Category: Uncategorized

Check out the new Atomz.com powered search engine on the left side of this screen. I’m happy to give them a plug, because their service is good, fast, and free. I’m extremely impressed with what the Blogger revolution has wrought. You don’t need heavy server-side action on your site if you can make clever use of all the free services out there. These are developments I never would have anticipated…

Snakes and Ladders is a collection of intriguing essays by Erik Davis. He wrote an entertaining book called Techgnosis about the parallels between ancient traditions of magic and our current information-centric culture.

405 is a movie made by two guys working nights and weekends for three months. Go and watch it. You’ll be impressed.

Cliff Stoll of Cuckoo’s Egg fame is back peddling a line of Acme Klein Bottles.

OnePage is just one of a growing trend: cut and paste your own web page from other web pages. The result may look like a ransom note, but at least it’s your ransom note.

This Principles of Graphic Design site by Mundi Design Studios was a bronze winner in the recent ID magazine Interactive Media Design Review. Clean, well-executed, and free.

Here

are some nifty applets by an Italian gentleman named Fabio Ciucci. These things are usually incredibly annoying, but his are well enough done to be compelling, particularly the ones that pick apart images pixel by pixel, like the water applet.

Two useful free services: QuickTopic and Spyonit. QuickTopic is the new name for the extremely useful service formerly called TakeItOffline. Within seconds, you can spawn a free discussion group. Spyonit watches websites, among other things, so that you don’t have to visit a site often in order to find out that it’s changed. Somebody else watches and then tells you.

I’m not sure why this retro architecture is so interesting, but it is. And here is an entertaining article on opium.

Many of the applets at bewitched are beautiful, but
the shortcut wins the prize. It’s visual treat that keeps you watching till the very end. Incidentally, the guy behind the work (Martin Wattenberg) also does the SmartMoney Map of the Market visualization, which is an honest-to-goodness jewel of interface design.

Along the same lines as the bewitched.com site, here are some of my favorite visual dynamic toys:
Motion Sketch and
Gravilux, both by Scott Snibbe, and the ever popular
sodaconstructor.

It has now been four years since the Star Chamber began broadcasting on this frequency. We opened our offices for business on April 16th, 1996 and have been publishing more-or-less whatever more-or-less weekly since then.