The Makezine has a neat project in the recent issue, that triggers my heart with the Atari-beat: so cool, it almost hurts! Unfortunately I did not get any issue of this magazine here in Germany yet, but it looks like you can build this thing on your own. The according project-site on the Makezine delivers the schematics for building this, as well as a program-file download to upload this on any microcontroller. Homebrew to take away, if you like.

This box was designed and developed by the people over at Uncommon Projects. They have very interesting projects on their site, so be sure to visit it. I was wondering if there is a market for things like that. Retro-nostalgia hardware, that is free from hassle and remain at the roots of cool stuff. The success from the Macintosh was also based on take-away versus to assemble at home. Maybe this wonder will happen again?

If you use the Firefox (98% of the hands rise) and are into designing and developing websites, than I have a very special tip for you. Firebug is the best Firefox add-on, that make debugging, analyzing, creating and designing of css-themes extremely easy. It’s a powerful tool that let you design, change and redesign a whole website within seconds. You almost work with your website in a graphical way, like using an illustrator application, but in fact all changes are made on the css. Changes are stored in the temporarily memory of the tool, so you can build upon changes you made earlier and morph and redesign the complete css also “just for testing puroses”. When satisfied, just copy the css and paste it into the file on the webserver.

With Firebug you can test out ideas very quickly or visually explain the design methods, while your customer is sitting next to you. Even for debugging it’s got great features. One example: for every element you browse, you’ll get all css-data that is affected and relevant for this special element on the website – even the inherited lines of code, and also the ones that were inherited, but overwritten (marked with a strike).

Download it at Firefox Add-ons or on the Firebug Website.

[ via CForms ]

Update: The Download Day will be on Tuesday, 17. June 2008. Have a good time in downloading FF3!

The browser Firefox 3 wants to get the world record for the most downloaded tool within 24 hours. On the so called “Download Day” you can submit your mail-address to get the latest information. You “pledge”, that you will download the browser on that day. Just right at the moment the amount of people who promised to download Firefox 3 on that day is impressive. Just take a look at the live-update, interactive map.

[ via Gulli ]

Streetartist blublu.org made an amazing video, that will let you ask foremost one question: How much time did the people spend to make this video? “Motu” basically shows an animation, that was entirely filmed outside or to be more precise: on walls or abandoned places. With chalk they animate morphing figures all over walls in the city. Each frame leaves a white trail, that was the “animation frame” from the picture before, resulting in a very interesting visual effect.

The whole movie is somehow based upon surprise and there are scenes, that simply will make you wonder, because the play of light, animation, spacial situation and camera perspective is simply awesome! Thumbs up for the idea and the work invested. A unique piece of art.

Another piece called Livorno by blublu.

[ via Stylespion ]

Today I discovered a great pictureset on flickr, that deals with under-appreciated architectonic elements, that are often associated with “transport” und “wasted space”. The talk is about “Interchanges”. Ken Ohyama takes pictures in Japan of this motorway-elements from the foot passenger point of view. Most pictures were taken at night with long exposure and reveal the magic of this forgotten spaces within the city body. The pictures remind me both on a mystical game world, as well as the unlimited imagination of toys with the ability to think anything, in order to build it. The streets look like moody rollercoasters, while the ghostly pictures somehow talk.

May is a lazy month! That’s why the Round-Up will be short. I had also lots of stuff to work and mostly wrote my thoughts directly in here. Besides… we had two highlights this month with the Flex-Actionscript-tutorial and the Winamp-Interview with Justin Frankel.

1.

A short movie, that played right into my heart! Musicotherapy is wicked day at a therapists-center. In this cartoon the doctor is very sensitive against noises, while the inhabitants of the house can’t stop to play music. This movie is also a contribution to the Bitfilm-Festival 2008 in the category 3D space award, feel free to vote!

2.

Another short movie with similar color-scapes. Not as brilliant as the work above, but something nice to entertain. The characters expressions are somehow… cute?

3.

Okay, this is old stuff, but it blasted my mind! The Yellow Magic Orchestra and their view upon the technopolis city Tokyo. Sometimes… I just love the 80ies.

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The Toriton Plus is a very interesting music controller. It transforms movements of water into sounds. The motion of the water is detected by lasers. The sounds in the video give a nice Oval-like drift, making this a very smooth music instrument.