This has to be the best concept rendering I’ve ever seen. Saikat Biswas designed these mock-ups to illustrate his concept for an open-source camera platform based on the original Holga camera. But unlike the original, Saikat has applied some tried and true Rams/Braun-esque styling to the exterior that’s sure to inspire lust in the hearts of design geeks everywhere. Check his full post and you’ll see he’s really thought the whole thing out. Apparently he’s received quite a bit of interest so hopefully this thing makes it to production someday. I’m not sure, but didn’t Lomography buy the rights to the Holga a while back? Saikat might have an easier time if he gave it a different name.
One of the best music licensings this summer has to be the Cadillaccommercial using Lindstrom & Christabelle’sLovesick, it works great plus i’m happy to see some slow disco touching the mainstream market. Check out this beautiful job that Four Tet does with the track.
The new Panda Bear album coming sounds really really promising, I hope its a Top 10 album of the year, I have a feeling after hearing this it’s going to be a solid listen.
More Four Tet but now it’s his turn to be remixed by none other than his labelmate Caribou, reminds me a bit of Apparat and James Holden.
A shortie but easily a goodie, just don’t think about how Kanye West ruined the chipmunk vocal effect and you’ll be fine, oh wait…
I posted on Neil Krug a while back (original post link) but I stumbled on his Flickr again today and was pleasantly surprised by some great new work he’s posted since then. From what I’ve heard he uses expired Polaroid film to get that vintage look. I think someone needs to forward Neil’s portfolio to Tame Impala’s manager.
You can check out more of Neil’s work at his Flickr.
After a weekend of playing with Tycho, Mux Mool, The Sight Below and Solvent, Shigeto offers up a FREE 5 song EP for your listening pleasure. The songs have an array of influences ranging from jazz, IDM and Detroit instrumental hip hop and he also gives us a sneak peek of what’s to come on his first LP Full Circle which is coming out this fall. Download the EP here. I highly recommend the song Grandma’s Words / Rise Out Of The Stone, it grows beautifully.
Below is a sample of what Shigeto shares on his soundcloud account which includes a few unreleased song.
Qus Qus is the design studio of Dima Kuzmichev. This work is super clean — I feel like if I ran a corporation of any kind, I would have Dima do my annual report. Especially if we were based in Iceland and wanted to make our wind power turbines seem sexy. There is a cold perfectionism at work here. Great grid work, some beautiful type, pretty much everything you need. I was also really impressed with the logowork. The one for Artisanale was my favorite (and the name sounds awesome to boot).
Marian Bantjes is one of those designers whose work I’ve seen often but never put it all together as being from the same artist. Browsing her very deep portfolio you’ll find everything from high school savant ballpoint pen drawings to hyper-maximalist pattern collages. Everything in it is overflowing with passion and Marian’s unwavering reverence for detail is truly something beautiful. Check out her portfolio for more. Also check out Marian’s TED talk (via Leigh)
Via @Nopattern, which is perfect because it’s interesting to note the overlaps between some of their word art.
It’s been almost a year now since I wrote my first post on data backup so I thought I’d do a follow-up and detail the backup scheme I ended up going with.
The original scheme was fundamentally flawed in that the off-site backup was still pretty susceptible to loss, damage, or theft and wasn’t truly off-site in the broad geographical sense. I was simply storing it at a house about three blocks away. Given the spacing (or lack thereof) of buildings in San Francisco, a few blocks means very little considering the ever-present threat of earthquake and/or fire.
So with that in mind, and after reading through the comments of the original post, I took Eydryan’s advice and looked into Backblaze. Backblaze is an online backup service for PC and Mac that allows unlimited data storage for $5/month per machine. This seemed a little too good to be true but I gave it a shot anyways. Much to my surprise, the service not only works, it works flawlessly and is about as dead-simple as anyone could ask for. It’s a little oversimplified for my tastes — being a PC user I’m more accustomed to layers-deep menus with infinite settings and options — but it does its job and does it well.
Backblaze in action (Also available for Mac)
I’ve been on Backblaze for around three weeks now and I’ve pushed up about 400GB of the 987GB total I have set to backup. Obviously the initial backup is pretty slow and depends a lot on your connection speed (I’m on Comcast), but I just allow it to crank away all day in the background and it hasn’t yet interfered much with any of my day to day activities. The internet has been a little sluggish lately while it’s moving everything up for the first time, but it’s a temporary annoyance and well worth it. I suppose I could just run it at night, but I’ve opted to let it go 24/7 to get the initial backup out of the way as soon as possible. I’ll probably be done backing up around the two month mark at which point Backblaze will begin incrementally updating files I’ve changed on my side. All the backups are encrypted so only I can view or access my files, which is a good feeling when you’re posting your life’s work to someone else’s data center.
As for local backup, I’m running an internal mirror drive which I then backup to an external which is still stored off-site. That’s a total of three physical copies of the data to which I have easy access. Backblaze is great for peace of mind in case of catastrophic loss, but when you just screwed up a 3GB PSB and need to go back a version, you really don’t want deal with the downtime involved in pulling it down from a server.
I’ve never felt this confident in terms of data security, the combination of local and online backup is virtually foolproof and gives me the best of both worlds in terms of ease of access and security. It’s actually sort of scary looking back at that first post and realizing how long I lived with the old system, catastrophe was just a careless neighbor away.
Tom Croose and Slow Hands make up Worst Friends, both of them have contributed amazing exclusive work for the ISO50 with playlists, mixes, remixes, edits, and covers of artists like Van Morrison, Beirut, Fleetwood Mac and M83. Both of them are great guys, they were my DJ partners when I moved to Brooklyn and now release on Future Classics and Wolf+Lamb and also “Tom” is getting married this summer, congrats guys on this 12″ release.
A new Sun Kil Moon album is out and i’m loving it all the way thru, check out the Mark Kozelek playlist I put together awhile back.
This weekend I watched a Thavius Beck ableton sort of lecture on how he uses his Beat Repeat, it was pretty enjoyavble so I went back to find a track for the blog and found this gem, is this an Outkast song? I don’t know enough about Outkast sadly.
The Books have a new album coming out, i’m huge fan, the guys in that group definitely have influenced many musicians I know, this new one sounds like if you made Lemon Jelly and DJ Shadow work together 8 years ago, which to me is a great thing.
