though it
implies incompleteness I like semicircles. Or else a
nice oval.

MS: Did you always want to be an artist?

DH: As a kid I was constantly making stuff, coloring and reading,
and I said that I either wanted to be an artist or a writer. I sent an
Encyclopedia Brown short story I had
written to author Donald J. Sobol but I never heard
back from him. I won a 10 speed bike in the Kellogg's
Stick Up For Breakfast contest and a pocket watch in a
Jolly Green Giant coloring contest. The bike was
stolen just a few weeks after I got it. I went to a
very small private school for Jr. high and high scool
where sports was EVERYTHING, so i got very involved
with soccer and basketball but I was never very good
at sports. My junior year in high school they finally
offered an art class, and during the first week of
school that year I KNEW that I had found what I wanted
to do, and I have never even briefly considered doing
anything else. It gives me a lot of satisfaction.

MS: What inspires you?

DH: From being a human being with 2 eyes, I guess.
It's a self-perpetuating thing for me. One painting
leads to another. That's the kind of question I
thought about a lot as an art student, but I've been
doing this long enough now that the work has taken on
a life of it's own. The work doesn't follow me
around, I follow it and I've quit asking questions.
I'm usually too busy painting to be bothered.

MS: Which artists have inspired your work?

DH: I could give you a long list with literally
hundreds of names. I love art history, especially the
last 100 years or so. I worked for 11 years as a
security guard at the Milwaukee Art Museum, both
because i needed a day job but also because I wanted
to spend time with the art. I'm not ashamed to admit
to having been influenced by the work of others.
Cezanne said that we are all just links in a chain.
My friend Dave says that if you ask someone who is in
a band what his or her music sounds like and they say
something like "we don't sound like anything you've
ever heard before", you KNOW that they suck, that they
have a tiny record collection and that they haven't
listened to much music. Everyone sounds like someone
else. Sure, we all hopefully have something unique to
contribute, and you always want to be careful not to
be derivative, but it is pretty arrogant to think that
you don't need to be informed about the history of art
if you are going to be a serious artist. All of that
having been said, some artists that have interested me
very much in the last few years are swiss artists Max
Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Karl Gerstner. All are
abstract painters with a strong emphasis on color and
simple visual relationships. Bill studied at the
Bauhaus and was not only a great sculptor and painter
but an influential designer. I think he had a lot to
do with the Swatch, actually. Gerstner founded a very
important design firm, GGK, before he eventually
devoted himself to painting full-time. Anyone
interested in good design should definitely be
familiar with them. Gerstner has written some
exceelent books which I would highly reccommend to any
artist or designer. Gerstner says

"The form is the body of the color.
The color is the soul of the form."

I love that. It's such a fundamental, beautiful
lesson that I am only now beginning to learn. It's
the kind of stuff that would bore non-artists to tears
though. A few years ago my friend Dave (again),
bought Josef Albers' "The Interaction of Color" and he
decided to give it to me. He said "this whole book is
about putting colors next to other colors. I can't
read THIS!"

MS: Tell us about Milwaukee. Why not NY, LA, Chicago?

DH: I didn't know I was allowed to leave! Milwaukee
is a very difficult place to be an artist because so
few people really care about art, not to mention
actually buying art. I was interested in moving to
New York last year but I am poor. Laziness and
inertia have kept me here, I guess. Bodies at rest
tend to stay at rest. I think that I could do better
for myself somewhere else though.

MS: What's your favorite shape?

DH: It's so interesting that you have a web site
devoted to shapes! I think shapes are like numbers --
some are just more elegant and beautiful than others.
Like I said, I dislike shapes that are random or make
little or no sense. These last few years I have been
obsessed with shapes called pentominoes, which are
formed by combining five squares. There are 18
different pentominoes. Oh, there are those people who
will try to tell you that there are only 12 different
pentominoes, but don't you believe them! To my way of
thinking there are 18 because 6 of them are
asymmetrical, and when you flip over an "l" shape, for
example, that's an entirely different shape! I cut
pieces of paper into the 18 different pentomino shapes
and I began to try to piece them together, like a
jigsaw puzzle, into complete rectangles of 9 x 10.
Try it some time. It ain't so easy. I felt like I
had tapped into something, and I have since done
dozens of paintings based on this basic formula.
I'm not sure I have (a favorite shape). I prefer
shapes that make sense. Randomness and chance make me
uneasy. I prefer order and structure.

Next week we'll wrap up our interview with Doug talking process, computers and meaning. Have a great weekend.

Chinese Backstreet Yao Ming Fans

Stop what you are doing and Watch this Video.

Two Chinese students, possibly fans of American culture, want it that way. Here's a shout out to friends in the Far East...

Thanks DZ for the tip!

Tags: video, chinese, students

No Photoshop Killer, Aperture OS X

Apple's Aperture is a nice piece of software. It's the right tool for the right job - workflow and image management for professional photographers. Don't let the blogosphere fool you into thinking this eats into Adobe's user base. Aperture specializes in photography, while Photoshop has tools for designers and photographers. What Final Cut Pro was to iMovie, Aperture is to iPhoto - an industrial strength tool with great management for a lot of large files and non-destructive editing and Apple's obvious ease-of-use (or should I say joy-to-use). Best feature of all? It's another reason to buy a Power Mac (and the new Quad G5 with a TB of disk space and 16 GB's of RAM will do just fine).

Tags: apple, software, photography

Steak T-Shirt by Palmer Cash

It's an island of meat on a T-Shirt, strangely attractive. Fun stuff at Palmer Cash, straight out of Boise, Idaho.

Tags: tshirts, illustration

Mister Shape 2006 T-Shirts

Mister Shape shifts toward the love of shapes. Shapes are everything and everywhere. The ability to recognize these shapes and form patterns enables us to function in life. The goal of Mister Shape is to help you see shapes in places you might not look - to help you recognize the patterns of your life. A brighter color palette and positive thoughts combined with abstract and narrative graphic patterns highlight the 2006 T-shirts.



Hero looks back at the heroic deeds performed daily growing up. Mario saving the princess, a game of Contra blasting aliens, winning the race in Wipeout. No matter the platform or controller, you had the skills, desire and talent to overcome your foe. You were an everyday hero.

Thanks to many of you who have provided words of encouragement and support for the new line over the past year. Special thanks to Spencer, Adam, DZ, Tyrone and King for the great code, critique and photography.

Tags: shapes, tshirts, tshirt, fashion, cool, design, apparel, clothing, shopping

To-do Shapes

The linear to-do list is a tried and tested tool for getting things done. IdeaXIdea has a great innovation with the Bubble Map. We've been working with it the past few days and the biggest gain is in the at-a-glance comprehension of what's most important and how much of it is left. Using both the size relationship and pie-shading techniques we've been able to crush a few tasks, including most of our own site redesign.



Tags: gtd, shapes

iPod Video

Apple keeps it coming. Witness the new video-enabled iPod. When you lead a market, innovate faster than they can catch you. First it played songs. Then photos. Then podcasts, and now the iPod plays videos. 15,000 songs, 25,000 photos and 150 hours of video. It's slimmer and has 20 hours of battery life, 5 five hours more than before. The 30GB model holds 75 hours of video and retails for $299. The 60GB version will hold 150 hours of video and sell for $399.

Additionally, iTunes 6 was released today. You can now buy TV shows through the iTunes store. Purchase current episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Night Stalker and two Disney channels for $1.99 the day after they are broadcast on air, commercial free. Even Pixar shorts are available.

Tags: apple, video, iPod, innovation

The Shape of Your Head

Does the shape of your head determine mental ability? Do the pieces inside your head do certain things? Seen an MRI lately? A geometric shape has certain mathematical value based on it's properties. Some shapes communicate by the nature of their color, size and context. Certain organs in our body serve specific functions. As early as the 1700s, people theorized about the shape and nature of our heads. Remember Phrenology?



Excerpts from the British Library:

Phrenology was a science of character divination, faculty psychology, theory of brain and what the 19th-century phrenologists called "the only true science of mind." Phrenology came from the theories of the idiosyncratic Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828). The basic tenets of Gall's system were:

1.The brain is the organ of the mind.
2. The mind is composed of multiple distinct, innate faculties.
3. Because they are distinct, each faculty must have a separate seat or "organ" in the brain.
4. The size of an organ, other things being equal, is a measure of its power.
5. The shape of the brain is determined by the development of the various organs.
6. As the skull takes its shape from the brain, the surface of the skull can be read as an accurate index of psychological aptitudes and tendencies.

An author in 1838 summed up the feelings of many critics: "Phrenology is a mass of untruth! its physics are false and presumptuous, its metaphysics nonsensical, its ethics a gross ideotic blunder! And yet this system has numerous admirers, and its lecturers often appear in public, exhibiting the ignorance and audacity of the charlatan, in every sentence they utter, and they are generally surrounded by a gaping multitude, of bump-feeling people, eager to gain knowledge of the so-called "science.""



Most of phrenology's basic premises have been vindicated, though the particulars of reading character from the skull have not. For example, the principle that many functions are localized in the brain is now a commonplace (although many other functions are distributed). Also, areas of the brain that are more frequently used (as the right hippocampus of London taxi drivers) may become enlarged with use. (See The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 17, 1997.) This is exactly what phrenologists asserted.

Tags: brain, shapes

iPod Directions with iWay

Ready for the weekend? Headed somewhere new? iWay brings Yahoo! maps to your iPod. Simply type in where you are and where you want to go, you will download a zip file with your map, put that image in your iphoto folder and sync. Never ask for directions again.

Tags: ipod, maps, yahoo

Edward Burtyansky: China

Elements of Russian Constructivism, right angles and V-shapes. Shipyard #11 Qili Port Zhejiang Province, Edward Burtyansky.

Burtyansky's exhibition, China, is now on view at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

Tags: triangle, photography, china

Desert Living Tip #520: School iBooks

No need to haul pounds of textbooks to and from school North of Tucson, AZ. In Vail School District's Empire High student textbooks are being replaced with iBooks. The cost per student between all the text books and the iBooks amounts to $100-200.

Tags: education, arizona, apple

70six Athletic Block T-Shirt

More cool stuff out of 70six. The Athletic Block T-Shirt gives their brand a sporty look. The number six in athletic block, and nanajyu ('seventy') in katakana on the back. Score!

Tags: tshirt, design