I’m sorry to say that there may be a little downtime on the horizon. I’m transferring this domain from it’s current host to (mt) – where the site is physically hosted. It’s silly for me to be paying two suppliers in order to keep the Urban Mainframe online and there are some additional benefits in (mt) domain hosting that I’ll take advantage of including email services and DNS management.

It’ll take around 48 hours for the DNS changes to propagate fully so the dust should start to settle over the coming weekend.

See you on the flip-side…

The much-anticipated (especially by yours truly) Nikon D90 has Live View, a 12.3 megapixel sensor (shared with the D300), GPS tagging and shoots HD720p video! I’m suffering from gadget envy yet again. [via]

An extremely well conceived and produced video mix. Incredible editing results in a very convincing bit of footage. The Empire is striking back.

I want to remodel my rather drab and cold computer workspace¹ but I’m not quite sure what I want to do with the small amount of space my Macintosh lives in. And so I’ve spent a few hours browsing through workspace photos on Flickr for inspiration and, adopting ideas from a variety of home and office photographs, I think I’ll be able to create the perfect workspace for myself.

What follows is a gallery of those workspaces I found most appealing, with a concise commentary on what qualities appealed to me.

1. I love the simplicity and warmth of this workspace. The lighting here looks absolutely perfect for long hours in front of the computer. I think the desk lamps are gorgeous² and the lack of visible cabling is very appealing.

Continue Reading…

The pace of technology steadily increases, new fields of science are heavily explored and innovative concepts emerge almost every day, resulting in stunning and overwhelming products. The impact of these products can be tremendous: in fact, new technology can completely revolutionize the way we play, communicate, work and live our lives. Some of these products are just eye-candy, some are useful, some are visionary and some may become revolutionary in the next years.

People are willing to automate their current processes but not change them. They think they’re already doing it the right way. Big companies have to standardise their processes across all their different locations if they want to automate efficiently. That requires a lot of change, and a lot of resistance to that change is inevitable.

- Larry Ellison

(Quotation from “Softwar, An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle” by Matthew Symonds, page 35)

It always amazes me how, when one is innocently browsing the Web, following a link can suddenly reveal an Internet gem that has previously been lost amongst billions of pages of white-noise. This happened to me yesterday - while idly clicking links on Designslices, I discovered the fabulous SpaceCollective - a website that then kept me thoroughly engrossed for hours.

“Space Collective.org is a cross-media information and entertainment channel for post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking terrestrials.”

Along with being beautifully designed and easy to navigate, SpaceCollective features some gorgeous imagery and, most importantly, interesting, informative and thought-provoking articles.

My favourite pages include:

• Megan’s Epiphany
• Perceiving Infinity: Schematic Portals into The Mind of God
• Becoming Immortal
• Start Your Own Revolution

So if you’ve got several hours (or days) to kill, head on over to SpaceCollective for some serious mental stimulation.

Unboxing a mint Apple //c - twenty years after it was originally sold. Awesome! [via]

Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. Ten recent developments in the field of user experience design are presented here. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality and in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.

“The Web has a particular architecture and it makes sense that if you are deploying a service or API on the Web then it should take advantage of this architecture instead of fighting against it. There are millions of deployed clients, servers and intermediaries that support REST and it makes sense to be compatible with their expectations.” [via]