The Evolution of the Web is an interactive graphic created by Hyperakt charting the rise and change of various technologies and browsers since the birth of the web.
Each browser is shown within a timeline with screen captures of their various versions, plotted against their support for standards and technologies that appear as time progresses.
This induced flashbacks of the horror of coding for IE3 and Netscape.
One of my photos of Stockwell bus garage in South London. The huge arched concrete roof was designed by Adie, Button and Partners, with the engineer A E Beer.
When it was built in 1952 it was the largest unsupported area under one roof in Europe, and is now a Grade II listed building thanks to the campaigning of, amongst others, Will Self, who lives nearby.
When I was growing up and first riding a proper bike I had a knocked about old 10-speed racer built up from a frame pulled out of the local lake. But once my brother left home, I was allowed to ride the bike handed down to him from my dad, an original cream curly stay Hetchins produced in the mid 1960s.
The curly stays were allegedly to improve the ride over bad roads and cobbles, but they certainly served another purpose as a unique identifier, along with the over-worked frame lugs.
The original rarities now command very high prices but they are still produced in very small numbers today.
Photos via period-correct
Just spent a very enlightening few days finding my way around scalable vector graphics (SVG) code. Incredibly powerful stuff, as I hope the slightly hypnotic animation I created above shows. As more and more browsers support the SVG standard natively, complex, scalable, low impact graphics without the need for Flash will become a reality.
Currently however the tools available to create, edit and animate SVGs are not mature. Paths and designs can be created in a variety of applications including Illustrator and Inkscape, but animation support is almost non-existent. To make the sequence above meant converting the initial vector shapes into SVG and then hand coding the transforms and animations line by line in a text editor.
One of my beloved cameras. Contaflex were 35mm SLR cameras produced by the German Zeiss company in the 50s and 60s. This particular one is a Contaflex I, featuring a between-the-lens leaf shutter in a lovely Zeiss Tessar 45mm f:2.8 lens.
This thing is built like a tank, has amazing optics and has zero electrical components. On the downside, the lens and shutter system is unbelieveably complex and if it goes wrong it is really fiddly to mend. I have disassembled two of these to free shutter blades that were sticking and believe me it isn't something I'd recommend.
It is now having other issues; the mirror silvering has begun to peel off and the prism has a small ding, meaning the viewfinder image is flawed. I may try to resurrect this one, or try to find a happier example to replace it.
I'm really impressed by some of the illustrations by Matthew Hollister, particularly this one in TimeOut for a story exploring the links between the BBM network and the London riots.
via grain edit
A video I shot recently of a nautical radar station on the south coast near Winchelsea.
This is just an experiment for me to test embedding using the video tag as well as to try encoding using the Theora Ogg and vp8 codecs, and see how they perform on multiple devices and operating systems.