Following up to my previous entry this is what the new F1 steering wheel looks like. Pretty neat and very interesting from a UI standpoint. Wish they made these for normal cars!

Also, check out some more photos from the Signapore Grand Prix, also from the big picture.

Update: Here are a couple more links: Some history of the steering wheel from F1Technical and another article about F1 User interfaces.

Take a household light switch, network it to the powergrid and make it give resistance when trying to turn it on when the powergrid is under load. The more power being used the harder it is to turn on. You can network it to either your homes energy usage, or the grid as a whole. Pretty neat concept.

Pretty neat infographic from nytimes showing twitter usage across the country during the superbowl. The more I use twitter the more the value of things like this really start to show. For such a simple service it has some rather large overall uses.

I have talked about sparklines before and this seems to be a very well done implementation of them in Flex. Putting this out there for me as much as anyone else. See also: Flex Spinner.

Pretty convincing arguments for an old sea making soil fertile for cotton production which made it more likely to have higher populations of slaves which translates into higher population of blacks today in these areas surrounded by higher population of whites. Worth a read.

For those of us who suffer withdrawals when our hands leave the keyboard.

Just a quick followup to a previous post.

I am sure this is written in flex; It is a very compelling layered photo editor. Lots of brushes, lots of options. And it seems pretty snappy considering what it all it does. Its not going to replace photoshop for any serious users, but for the casual user, yeah, I think it would.

I haven't had a chance to see the video of this yet but basically think about a flinstone's car only using your hands in a rowing motion instead of the callous inducing running. Pretty neat stuff.

Brought to you from the ministry of the obvious, Wired does a piece telling you what you already know. Sci-Fi has a healthy dose of the "Fi". I watched the movie for the first time last night and was really impressed. It seemed remarkably well done. If you haven't seen it, skip the Wired article till you do, but its worth your couple of hours.

On a side note, the software and tech (not related to the suit directly except for that awesome HUD) featured a very prominent role in the film as well. Some scenes heavy on the "minority report" type effects, but all well done. If anyone knows of any discussions about the software around the internets please let me know.

Using software to show proportions of countries based on things other than land size. I have seen this somewhere else before but still quite interesting. If anyone has any other links related to this please let me know. The housing prices map is particularly interesting in today's economy.

Great infographic from the New York Times comparing the $700 Billion bailout to other government spending. It's worth a look.

As someone who values their sleep and appreciates quality bedding, this is good information.

In a quality product, the incremental comfort value of increasing thread count over 300 is very little. A 300 thread count can feel far superior to a 1000 thread count. Thread count has become a simple metric used by marketing people to capture interest and impress with high numbers. The problem with mass produced high thread count sheets is that to keep the price down, important elements of quality must be sacrificed, meaning in the end the customer gets a product with an impressive thread count but that probably feels no better (or even worse) than something with a lower thread count.

Some of the nicest sheets I own are some of the lowest thread counts. But after reading that article, who knew there were so much jargon around sheets...

PDF Warning. Article from 2006 by Maureen Stone. If you are ever designing data visualization (charts, graphs, infographics, etc) the colors you choose for your data sets are very important. It is amazing how wrong some software such as excel gets this right out of the box.

Another home furnishings design that is pretty cool. I wish I would have had these back when I was a kid, it would have been a lot of fun. I like the concept picture better than the actual sandbags though. They don't need the edge on them. It would be a lot of materials, but it would be great for nerf wars...

I love this kind of design, beautiful, yet functional.

I don't really condone graffiti, but this stuff is remarkably well done. It is by an British, pseudo-anonymous artist named Banksy. A website of his work lists his manifesto. Certainly thought provoking if nothing else.

This one is my favorite.(I totally want one).

Google Chrome has been released, to much fanfare and much grumbling. After using it for about a day, both at work and at home, I am happy to report that I am very pleased. I had a little trouble importing my bookmarks into chrome from firefox at work but had no trouble at home and finally got them in at work as well. The browser is very fast and although there seems to be a few rendering issues with images it is overall very mature for a google product we only heard about a couple of days ago. I will follow up with a better write up after using it a little more, but I will recommend downloading it and trying it out if you have the slightest curiosity. It is worth the try.

I will put out a better review later next week after some more usage, but in the meantime, those of you that have tried it, let me know what you think.

I am going to try to keep this from becoming photography and videography day on adeepblue, but you got to check out this article on wired about the Red Cameras. From the article:

It's more than that: His team of engineers and scientists have created the first digital movie camera that matches the detail and richness of analog film. The Red One records motion in a whopping 4,096 lines of horizontal resolution?"4K" in filmmaker lingo?and 2,304 of vertical. For comparison, hi-def digital movies like Sin City and the Star Wars prequels top out at 1,920 by 1,080, just like your HDTV. (There's also a slightly higher-resolution option called 2K that reaches 2,048 lines by 1,080.) Film doesn't have pixels, but the industry-standard 35-millimeter stock has a visual resolution roughly equivalent to 4K. And that's what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it's easier to use and cheaper?by orders of magnitude?than a film camera. In other words, Jannard's creation threatens to make 35-mm movie film obsolete.

A Red camera was used to shoot the video that I linked to a couple of days back with the slow motion skateboarders. This is pretty cool for the future of video, not to mention the much more casual videographer.