This is a great industrial film by Jam Handy for Hamilton Watch Company in 1949. It explains the mechanics of a wind-up watch. If they were making it today they might call it F*cking Watches, How Do They Work? [via Hodinkee]
Schell expands on his Gamepocalypse idea presented at the end of his DICE talk earlier this year. He makes dozens of predictions that all seem plausible, creepy, and somewhat fun.
It's a few years old now, but this is great advice from Jay Smooth about keeping behavior and being separate in arguments. This advice doesn't just apply to conversations about race, I think it's good to keep in mind for any disagreement. I found this via an excellent comment by jessamyn in a thread at Ask MetaFilter about dealing with difficult people: Help us deal with our black sheep Meetup member. Lots of good advice in the thread too.
Jesse and Adam are back again talking about the benefits of dressing well for work with Paul Feig. It's relaxed and funny. They also added a great new segment with the blogger behind Nerd Boyfriend where she dissects a classic look and finds modern versions of the clothes. More nice work from Put This On.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I have been enjoying The Incident by Neven Mrgan and Matt Comi on my iPhone. Here's what it looks like:
Nothing too complicated. There's falling stuff that you tilt the phone to avoid, and a great 8-bit soundtrack. Seeing all of the pixelated junk they designed is half the fun.
I don't have an XBox, but this atmospheric game called Limbo looks like another fun design experience. It's the first console game I've seen in a while that I'd like to play:
(I found this last trailer via the consistently excellent video site Devour. Check it out if you haven't seen it. Looks great on an iPad.)
"mod_evasive is an evasive maneuvers module for Apache to provide evasive action in the event of an HTTP DoS or DDoS attack or brute force attack." Filed for (hopefully) non-use.
"This demo is an implementation of a full 8-bit color cycling engine, rendered into an HTML5 Canvas in real-time." Nice look at the lost video game art of color cycling to show movement.
A couple months ago I posted that I wanted an Image Reader for the iPad. I've found the next best thing that meets almost everything on my wish list: Reeder for iPad. It is the best $5 I've spent on the iPad so far. Here's a look:
As you can see: minimal interface with a few buttons along the side and top. You tap those arrows to go forward/back, and there's seamless integration with Google Reader for favoriting and sharing. I also use the iPhone version of Reeder and the iPad version is even better. There's less reporting on what Reeder is doing in the background, so I think more about what I'm reading and less about what I'm using to read.
I'd still like a way to strip away even text and interact with the images on their own at full screen, but this is so close to perfect that I won't complain.
"Yet despite all the innovations in the iPhone 4, without basic telephony service it’s just a piece of shit." Matt Honan succinctly sums up Apple's AT&T problem. The frustrating part is that it's potentially solvable by opening things up to other carriers.
"Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty." I've been noticing this too especially on the iPad's potentially gorgeous display. The app-makers, including Apple, just don't seem to care. [via jessamyn]