Daily Clerks

As we’ve mentioned before and in our How to Go Green series -the one dedicated to Wardrobe- one of the ways to make “eco-savvy fashion choices” is to buy repurposed clothing. Well, if you’re ever shopping in or around Buenos Aires, Ana Walsh’s exquisite taste and faculties in the matters clothes recovery is something to have in mind. This former fashion producer and PR executive that has worked with big brands in the industry launched this year her own line of clothing, focused on clothes recovery and redesign: Ana Walsh Fashion Archeology. “The name is a reference to an archeological work that focuses in the search and redesign of antique pieces through an artisan labor which keeps each products’ original essence”, she explains in her website, where you can also check some pieces of the first collection, called Rebirth. The clothes can be purchased in Pompon -a small shop in 5942 Nicaragua st, Palermo, Buenos Aires- or in her showroom (appointments by phone: 54 11 4833 1063). ::Ana Walsh

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The issue of bird deaths caused by wind turbines still creates knots in the stomachs of many treehuggers: despite evidence that harnessing wind energy has a relatively light impact on birds with proper planning and siting, opponents of new wind projects consistently conjure up images of wind turbine blades coated in blood and feathers (or at least turbines surrounded by avian carcasses). Wind opponents can count on at least one less potential ally, though, as one of the US’ oldest conservation organizations, the National Audubon Society, has publicly declared its support for continued wind development, and its belief that the climate crisis poses a much bigger risk to our feathered friends:

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We adore Castor Canadensis, the funny, brilliant team of designers who created the recycled tube light and the saunabox. They also did the credenza1, which is gorgeous but bizarre- it is carved out of a solid block of Indiana limestone, extraordinarily beautiful and extravagantly wasteful. Perhaps as penance for this TreeHugger incorrect piece, they have designed Credenza2. “Easily assembled, this Credenza packs flat and requires no hardware. 2 ratchet straps lash the components tightly in place. It is made from a single sheet of plywood with zero waste. Moving? Dismantle it and strap it to the roof of your car. ” I usually hate flash but I love this site. ::Castor Canadensis

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Last year we were delighted to hear about Lawrence Rome’s innovative backpack design. His energy generating backpack concept made headlines and found astounding support. One of the unexpected benefits of his support system was that people found it was more comfortable, and felt lighter. Rome had hinted last year that this might be just as big a discovery as the innovative energy capture system. The past year has seen testing of this design, and found that the bungee design does indeed make for a lighter load.

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Filed under: Accessories, iPod Family, iTS, iTunes

Looking to get in shape in 2007? Your new iPod makes a great workout companion. Yes, you still have to “just do it”, but your iPod can help you “do it” if you let it.

Consider the Nike+iPod sports kit. It lets you track your training progress in real time by connecting a transmitter in your sneakers to a receiver on your iPod nano. This is great for people who want to start easy and work on pushing themselves a little at a time towards more and more progress on their goals.

Tangerine from the Potion Factory is another great workout tool. It allows you to build workout playlists from the music in your iTunes library, creating training sets at either a steady BPM or using BPM profiles that ramp up and down for interval training.

You can also download any number of training podcasts that provide a personal electronic trainer. Here are some of my favorites, both with and without coaching.

Marina’s Walking and Aerobics Marina offers 10-15 minute workout sets that range from 126-150 bpm. The free samples available at the iTunes link are pretty lame. You have to go to her website to purchase and download actual work-outs. You put together four or five of them and you get a full hours’ workout. Marina is a love-her or don’t-love-her phenomenon. I personally love her style, her reminders to breathe, her focus on walking for fitness. If you like the music but not the coaching, you can purchase the workouts without instructions.

Podrunner Great music at varying BPM, running about an hour each in length. Fantastic stuff, easy to work out to. No coaching or voice-overs, though. If you’re looking for nicely paced high intensity music, this is the podcast to turn to.

My Pod Bod This is a mix of audio and video how-tos, including coached exercises and interval training. The audio sessions run about twenty minutes and the video how-to’s are just a few minutes in length.

Muscle Audio Workouts David Greenwalt’s “world class” muscle workout training involves weight lifting and resistance training. I find these work best over speakers so your headphones don’t get tangled in the equipment.

Workout On The Web Short how-to video fitness info. Good reference material.

Fitness Attack Amy McIntyre’s 60-second fitness inspirations. For when you’re looking for a little fitness boost in your life.

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You might have not heard of Shawn Fanning before, but I am sure most of us would know or at least have heard about the P2P music sharing application, Napster. Well, he was the owner of Napster before he decided to sell it to Bertelsmann for $8 million 2 years ago.

He then went on and started a new project - Snocap. Guess what, it’s music-related, too. But it was said to be better than Napster and was able to do what Napster lacked previously. And it was a success. It even partnered with Myspace to make Snocap’s music store available to Myspace music artists not too long ago.

And now Shawn is working on a new project that he called Rupture and surprisingly, this one has nothing to do with music at all. Actually, there’s a story about how he came up with this whole Rupture idea. It all started after he sold Napster. Shawn immediately got a copy of the World of Warcraft. He loved the game (who doesn’t?) and soon enough, he saw a problem: it’s hard to communicate with other players.

Online games usually have their own followers and these people are always out there looking for ways to communicate with each other. And although they can use instant messengers to contact each other, it is usually quite troublesome to discuss the game without having any image to describe the situation they are in. Shawn Fanning actually made Rupture so that it would tap into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site for each player.

Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to discuss any good strategies they can use to improve their gaming experience. This is definitely something that new players will value very much: they will be able to play their game without having much trouble. By joining Rupture, players will be able to chat in groups or with other individuals. Rupture will also be a place to download add-ons and game demos available.

Talking about competition, Rupture is nothing new. WoW players have a myspace profile with over 100k of friends and a similar community called the Warcraft Social Network with more than 2,000 members. That is a very impressive number of users. And they also spend a lot of time online. No wonder that Shawn saw the potential and made a better online community for WoW players.

Rupture is still in private beta and has not been released to the WoW players yet, but you can opt for a notification once they are open for registration. If this project is successful, it will be realistic for us to expect more similar social networking sites that are created based on any online gaming communities that already exist. But I personally already feel that this is going to be another one of Shawn Fanning’s success stories.

gaming, rupture, social networking, warcraft, web 2, World of Warcraft, WoW

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Filed under: Odds and ends, Blogging, Blogs

I’m going to tell you a secret, that I hope we can keep between us: I am a big fan of blogs and blogging. I love to write and I love to read, so blogging is a natural extension of that (and I hope my level of enjoyment makes its way into my posts here). WordPress is the hottest blogging tool out there. It is open source, dynamic, and all the cool kids use it. Sadly, while content is king, people also love a pretty face.

Circle Six Blog has a great post up that outlines Brett’s workflow for designing WordPress themes locally on his Mac. He lists a number of useful apps that we have covered on TUAW and includes some good general web design tips.

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Filed under: Software, Apple Professional

Aperture is Apple’s tool designed for professional photographers who take lots and lots of pictures. As such, handling metadata is an important part of any workflow involving Aperture. James Duncan Davidson has some tricks to help you get the metadata you need into Aperture as quickly as possible. I’m sure this will save someone some time out there.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Features, TUAW Business

Christmas is over, and you know what that means: New Years is just around the corner. When the calendar turns to yet another year people around the globe make promises to themselves, promises that they will better themselves by doing a number of things. These ‘promises’ are known as resolutions and everyone knows that they are often difficult to keep.

TUAW has got your back this year. Today we start a series called ‘TUAW Resolutions’ in which we gives you ways to accomplish this year’s resolutions with a little help from your Mac (or iPod).

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Filed under: Gaming, Steve Jobs, Apple

In the summer of 1989, I had a really, really tough assignment: I had to evaluate the NeXT Cube for a publishing company. What a hardship to have that black box on my desk, along with that 400-dpi laser printer! I don’t know how I ever managed.

It’s hard to believe that it was ten years ago, on 12/20/1996, that we welcomed Steve Jobs and NeXT Computers back into the Apple family. Legendary game developer John Romero remembers, and he’s got a fascinating post up about the role of NeXT in bringing his babies to market.

According to Romero, the original development environment for both Doom and Quake was NeXTSTEP; in fact, the first four years of id Software’s efforts were on NeXT. He fondly remembers the days of simultaneously building for three different architectures, and side-by-side map editing across the LAN with cofounder John Carmack.

Romero ends his post by noting that he spent the 15 years prior to 1996 working on computers built by Steve Jobs, and that “maybe someday I’ll get one of those kickass iMacs.” Cue the salivary glands of Mac gamers everywhere…

[via IMG]

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