It amazes me how non-relevant this topic is, particularly nowadays when there can be little reason to entice a consumer to engage in letting loose of whatever cash they may have. By the time we get out of the current morass of mistrust, misspending and misguided expectations of a world where all the growth graphs go…

I swear to GOD this is a friend’s “sig” line in her emails (she’s the hardest working IT person at a university department with lots of whining, illegal-software-downloading, computer-breaking-and-never-fixing, softdrink-drinking-right-by-fancy-computer-equipment students, so I have complete sympathy.)

Seen in the "Funplex" — a warning sign that prepares those not used to losing that they may in fact obtain nothing for their time and perhaps even lose something in exchange for the token they use to have a whirl at the crane game (try and hoist out a bundle of tickets which can be used to get things – mostly crap —…

Continuing on my strange pursuit of designing weird interfaces that disrupt conventional game interaction rituals, I put together a bit more of my “PSX” project. You probably don’t recall, but this is the project where I’ve created a little “dongle” that can fool a PS2 (or Playstation 3, as it turns out..) into thin…

Tending to the digital garden here, replacing a small-oldish laptop hard drive (90 GB) for a larger one (320 GB). Going through this ritual made me think about what gets old and how things begin to fail, or need to be retired, or stored for the winter, or, like the roses in our backyard, deadheaded.. In this case, I…

Improvisation enacted to overcome a secured door that is probably the most often used in the studio, sitting near to the kitchen and coffee machines (and the sadly defunct espresso machine..) A stapler used to keep a door open helps one poor sould evades the secure RFID lock. Likely, their secure card was left on th…

Anticipating the less-than-lovely side of ubiquitous computing scenarios, this photo is the end point of a circuitous GPS navigation FAIL on the way to relatives for Thanksgiving dinner last week. Looks like we’re driving into the river there. After what we went through, it wouldn’t surprise me if the GPS lady sent…

Curious strategy for preventing bumper dings — a bumper for the bumper, you might say. It’s the Mobile De-fender. (Get it? De Fender?) You will see material like this for preventing a lower category of bump, such as a “light tap” from negotiating a tricky parallel parking job, or even the deliberate tap to inch a ca…

There’s a story here. The bottle smashed on the ground is a lovely blue-green glass with a Sake label of some sort on it, probably from the pocket-sized Sake specialty store 10 meters or so back down the block. I don’t know if the smashed bottle, and the janky protective garbage bag over the driver’s side window her…