I’ve been completely lusting after something like a Sonos system that lets me play whatever music I want in any room in the house, so I can send audio from my computer to (for example) the living room speakers. Sonos (which seems like the only really decent system out there) costs hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands depending on your needs, so there wasn’t much chance I’d actually buy one.

Turns out I can do everything I need with a $25 application: http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

This is totally cool as hell. I took a half-broken old iphone and made it the receiver for the living room speakers. I can also send from my computer to every other computer on the network, no problem. So for a party, it’s easy to make any computer be controlling music that plays in every room in the house (using some cheap thrift store speakers etc as needed). It’s also equally easy for Celene and I to dynamically split the house into a couple of zones, one where she’s hearing the music she’s playing, and one where I hear what I want.

Note that that $25 covers installation on all your computers. One-time fee 🙂

As desktop towers have given way to today’s sleek laptops and even sleeker mobile devices, all glued shut to preclude even the possibility of tinkering, we’ve lost something valuable: the art of the case mod. Thankfully, over in Japan, Hiroto Ikeuchi is keeping the craft alive in spectacular fashion.

Ikeuchi spent the better part of the last year building this incredible machine, a creation that isn’t so much a case mod as full-blown diorama. It’s a deliriously detailed little world that just happens to take place in and around a functioning computer. It also redefines the idea of what it means to have a cluttered desk.

Ikeuchi, a designer by trade, likes to call it his “secret base.” Inspired by mecha anime like Gundam and Macross, every surface is packed with something to discover. Soldiers tend to intricate, forbidding machinery. Mechs await repair. The work seamlessly blends plastic toys, gizmo components, and scraps of other materials with the computer itself. Atop the tower, the shell of a DSLR is repurposed as a laser cannon.

via This Insane Case Mod Looks Like a World War III Fever Dream | Wired Design | Wired.com.

http://wrd.cm/1cuKEWL

http://hotfops.tumblr.com/post/72064865374/high-tech-low-fashion-black-model-famous

[Thoughtful meditation on the shift from film to digital, although it seems like it may have been overzealously edited. -egg]

In late 2004, after graduating college, I scrounged together enough cash to buy my first real digital camera: the Nikon D70, which was almost identical to the 8008 except that, when the shutter opened, light hit an array of sensors rather than film. Even though that difference seemed small, the purchase made me nervous. I had developed hundreds, if not thousands, of rolls of black-and-white film in my badly ventilated, chemical-filled university apartment. Would I miss watching ghostly images appear from the silver halide salts, the sting of acetic acid on my hands and in my nostrils?

via Goodbye, Cameras : The New Yorker.

[Absolutely gorgeous. Follow the link for lots more pics. egg]

Completed in 2012, Serpent d’océan is a giant aluminum sea serpent skeleton by artist Huang Yong Ping previously situated off the shore of the Loire River where it empties into the Bay of Biscay just outside of Nantes, France. Measuring nearly 425 feet 130 meters in length the curving skeleton mirrors the curves of the nearby Saint-Nazaire bridge and was created as a permanent work for the final Estuaire contemporary art exhibition in 2012.

via A Giant Twisting Serpent Skeleton Emerges from the Loire River in France | Colossal.

[This is a whole world of awesome. -egg]

Lol My Thesis invites PhD candidates to submit snarky, one-sentence summaries of their theses.

“The patriarchy sucks and lesbians are awesome.”

“When a space rock goes in front of a star, you can’t see the star again until the rock moves.”

“Really, really thin semiconductors look different and act differently than really thin semiconductors because quantum mechanics. Also, 10 nanometers sounds really big now.”

“Self-image relates to ADHD by…well, this would’ve worked except people are actually wrong half the time about having ADHD.”

“My invasive fruit flies won’t have sex for me.”

via Lol My Thesis.

…I stumbled onto the work of Paolo Curcio (aka “mrthe”) who appears to have taken the process of carving coins to an entirely new level. Using a variety of different coins the Barcelona-based artist creates etched homages to pop culture, illustrations of figures from literature, and most commonly: macabre portraits of skulls and death, probably the most prevalent theme in hobo nickel art.

via Remarkable Hobo Nickels Carved from Clad Coins by Paolo Curcio | Colossal.

This apparent social indifference was viewed as central to the condition. Unfortunately, the theory also seemed to imply that autistic people are uncaring because they don’t easily recognize that other people exist as intentional agents who can be loved, thwarted or hurt. But while the Sally-Anne experiment shows that autistic people have difficulty knowing that other people have different perspectives—what researchers call cognitive empathy or “theory of mind”—it doesn’t show that they don’t care when someone is hurt or feeling pain, whether emotional or physical. In terms of caring—technically called affective empathy—autistic people aren’t necessarily impaired.

Sadly, however, the two different kinds of empathy are combined in one English word. And so, since the 1980s, this idea that autistic people “lack empathy” has taken hold.

via The boy whose brain could unlock autism — Matter — Medium.

What was exciting in 2009—this pairing of reverse-chronological content with the expectation that the web’s traditional and social media would be real-time— feels like a burden in 2013.

The early indications were when people started tossing around ideas like digital sabbaths and talking about FOMO (fear of missing out). But it was easy to think this was a niche feeling only for the media class and its associated hipsters across the country.

[…]

I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished. 

It’s hard to know when changes are happening. As someone who spends all day on the Internet, I would say that I sense it. But the evidence I can present to you is partial, incomplete, suggestive more than authoritative. In that vein, I would say that nowness is not going away, but the bundle of ideas that formed the metaphor of the The Stream is pulling apart.

via 2013: The Year ‘the Stream’ Crested – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic.