Think of HAL from 2001 and Alfred from Batman, and your not to far away from the Speaking ringtones I created for my 802se. If you have MP3 playback on your phone and can set your ringtone and alarm tones (and others if you have a smartphone), then you should def. take a listen to these. I think computerized voices are super cool and ever since WarGames, I have been hooked. You know that

I had to clear out my storage unit and found I had a HUGE assortment of imported Action Figures (from Hong Kong and Japan) that I just can hold on to anymore. If any of you are interested, please drop me a line. I posted the lot on Craigslist.com as well, so please help me, by buying something! No offer overlooked! View Imported Action Figures on Craigslist.com

If you liked the Dizzee Rascal release I mentioned earlier, another (this time Female) rugged and raw Brit Hop rapper from the XL record label is blowing up. Maya Arulpragasam aka M.I.A. as she is known on her record releases, emigrated from Sri Lanka in the late 80's due to civil unrest and made her home in London. Since then she has become an underground success. Her voice has a very pleasant,

One of my all time favorite industrial design artifacts is the Intermodal Freight Container aka Shipping Container. Its one of those ubiquitous design artifacts that hovers under ones nose just about all the time. Its become so common place to most people that its not even thought of as an 'artifact', but more like one additional piece of flotsam in the jetsam of urban industrial life. Not for

If you don't know, QR Codes are a variant of the Barcode, but in 3D space (most popular in Japan currently, but you can see them on your UPS shipping labels here). Basically a square with a number of control points that store various snippets of data. Anything from your typical mobile phone vCard information, a website URL, a general text note, etc. They are pretty common in Japan for getting

Just after the RES screenings on Monday at The Egyptian theater, I passed this non-descript building that had some striking redish-pink neon light sculptures on the outer wall. I dont have a clue what was really in this building, but I snapped some camera phone images and made this montage. It had a geisha girl on the front door as well. View: Screening Info at RES.com View: The Egyptian

I have been really looking forward to this, after seeing all the previz sketches and photoshop mockups... finally after the torrential downpours subsided, the sign installers were able to assemble and mount the new Idealab globe/thought bubbles logo on the building. I think that it looks awesome, the colors are VERY vivid and the Idealab type is well rendered; aluminum, and clean. This is one

I just got this link from a friend of mine Tom at Polychrome, "Its perfect for your blog" as he mentioned it. I will agree with him on this one. I LOVE bento, and while I was traveling in Japan (in 2001), had many. I also used to work in Downtown LA many years ago and frequented the local Japanese grocery store in Little Tokyo, they had a great selection of pre-made sandwich bentos... so

So I finally was able to get my hands on a Vodaphone 802se from Japan. I somehow won an auction on eBay for this phone, what luck! After I got the phone I had to go through the whole unlocking process. This is something I have never done before, and to make it even harder, you have to do this on a Windows machine (no Mac capability yet). You also need a couple things previous to unlocking your

To celebrate 5 years in business, jetBlue is now flying people from Burbank to New York and back for $99! This is so cool. I have been wanting jetBlue to expand their coverage of California and my dream has come true (blue)! With the inflight multichannel digital TV and leather seats, who needs peanuts, I will bring my own snacks. I think SouthWest is going to have to start bolstering their

With the release of the newer Powerbooks, Apple has included an updated USB TrackPad (replacing the ADB TrackPad) and some pseudo-proprietary two-finger scrolling features. I say pseudo because it turns out that some of the older Powerbooks and iBook support the enhanced scrolling. A few Mac hack sites have posted these app/hack links to get the enhanced scrolling features to work on pre-2005

This is an online bitfont editor for both Mac and Windows from pentacom.jp. You basically hand draw, pixel by pixel, your complete alpha/numeric typeface; then save to a TTF file for use in any of your design work. Pretty awesome if you ask me. I sourced the online app from FontLeech, a great blog that focuses on, you guessed it, Fonts. It has some links to some great free fonts online, as well

I just caught this link on the FontShop website, and I gotta say its pretty awesome to see two of my previous professional associates (and friends) were invited to participate, Erik Spiekermann and Joachim M. Erik is of course the founder of MetaDesign and creator of the Meta typface. Joachim is founder of TypeBox and a multilingual type designer (designing fonts for both Japanese and Roman