Microsoft:

October 07, 2012:

WOOP!

Portraits Drawn with Tea, Vodka, Whiskey and Ink by Carne Griffiths:




UK-based illustrator Carne Griffiths creates these striking portraits with uncommon mediums such as tea brandy, vodka, whiskey, graphite and calligraphy ink. His drawings most frequently explore human and floral forms, as says he’s “fascinated by the flow of line and the ‘invisible lines’ that connect us to the natural world.” The four pieces above are part of a limited edition postcard set just released by Griffiths, each of which comes in a fancy custom-illustrated, wax-sealed envelope. He also has a solo show at Ink-d Gallery in Brighton that closes this Saturday. (via behance)

Magnetized Cyanotype Butterfly Installations by Tasha Lewis:







For the past few months Indianapolis-based artist Tasha Lewis has been traveling around the country creating guerrilla installations using a swarms of 400 cyanotype butterflies printed on cotton fabric (cyanotype is a photographic printing process that results in blue images, just like blueprints). Each blue insect is embedded with powerful magnets allowing her to place them on any metallic surface without causing damage, which as far as impermanent street art goes, is brilliant. Of her work she says:

My current body of work was drawn from an investigation into the cultural/scientific/historical context in which the cyanotype was born. Popularized by scientists, and botanists in particular, the cyanotype is intrinsically tied into the scientific recording boom of the late 19th and early 20th century. These are the times of the curiosity cabinet, the prints of Anna Atkins and a rush of explorers/scientists to colonial lands only to bring back specimens from foreign ecosystems. [.. ] The cyanotype is a process of documenting. The resultant image is a kind of scientific stand-in for the actual object in question. It is the trace of the original. In this way, like cyanotype’s use for building blue prints in more recent centuries, my work is formed as the re-presentation of something real; it is somehow not quite the object itself.”

Tasha has published photos of numerous installations on her Tumblr, definitely worth a look. (via empty kingdom)

Popular synthesizer manufacturer wants you to print out your own replacement knobs:

OP-1 synthesizer manufacturer Teenage Engineering doesn’t want to ship you replacement knobs and buttons for your instrument. Instead, they’ve uploaded printable shapefiles to Shapeways and have asked their customers to simply download them and print them on a nearby 3D printer as needed. This appears to be the first time a manufacturer has taken such a step, according to a Shapeways blog-post. Here’s the official statement from Teenage Engineering:

We work hard to make our OP-1 users happy with free OS updates and added functionality. But sometimes we fail. As some have noted, the shipping cost of the OP-1 accessories is very high. This is because we can’t find a good delivery service for small items. Meanwhile, we have decided to put all CAD files of the parts in our library section for you to download. The files are provided in both STEP and STL format. Just download the files and 3D print as many as you want. Next fail is the OP-1 manual update. We are almost there…we promise it will be ready sometime next week. Thank you all for your patience, we promise to work even harder in the future to make you happy.

Embracing 3-D Printers, Manufacturer Tells Customers to Print Their Own Replacement Parts

[Oh, are we up to that already? -egg]

Entire, working mobile phone with SIM free in this week’s Entertainment Weekly:

This week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly sports a live-tweeting interactive video display. The folks from Mashable did a teardown to see how this was accomplished, and discovered that there is a complete (albeit without a case or keypad) Foxconn Android phone glued between the pages, along with a T-Mobile SIM. By poking around, they were even able to make phonecalls with it.

They didn’t show what happened if you put the SIM in another phone, which would be a neat trick, and I also wondered about the injunction to turn off mobile devices for takeoff and landing.

We Found a Free Smartphone Embedded Inside Entertainment Weekly

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

[This is totally awesome. -egg
PS — video, too!]
Mitt Romney agrees with you: Use the RoboRomney service to fill in your positions on issues from abortion to the economy to gun-control, and the system will mine a database of real Romney quotes to produce a position paper in which the candidate agrees with everything you say.