We find ourselves spending a lot of time sifting through product review websites as we try to make smart purchases. This can be a tedious process, and often we end up more unsure of what we’re looking for than when we started. That’s why we were really excited to discover The Wirecutter ,”a list of only great technology”. Run by Brian Lam, a former Gizmodo and Wired writer, the site lists “the best” in gadgets, from phones and TVs to cables and wireless music, to vacuum cleaners and electric toothbrushes.
We came across the site while researching portable hard drives, and really loved the layout of Lam’s reviews.Lam names the Lenovo Thinkpad USB 3.0 Secure Hard Drive as the best, but gives a thorough explanation of his choice and offers a couple of cheaper options that he still recommends. At the end of his write-ups, he includes a list of the “best sources” on his product choices, so you have easy access to a few other reputable reviews and his evaluation process.
Best of all, we like the way he thinks. read more…
We recently stumbled on a cool Japanese site that will instantly transmute any photo you upload to an aged version “like over 100 to 150 years old.”
On the upper right corner of the site you can ‘English’ to see a translation. You choose the file where it says to, and then click the blue box below it to upload. Wait a minute and you’ll your photo transformed.
The photo above is the vintage-ized version of this one we took of Palais Royale in Paris a couple of years ago:
Like everyone we know, we have a growing pile of books that we’ve been wanting to sell, to cut down on clutter and make a few bucks in the process. We recently discovered BookScouter, a website that tells you how much your used books are worth to a variety of online retailers.
The best part is that they pay for shipping (book rate) and provide labels, making selling books fairly simple—you just have to pack them up and drop them off when you are making a trip to the post office. We decided to test the process out to see if it’s really that easy. If you’re looking to sell, here’s the deal, start to finish: read more…
(Video link here.) Ekso Bionics, creators of a robotic exoskeleton that enables paraplegics to walk, has created a compelling video about their remarkable invention. Much of the video is of Amanda Boxtel, an early product tester, who has not walked since she sustained an spinal cord injury 20 years ago (though she has mastered – and taught – many sitting-down sports.) Watching her, and listening to her speak of her experience, is to be reminded of – and really “get” - the little ordinary things that we take for granted…“putting my heal on the ground…being able to bend my knee..taking a step and then another step…a walk in nature.”
(Video link here.) I tend to have mixed feelings about the growing number of options for social networking. I’ve definitely noticed my own reliance on social networks making me a little more self-indulgent and a little less personal in my communications with friends. But the power of social networking sites to create communities for people greatly in need of them never ceases to amaze me. Case in point: I Had Cancer, a social networking site for folks who have been diagnosed with or survived cancer and their loved ones. It was created/improvised by a cancer survivor, responding to the need she saw around her, and that she herself had experienced. And because everyone is touched in some way by cancer, dealing with it themselves, or knowing someone who is. read more…
Even though many of us are on email all day, there is absolutely no substitute for coming home to an actual letter or postcard you can hold in your hand. We recently tried out Postcardly, a service that melds our online lives with the magic of good old-fashioned mail. You upload a photo or graphic, add a message, supply the address, and Postcardly prints and delivers your postcards. We sent ourselves one of our graphic signs, and a photo from Ellen Silverman’s wonderful Cuban Kitchen archive. They took a week to arrive, but we were pleased enough with the quality, especially with photos. You can send an image directly from your phone, turning a snapshot into an instant postcard.
This is a great way to drop a line to someone who doesn’t use email, but it’s also a neat way to keep the printed photograph alive. Since getting a digital camera, we rarely print photos. But it used to be fun to give a friend a photograph they could tape on the wall and have on hand to look back to. read more…
Recently, we came a cross an old hard drive that we had swapped out of a computer long ago; who knows what revealing bits of information were on it? We searched the internet to learn how to dispose of a hard drive without leaving ourselves open to industrious hackers. We could either wipe it clean by ways that were way beyond our competence or…DESTROY IT. A friend of ours took it onto the street and smashed it to bits on the sidewalk using a $9 hammer we’d bought on Amazon. She returned with the twisted wreck, which had become was curiously beautiful…an inadvertent sculpture. read more…
Marc Chagall‘s grand daughter Bella Meyer got a Doctorate in medieval art history from the Sorbonne and has held a variety of jobs – designing props for the theater, working as a puppeteer – before stumbling on her true calling: floral design. After friends asked her to design a blossom-laden chuppah for their wedding, Meyer, who had always drawn and painted, realized that flowers are her medium…”in their variety and richness, they’re natural art supplies.”
In 2003, she started Fleurs Bella as a floral design company; two years ago, it morphed into a bricks-and-morter shop near New York City’s Union Square. Heres an bit of her compelling story recently published on Tablet:
“Cut flowers,” she says, “have no other purpose aside from being given.” She always keeps a stash just outside the shop, with a sign that says “take one please.” About once a month, she ventures out onto the streets with what she calls “flower graffiti,” tucking small bouquets into alleyways or subway stations. Occasionally she’ll thrust her flowers at random strangers. Not everyone is thrilled. She recalls one man who yelled at her: “I don’t want to be happy!”
Flower graffiti! Such a wonderful idea: a guerilla florist. Downtown Express called her a “flower vigilante” for her unique strategy: read more…
Our friend Charlie Allenson had a big birthday a few days ago, and we had big plans to give him a shout out that day and find ourselves, THE DAY AFTER, having been swept away by..everything. Damn. Charlie’s at the jazz festival in New Orleans so we thought we’d publish some of the very cool photos he sent us when he was in Vietnam recently. They are right up our alley of totally, seriously, charmingly improvised LIFE that seems to happen everywhere there, like the floating villages of Ha Long Bay. This house, above, appears to be floating on oil drums and styrefoam block. There is no supermarket; a market boat makes regultrips to each floating house.
Usually when we’ve wanted to figure out the right color to paint a room, we’ve bought samples and painted swatches right on the wall. This method works pretty well if you are only choosing ONE color. But what if you want to use several or many colors in a room or throughout the house? We love this strategy that location agent Andrea Reisfeld and photographer William Abranowicz posted on their blog A +B See, after they consulted with color-genius Eve Ashcraft, whose advised the likes of Martha Stewart on paint colors:
“We bought sample sizes of all 17 options, and painted them on sheets of mason board which had been primed with white.
Now, we can place the colors in their proper rooms throughout the house, and see how they work against the floor color choices and against rooms within the same sightlines. We’ll be able to see how the colors look in the light of our house, bright days, dark days and night time.”
It is SUCH a good idea, allowing you to move colors around at will.
Read more about Andrea and Bill’s big color changes here. You’ll find lots of color and other inspiration at Ashcraft’s blog Studio Horn.
At Reference Library, we read about a unique service designed to change your life. New Daily Dance is “a service that choreographs personalized, contemporary rituals and happenings that bridge the gap between where you are now and your most desired future.” Their theory is that the secret to your most desirable future is hidden in your daily routines – that the way we move affects the direction of our lives. Daily Dance will create a routine/ritual that aids in shifting your life toward where you want it to go, an idea we find incredibly intriguing. Here’s an example:
“A recent client asked for a New Ritual to relieve some of the anxiety of her daily urban commute… For the mornings, we choreographed the “zip up dance” based on zipping in good feelings from her home environment, and provided a sachet for her to gather fresh herbs from her garden to take into the subway for holding and smelling. For the evening, we choreographed a happening where a masseuse met her at a specified place and time on the subway platform where she then received a hand, arm, shoulder, and neck massage while waiting for her train. She reported a great sense of emotional and physical relief in her daily commute, now having both the ongoing sachet collection morning ritual to take into the train, plus a reason to smile on the subway platform in the evenings with the massage memory. Both activities added to the memory of the space.”
We found the photo above on New Daily Dance’s website, under the header CONSUME TIME INSTEAD OF SPENDING IT,an idea that stopped us in our tracks. read more…
Alert !!: ‘the improvised life is THRILLED to be part a very cool group post called NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays, the ultimate holiday guide by New York’s best bloggers, from unique gifts to the most celebratory libations, to Christmas with Andy Warhol. Be sure to check out it; it’s on the Home Page now, and here, or just scroll down to the bottom of this post.
We steered clear of email cards because we couldn’t find any that delivered the visual message we wanted AND because they lacked an envelope, which we think an essential part of the pleasure of receiving a card.
Until recently. We discovered Paperless Post, a website that allows you to design your own cards (to a degree) and then send them in a sort of digital envelope that the recipient gets to open online. Once you create an account, your first few cards are free; after that, the charge is a fraction of what snailmail costs. It’s the envelope that got us. read more…
Blu Dot is offering a surprisingly compelling clock widget you can download to your computer. It is a one inch square that sits anywhere on your screen you like; with each new minute, a new number image appears. The effect is constant surprise and little jostles to your mind about change and possibilities. For free!
Andrew Sullivan of theatlantic.com is the huge-traffic blogger of The Daily Dish; its often fierce content ranges from politics, to heart-breaking illicit tweets from Iran’s recent election protests, to grim pictures of torture. For a couple of years now he’s broken up the intensity of his writing and opinion with an ongoing post category called A View from Your Window, a simple photo inserted into the midst of the day’s many posts with a caption indicating time and place, that one of his readers around the world sent in. It is just that: what one person sees when he/she looks out the window.
These photos have a curious effect: of giving instantly a different point of view, and a reminder of the very similar and very different dailyness of lives around the world. They are somehow both refreshing and heartening.
But what is really interesting is the book Sullivan made them into. read more…
ColorCapture Ben, a new iPhone and iPod Touch application, allows users to zoom into a particular color in a picture on their device, tap the “match” key, and see a display of paints closest to the color, along with a range of lighter and darker shades. (The app, created by Benjamin Moore, will reference its 3,300+ paint colors.) You can save the color “chips” on your phone for future reference.
Its an incredibly useful app, if you bear in mind that the color match is of a photo, which are often different than real-life colors.
ColorCapture Ben will be Available in June 1, free of charge at the Apple App Store.
If you don’t have an iPhone and/or are really serious about paint colors, Benjamin Moore has a more accurate standalone alternative, Pocket Palette Device, that will do the same thing, with more serious calibrations (for about $300).
