Via the teaser site at tv.be

Such silence always means the same thing: lazyness, pure and utter lazyness.
And doing other things, not taking the time to talk about ‘em.

More of that now.. See you later!


Made with Face of, crappy face replacement osx tool by Pill & Pillow

Comment on kingoftrash.be

It’s a project aimed at giving more attention to design in the streets of Hasselt. It consists of two parts: an installation that will be placed in art center Z33 from september 16th, allowing to browse a map with designs in the city and to print out postcards of it. The second part is a site with the same functionalities where people can contribute by sharing pictures and descriptions of design they love.

Objets trouvés was conceived by product designer Wim Buts who was selected for the Toegepast12 design presentation by Design Platform Limburg. Wim contacted me to help realize his project. Among others, he took care of the content and the visuals. My contribution included designing the interface and developing the website.

I’d been wanting to toy around with the Google maps API for a while and this project was a good excuse to get that of my todo list. The Google maps resources that were most helpful were: Google mapki, the maps group on Google groups and Mike Williams’ tutorials. There’s plenty of examples to get you started so basic things are pretty easy to make. It just gets a bit harder when you want to combine specific functionalities from examples. The hardest part in development was making sure everything was working cross browser. The javascript ànd the CSS. Like many times IE6 proved to be a royal pain in the ass.

Then there’s the backoffice. All the data is stored on our server and it feeds the javascript via an XML file. I decided to try out a cakePHP to whip up this basic backoffice to approve and manage entries. Cake is a rapid development framework using the model-view-controller pattern. W.o.w. this experience makes me want to throw away all the previous CMS code I’ve built from scratch. I’ve only learned the basics of cake yet but already it’s clear that this the way to go: faster development time, clear code structure, OO approach,.. This is good stuff.

The installation at Z33 is a slimmed down version of the website. Visitors will only be able to use the mouse. We’re using a kiosk extension for Firefox to limit their possibilities, present the site in full screen and print the postcards without a dialog box popping up.

That’s it. Now go to Hasselt, take some pictures and post them on the site. I want some content there :^)
And if you happen to print out some postcards with the installation, feel free to send me one.

After living for a year in the shadow of the Boerentoren in Antwerp I’m moving to the center of Brussels. I’m looking forward to live there. It’s all going to be pretty new. Even tho I lived close to Brussels for most of my life I didn’t spend much time in the capital. It’s going to be a fresh start: a new job, clicking and scrolling with the peeps at Saatchi during the day, and discovering the city at night.

The new fritser headquarters will be based at the Anneessensplein. Right in the center, not the most friendly of neighbourhoods, but close to e-ve-ry-thing. It’s right there:

View larger map

It’s worth noting that the map is placed here with the new google maps embed method. Now you can easily embed an iframe instead of requesting an api key and calling and adjusting some javascript. Cool, quoi. Strange that they didn’t build this feature much sooner.

Anyway, sometime soon, apartment warming party in BXL!

Paper Critters is an online application that allows you to create and share paper toys in 3D.
It’s the final project of JR Fabito, a student of Computer Arts New Media.
That’s what I call graduating with style. The site received a FWA site of the day award, it’s hip, looks good, works like a charm and it uses the übercool Papervision 3D Flash engine. I bet the interactive agencies will be fighting to hire this guy.

Upload your picture, press a ‘Simpsonize it’ button, tweak the image a bit and you’ve got your own Simpsons character. Works wonderfull!

I could start bitching that this player is missing a fullscreen function, that the video is cropped poorly and that the buttons are too small.. but no.. nono.. it’s al goood :^)
Memories of Marktrock Leuven a few years ago are coming back, with a marketplace full of dudeskis with a stupid smile on their face, clapping along with the movements on the stage. And their was music too.
Life is good.

Often in the very first steps of the process my approach is to browse to many sites like google and flickr and compile all sorts of sources in a folder. This is a fun thing to do but it can take a lot of time if you have to enter the same keywords in different sites all the time.

Enter netvibes, a website that allows you to create pages full of modules and rss feeds. I put many existing netvibes search modules in one netvibes tab, allowing me to search tons of resources easily: regular search, blogs, podcasts, video, books, images,… This is a super search to make moodboarding a whole lot faster.

One thing I’m still missing is a way to enter the keywords in all the search modules at once. According to netvibes it’s possible with the personal search but this is not working for me. Maybe I should one day write a greasemonkey userscript for it… NOT :^)
You can add the tab to your netvibes here:



There are probably other ways to make a custom search on steroids like this. For one there’s Googles iGoogle which also has some seach modules.

I’m wondering, what do other people use to look for gold? Or am I missing some great Netvibes modules that should be added to the recipe?