Cicada (link com­ing shortly) is our first site of 2010, com­mis­sioned by a friend of mine for his new busi­ness. The brief was to provide a simple and clean web­site in order to allow pro­spect­ive cli­ents to con­tact him and to con­form to all cur­rent European stand­ards for busi­nesses. It should also be com­pli­ant with IE6+, Fire­fox, Chrome, and Opera.

The web­site truly does seem simple at first look, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in terms of JavaS­cript and design choices. The big one being cufon, used to serve Hel­vetica Neue — in Light and Ultra Light vari­ants — to the view­ers. Using cufon is as easy as upload­ing the typefaces to their provided gen­er­ator (make sure that the licens­ing allows for them to be embed­ded, you should also lock the file to your domain) and then link­ing the gen­er­ated JavaS­cript file in the head of your HTML:

Con­tinue read­ing: Cicada

Super­broth­ers: Sword & Swo­cery EP is home to the col­lab­or­at­ive work of Super­broth­ers, Jim Guthrie, and Capy. They’re work­ing on a game together and I’ve gotta say I’m pretty inter­ested in what it will be like. To explain to you just why I’m inter­ested I’m going to have to break it down.

Super­broth­ers
The first I heard about Super­broth­ers was when art and design blogs flipped their shit for their videos, and rightly so. Embed­ded below is my favour­ite of these: Dot Mat­rix Revolution.

Con­tinue read­ing: Super­broth­ers: Sword & Swo­cery EP

Yes, the Super­pos­i­tion Kitty web­site has been turned on its head. Black is White! White is Black! And … that’s about it. A code cleanup was long due, and while I was at it I changed a few things around. Most import­antly, I cleaned up the CSS, strip­ping it of a third of it’s weight in the pro­cess and hope­fully speed­ing up load times.

Unfor­tu­nately, a few of the tutorial posts are now slightly out­dated. I will be updat­ing them in the com­ing weeks to com­ply with the new theme and changes in code.

I’d like to thank 1KB CSS Grid for the base grid used in the new code. I’d messed around with vari­ous grids — such as 960.gs — before, but found them almost uni­ver­sally bloated in the effort to provide for every even­tu­al­ity. 1KB Grid is tiny and neat and much more eleg­ant than the sys­tem I had come up with pre­vi­ously. The grid now looks some­thing like this:

Con­tinue read­ing: White On Black

I have to admit that this is one I’ve been sit­ting on a while, I should’ve got­ten it out there much sooner so every­body could share in the joys of über cheap re-tensionable screen­print­ing frames. A caveat here though, they’re cheap for a reason: to get them to lay flat you may have to modify your plat­ten and regis­tra­tion can be a bit iffy. How­ever, I’ve found that once prop­erly ten­sioned they’ll keep for months, and because the only thing hold­ing the mesh to the frame is glue, if you rip it while reclaim­ing the screen (as I have done too many times) it’s easy enough to ten­sion up some new mesh.

First off, tools. The only tools I really need are a shift­ing span­ner, a hack­saw (please make sure you get a metal and not wood saw), and a c clamp. If you don’t have those then don’t worry, you’re going to need to make a trip to the shop for some 15mm cop­per pip­ing (usu­ally found in 3 or 4 meter lengths) and 90° com­pres­sion bends. Back from the hard­ware store yet? Mouse-over the images below for the process.

Cop­per pip­ing, cut to length. I find that 300mm and 400mm a side works best for A4 prints. Note that I’ve sanded them slightly to allow the mesh bet­ter pur­chase .

Con­tinue read­ing: Cheap Reten­sion­able Screen­print­ing Frames

God Of War: The Third is now (as of about 20 minutes ago) avail­able as a play­able demo on the PSN. Cur­rently sit­ting at 14% of a 2671 MB file here. Hope­fully we will finally find out what Kratos is so angry about.

I think we all know by now just how much I like books. It’s a lot. So it’s prob­ably a pretty safe assump­tion to ima­gine that I also read. A lot. The two would seem to go together.

Whether I am order­ing books from Amazon (home to everything you could ever want) which I don’t have space for or I’m haunt­ing the local and cent­ral branches of the Dun­dee Lib­rary (home to what I think is the best teen­age read­ing sec­tion on earth and pos­sessor of some real hid­den gems), look­ing for some­thing new.

This vora­city of con­sump­tion can often pose a prob­lem when com­bined with my short atten­tion span and lack of memory for any­thing that happened more than a week ago. A lot of the time when I try to remem­ber what book it was I read a month ago and what it was like I just plain old can’t, which can make review­ing or recom­mend­ing them to any­one quite difficult.

With that in mind I’ve prod­ded Ryan into rig­ging me a simple read­ing journal (to be found in the won­der­ful header menu under ‘books’) where I can record when I remem­ber to (which will hope­fully be often) the books I’ve recently ploughed my way through. This would seem to both sets of my prob­lems — remem­ber­ing and ‘review­ing’ (if that’s what you can call what I say about any of them) — at once.

Seg­mental is a 16 seg­ment dis­play font from Super­pos­i­tion Kitty to you. It’s free for per­sonal use, so please con­tact us if you would like to use it in a pro­fes­sional pro­ject. It should be avail­able to down­load from dafont shortly.

This happened only days after the poster went up on the Perth Rd. I haven’t gone back to see if it’s been changed, but I wouldn’t be sur­prised if it kept on hap­pen­ing. I apo­lo­gise to every­body vis­it­ing this blog for David Cameron’s star­ing face, but it may help to know that you can now make your own poster.

Some more pho­tos of Dun­dee, it’s lib­rary, it’s sky­line of archi­tec­tural clashes, and Jen below.

Con­tinue read­ing: Tak­ing A Walk In Dundee

I’m sick of get­ting auto­mated responses, I just don’t see the point. I don’t need an email telling me what I just did 2 minutes ago. Yes, I know, I was there too. So to that end I’ve inven­ted the Auto­mated Response Respon­der. That’ll teach the bastards.

First off, a few cau­tions: This is a bad idea, people don’t like it when you respond to their auto­mated responses, if they even notice at all. How­ever, this was — for me — more of an art pro­ject in the vein of Caleb Larson’s A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter (A sculp­ture that con­tinu­ally lists itself on eBay) than any real pro­gram­ming exer­cise. And now, on to the pro­ject itself.

You’re going to need Proc­mail for this. Proc­mail can be used to cre­ate mail-servers, mail­ing lists, sort your incom­ing mail into sep­ar­ate folders/files, pre­pro­cess your mail, start any pro­grams upon mail arrival or select­ively for­ward cer­tain incom­ing mail auto­mat­ic­ally to someone. Today we’ll be focus­ing on some vari­ation of that last one. Now, you’re going to need to install and set-up Proc­mail your­self (have I men­tioned yet that it’s a com­mand line tool?), I recom­mend Nancy McGough’s excel­lent Proc­mail Quick Start. Once you’ve got­ten that done you can get to my Proc­mail ‘recipe’.

:0
	check1 = "automated e-mail"
	check2 = "automated email"
	check3 = "automated notice"
	check4 = "automated message"

	*$ ! ^$MYXLOOP
	* B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4
	| (echo "From: you@domain.com" ;
		$FORMAIL -r -A"Precedence: junk"
		-A"X-Loop: you@domain.com" ;
		echo "This is an automated response
		in reply to your automated response.\n
		Please do not respond to this
		automated response.\n
		Thank you.\n"
	) | $SENDMAIL

Obvi­ously, the first thing you’re going to want to do here is to replace you@domain.com with your actual email address (on both occasions).

The actual code is quite simple. As you can see above, I have set up checks for the most com­mon word­ings in the body of auto­mated emails I have received, you can add, remove, or change as you wish. The next part — *$ ! ^$MYXLOOP — makes sure we’re not set­ting up an infin­ite loop here. The line after — * B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4 — simply cycles through the strings provided above and if any of them match sends the message:

This is an auto­mated response in reply to your auto­mated response.
Please do not respond to this auto­mated response.
Thank you.

It’s about time I pos­ted a fol­lowup to the first of this series about artists, pho­to­graph­ers, and cre­at­ive people that I have dis­covered while brows­ing vari­ous sites and for­ums. Today I’m con­cen­trat­ing on pho­to­graph­ers that I have dis­covered / redis­covered over the past few months.

Bo Wang

Bo Wang is a Chinese pho­to­grapher cur­rently based in New York. With a BS and MS in Phys­ics from Tsing­hau Uni­ver­sity he is now study­ing pho­to­graphy, video and related media at School Of Visual Arts, New York.

He cur­rently has a show — Het­ero­scapes — at Gal­lery 456 (end­ing 5th of Feb­ru­ary), I feel that his artist’s state­ment describes his pho­to­graphy best:

HETEROSCAPES is a por­trait of China’s con­tem­por­ary urban spaces and land­scapes in a period of intens­i­fied trans­ition. Through­out the past 20 years of an eco­nomic boom, this trans­ition has shif­ted the social power struc­ture and sub­ver­ted once com­mon val­ues, dra­mat­ic­ally alter­ing the func­tions and even the con­crete­ness of land­scapes and urban structures.

Bo Wang is rel­at­ively new to the pho­to­graphy world, but I feel he will be one to watch in the com­ing years.

Con­tinue read­ing: More Artists Of Today (And Yesterday)