Art

I’ve just purchased Radiohead’s new album “In Rainbows” (no, I didn’t order the discbox, just the download) and I’m currently listening to it. Ordering was nearly as easy as purchasing music from the iTunes Store which is definitely a plus. After registering an account (no activation email) and entering your credit card infos you get the link to some zip file which contains the songs as mp3 files (160 kbps, some people are complaining about the quality, I don’t. It’s okay for me for the price I’ve paid).

I did it only halfway through the album by now but from what I can say now it’s great. Their sound is quite different compared to the last few albums, I would classify it among OK Computer and Amnesiac. If you wanna have a better sound quality, wait for the discbox or till the album is in stores by next year. And if you’re looking for some cover artwork, see John Hick’s thread and the comments.

iWoz
JavaScript - The Definitive Guide
Object Thinking
The Art of Interactive Design

Got iWoz and JavaScript today via Amazon (sneak peaked into it), Object Thinking is a bit boring at the beginning but overally good and informative (some background infos which save you some googling).

I told you previously that one of my favourite search tags on Flickr is ‘loft’. That’s because I like to see how other people live, what their homes look like, what ideas they have to make their rooms nicer, more beautiful.

Lately I’ve found some new design blogs (you may have noticed this when you’re checking my del.icio.us bookmarks) and one of them, Apartment Theraphy has a nice feature called ‘House Tours’ - now you can guess what that means. I especially liked this one, home of Silvia and Axel (a German), the wall sculpture you can see in the picture.

Don’t get me wrong, I really love iTunes and the iTunes Store but thinking about prices… I’ve just paid 12 Euros for an album, if I would buy it via Amazon it would cost me 11 Euros and some waiting for the parcel to arrive. But I would get a real CD and a booklet, so more value for my money.

According to this article on CNET Apple has the same price scheme for every country, 0.99 Euros/US-Dollars/Canadian Dollars. I pay $ 1.31 for a song, a Canadian pays 83 Cents - that isn’t really fair, is it? I would really like to know how Apple justifies these differences. Maybe they need to save some money for their lawyers’ costs.

I’ve found a wonderful piece of design work today on Swissmiss, a blog I’ve discovered a few days ago which provides me with great inspiration every day. One of the last posts showed a clipboard by Felix Stark, which is nice, but Derina is even nicer. I bet you can do that on your own.

Taken in Stockholm, Sweden. Original image on Flickr.

Douglas Coupland on jPod

• How to confuse spam-bots: [current year] at domain dot com Found on Amit Gupta

• Instrumental music is underrated - So we are thinking the burdens

• I love cute dogs, but I hate those ho ho ho hats on Flickr

Assembled by Last.fm:

1. Nick Drake
2. Moby
3. Snow Patrol
4. Elliott Smith
5. Bernard Fanning
6. José González
7. The Cardigans
8. Norah Jones
9. Wilco
10. Jeff Buckley

Not including the music from my iPod.

Via kottke.org

Happy new year, by the way!

Sometime ago - nearly two years in a few weeks time - I wrote about Ikea modding, back then still in German. Well, as a fellow reader of my blog you know that I love browsing Flickr for photos tagged with ‘loft’. Today I stumbled over some pretty cool loft-workplace pictures and visited the guy’s blog (don’t ask me for the url, I really can’t remember) and suddenly I found myself on ikea hacker. Great blog, some really good ideas and I can’t wait to go to the Ikea store in Vienna after I come back.