Author: Kars Alfrink

“Guitar Hero II will feature two rather awesome headline tracks – Freebird and Sweet Child o’ Mine” — hell yes, definately I game I need to get.

Publisher of interesting-looking Shaolin Cowboy created by the great Geof Darrow.

Fiat wants to create the new 500 brand together with its customers, presumably. Nice example of a co-created marketing experience. Via Iskander.

“ubiquitous capture is a process that means staying mindful, always having the collection tools you need nearby, and then using them.” — Mann on maintaining good habits and getting back into GTD.

“A leapfrog is the most ambitious an organization can be, and few organizations are actually equipped to make such a massive change.” Exactly why I chose the name for my own company. Sort of. Via Peter.

Weinberger raves about a new feature of LibraryThing. Worth checking out.

Article on NGC show that studies martial artists’ capabilities using a crash test dummies. Sadly no armed styles were tested.

Disturbing and fascinating article on the ways in which the Israeli Defence Forces uses contemporary architectural theory and philosophy in their war with Palestine. Particularly chilling are the descriptions of their “micro-tactical actions”.

Saffer argues that you should only bother with personas if you compose them of research into user goals and motivations, not shallow demographics.

“Sometimes to do the right thing, organizations have to be tricked into doing it.” — Saffer compares designers to the trickster figure. I feel like Loki once in a while too, so I can relate.

Keith enjoys V for Vendetta on DVD. Darn, know I might just have to go out and rent this anyway.

Handy for the occasional mind sweep: the full trigger list from Allen’s GTD.

Website of “a pervasive surveillance project”. “Imagine that you are walking down the street when you hear a beep from your phone. You see a message reading: “You were in a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park; are you in love?”” Intriguing, i

“Buy more shiny nokia phones, or something. It’s like living in the future.” Heathcote admits to loving his new Nokia E70, sort of.

Quite a thorough look at ways to elaborate on personas in order to make them more useful for use when designing more information-driven consumer-facing websites. Includes a link to a useful toolkit.

Post by Identity Crisis author Jim Harper on how fake ideas allow Sunni to safely travel through hostile territory controlled by Shiite. It puts the whole online federated identity debate into perspective.

Webb contemplates ancient British burrows and their implications for the concept of ownership.

Cooper explains how personas came to be: “The problem is that while logic is a powerful and effective programming tool, it is a pathetically weak and inappropriate interaction design tool.”

This is an excellent piece on the parallels between the evolution of online games and the practice of information architecture. There’s a lot to contemplate here, among those the impact of open standards on the formation of online communities.

Cool stuff; an old project of mine still appears to be online. I designed this game (an episodic multimedia whodunnit) while freelancing at Plinq for Dutch broadcaster KRO.

Mann reminds us of the fact that folders have a dangerous side too. All this GTD stuff has started to make me think Allen’s work is like IA for a specific persona: the knowledge worker.

A piece on doing GTD with an early version of Backpack. Still quite informative. Jason Fried’s comment on moving items between pages is quite interesting too… When is “shortly”, Jason?

A review of the intruiging indie RPG Lacuna Part I. Recently rereleased as a 2nd edition. Maybe I should buy it and give it a spin.

A howto on listening to your iTunes library while away from home.

On how to set up your iTunes library so multiple machines can tune in to the same music and stream them to multiple sound systems.

Insightful post by Zijlstra on the dynamics of social software; specifically how objects, people and their descriptors interact. I’ve actually succeeded in applying this model to a concept I’m developing for a client.

Cool custom made designer plush toys.

“a research project that focuses on the accessibility of electronic games for gamers with disabilities”

Thought provoking presentation by Matt Webb about what an open, instrumented, user-transformable and iterative city might look like. One way to read it is a counter-cultural internet-lover’s view of architecture’s future. Does that make sense?

Flash nostalgia, via Bernard.

The best darn sea salt on the planet. Via Micon.

A search engine that learns from your community’s search behavior.

Jaiku is a phone book that displays the real-time presence and location of your contacts.

Mobile personal media publishing app for S60 phones.

“Old” but good post on using Backpack with GTD. I’ve been experimenting quite a bit myself lately but am mostly using it at work contrary to Frank, who prefers to use it for personal stuff.

More by Frank on GTD. I’m not really into using Backpack’s tags for contexts. But interesting nonetheless.

MacManus observes that most web 2.0 apps outside the US and UK are clones of successful concepts. This is also true for Dutch apps as it appears from this overview. For some types of apps (such as social networking) I can imagine a local version fulfills

A list of top horror films, mostly “modern” titles.

Another list of top horror movies, some good oldies in here.

A pretty decent introduction to Subversion for web designers and developers. We use it at the office for revision control of design docs and code.

Biddulph writes up some thoughts on working with thinglink. Fun stuff.

A collection of high level patterns for web 2.0 interoperability using thinglink as an example. Good introduction to APIs for non-techs.

The Hipster PDA is a “greatly simplified device for capturing and sharing information” that is “vastly superior” to any Palm.

“Really Useful Products do a 35 litre box that fits the 12 monthly and 31 daily tickler files with quite a bit of room to spare. The box takes A4 and Foolscap files on rails moulded into the box”