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Found this off of Core77. A Danish design firm that makes some interesting products, Essey has got this intruiging little chopping board made out of polyethylene. What's wonderful about it is that first of all, its not laid flat on the table. This makes it easy to pick up with just one hand instead of fumbling with two, because any liquids etc might be suctioning your board to the table. Secondly, it also creates an angled surface for chopping that faces the chef. This makes it more ergonomic and allows for better cutting and control. Lastly, the slanting also allows liquids to flow downward and down coagulate under your food. In this way, you can easily drain off the liquids.

I am in love with the simplicity of the design and how it manages to introduce so many new things to something so old. Chopping boards have been around for ages and the last innovation to one that I saw was that it has some vertical panels to direct the cutting and assist the chef. Yet, Essey's chopping board manages to easily surpass this by a total redesign of the object itself. Its clear that the design looked at a total concept of how a chef actually cut his food before coming up with this brilliant final solution.

Essey also have some other stuff as well, like the wastepaper bin shaped like what its supposed to contain. That baby won the Japan Good Design award for 2005.

Check out these watches from watch company Nooka. Most of the watches eschew traditional representation of time as we know it, either just digital numbers or an analog format, but a number of dots or a linear line instead.

Whilst I suppose that might take some getting used to, the watches themselves are good looking enough to be worth the trouble. Besides, the humble watch has grown from being simply a timepiece to a status symbol, fashion accesory and a viable alternative to a bracelet or like jewellery for men.

Link off Gizmodo.

Some pretty amazing origami by Yuko Nishimura including a successful version of one of my school projects. Link off MoCoLoco.

Having lots of free time in the office proffers me the chance to read up on whatever internet content takes my fancy. So today I re-read this thread in detail about jeans in superfuture's supertalk forum.

I like my jeans but I never knew there was so much to learn about them and all the terms and stuff, it just seems nearly overwhelming but intriguing at the same time. I was inspired and checked out all these cool websites for jeans companies or in some cases just searching round for info.

Nudie

What I love is their ethos about jeans being a second skin and recommending that you ought to wear your jeans in unwashed for several months, so it really develops to reflect you and your personality. Each crease or line remniscent of that night when you ran away from the poodle in the park or when you rolled around on the concrete floor outside the biggest club in the country. Obviously, if you've got OCD or you're just a neat/clean freak, then I guess thats not the way for you.

45rpm

These people are Japanese and as with many things Japs are into, they're obsessive about their jeans as well. I like how they've got these articles about how to "zeng" your denim. (That's modify in bengspeak)

PRPS (BEINGHUNTED featured article)

This in depth article goes through the entire process through which PRPS jeans are envisoned and then produced. I'm very impressed by the attention to detail and quality of their jeans and would prop myself up for a pair if and when I have the chance to.

UNIQLO

The Giordano/GAP of Japan, Uniqlo has been serving up quality product at reasonable prices from the time I first heard of them. For the price of 99RMB, I got myself a decent pair of selvedge denim jeans with standard details and good fit/quality. Its nearly unbelievable that somebody bothers to come up with a cheap but good quality product. Another great thing is they've got shops all over Shanghai.

At the moment, I'm really tempted to just go out, buy one or two pairs of UNIQLOs (I already own one though) and wear them interchangeably without washing until next summer, suitably wearing them in and having my own personalised "vintage" jeans. All I'd have to do is to think of ways to funk them up a bit, like painting the rivets/buttons or adding stitching/rips etc. Then I'll take pictures and post them to this blog once a month from purchase day until when I see fit.

Photography is one of those things I love to get into but just can't help feeling inadequate about when I check out what's happening out there. Still the self-deprecation doesn't in any way hamper my lust for new cameras.

I've been lugging around my Canon G3 for something like 2 or 3 years now. I remember chugging it along and taking great pics of the great wall or whatever but regretting that I didn't tell my dad to get me the Sony DSC V-1 instead.

It was my birthday present and I could pick one camera and my dad was really into it too so he thought I ought to get a Canon. At the time, he honestly believed only Canons were top notch. So I checked with friends and checked out DP Review and the G3 was the top cam of the time, excluding digital SLRs obviously. So I decided that I'd get the G3.

He went to the store without me to get it and told me that "Oh hey, there's this really good looking Sony just out, do you think you'd like this one instead?" And I went, "But the Canon comes with a free printer, let's get the G3 then." I'm so bloody stupid. (btw the damn free printer conked out after a few months...)

So now, I've wised up and know more about what I want from a camera. The simple truth is, I'm not and probably never will need a top of the line digital SLR. Yet, I'm not going to just accept any old point and shoot (or mickey mouse camera like my choir conductor used to say) either. So it would have to be a "prosumer" (god I hate that word) cam like the G3 or a high end P&S.

Looking at what's on the market, I'm really keen on Sony's new products. I previously stated that I'd settle for a DSC-W5/7 to my girlfriend but I'd like to take that back and say that what I really want now is the DSC-N1. 3 inch LCD touchscreen with minimal buttons, 8.1 megapixels... That and the LOMO LC-A and I'll never need another camera until they update the Sony again. Haha. Hope that damn thing has a full manual.

Back in junior college when we were like 17, we used to have this class in the morning conducted by two students from the class and they could talk about whatever they wanted. So me and a mate talked about music and categorising everything from classical to pop to rock to hip-hop to industrial and garage etc, making linkages and dropping names and influences to tie up this realm of music from era to era like the fanboys that we were.

Anyway, we summed it up by saying everything could fall into a four letter word ending with the letters ck; BECK. I first heard of him like most other people from that song. Then he had that brilliant album out with the jumping mop dog on the cover. More recently, he had a coupla not so good records before landing himself as a mellow guy with the recent Sea Change. His latest though is pretty cool. Guero has been out for a while now, but I'm finding it more often on my iPod. I especially love the hip-hoppy track, Hell Yes.

Incidentally that track has got this brilliant video by Garth Jennings featuring some pretty cool robots from Sony doing a geisha dance. The website itself has also undergone a revamp by none other than Hi-ReS themselves. Check it out full screen. You can watch a few videos including some the older songs like Devil's Haircut.

I was probably a bit off the mark with my statement to my dumbfounded class back in '97. (most of them couldn't be bothered with the trash I listened to anyway...) Beck certainly isn't the be all and end all to music but he's certainly a quaint little disturbing blip that catches your ear.

Just picked this up off 8 Days, which is a free Shanghai mag you can get off lotsa clubs and eateries all over the city and has similar content online as well to keep you up to date with the latest ins & outs.

maleonn is a Shanghai born artist/director/photographer who shoots in b&w then adds color later. He creates these surreal story style series of photos and he's got a brilliant sense of contemporary color. Plenty use of props all over his photos in the form of masks, balloons, rabbits... I love the strangeness and feel to the photos that he adds on, which you can't otherwise get just shooting photos.

Granted he isn't a pure photographer, he still is a damn good one and other than the altered series, he also shot a lot of good portraits and stuff. Worth checking out. I particularly like "The trek". Which has its cover photo picked up by 8 Days as well.

According to the review from Pitchfork, this is a reference to a Neil Young song, Hey Hey My My. This is Junior Senior's sophomore effort and it keeps going where their debut left off. Quite far off from what Neil Young sounds like, Junior Senior are what appear to be a pair of goofy, gay Danes that make trashy, gimmicky dance music.

Yet when you peer below the wafer thin surface, it becomes apparent that the the duo have a good feel for a beat and melody and are just gosh darned fun. They just seem to want to make good, fun music without any pretensions, an almost childlike and naive musical utopia.

Hey Hey My My Yo Yo  adds a little bit more hip-hop mixed in with all the menagerie of musical styles in Junior Senior's music. Lots of stuttering, random "yo's" and "yeahs" all over and unstoppable clapping mix in with funk, motown, soul, hip-hop, dance, disco, electronica and rock.

au by KDDI keeps coming out with consistently high standard mobile phones. From Marc Newson's talby to Makoto Saito's beautiful PENCK, they've got an impressive collection of handsets that cause massive salivation.

This trend continues with the Media Skin by Tokujin Yoshioka. Unveiled recently at the Tokyo Design Week, the Media Player could pass off for an iPod handphone almost. The promo shot has the handset dipped in paint, drawing many people to hope that it could really behave like that and you could dip your phone in different colors everyday.

Despite the fact that that's just going to fantasy for the conceivable future, the Media Skin remains a really attractive mobile communication device that just keeps things simple and pure.

Hulger is a company started by this UK designer who decided that he was sick of looking at the same horrible plastic mobile phones that are everywhere and the throwaway, get a new handphone every few months mentality.

So what he did was to take old retro handsets, repaint them and rewire them a bit, so they became like mega speaker handsets that could connect to your mobile phone. So instead of walking around with a silly bluetooth contraption on your ear, or some mic dangling down your face, you've got this huge, loudly colored piece of history that looks like youre talking to someone other than yourself.

Some models even come with bluetooth and I think what's great isn't that these huge handsets are just a joke or that they challenge the boring design intent of each new phone that comes out. What's great is that there's actually a possible market for these phones that makes them more practical than you think. Adding a cable allows each handset to be connected to a computer, enabling a it to turn into a voip handset instead. I think this niche is where the phone goes from being a big bright gimmick to something beautiful and practical.