In a upcoming project of mine, I've been playing with a new property in CSS called -webkit-filter that allows you to apply image filters to HTML elements.

For testing, I built a simple WebKit CSS Filter Demo page that allows you to experiment with tweaking the filter values.

"Quality is Always In Demand"

-- Uttered (or written) by David Turner, responsible for some recent iconic brand designs.

There's a new TV channel in Britain called 4seven. The idea is (surprisingly) not 24/7, but that Channel 4 in the UK will re-show the most "talked about" shows in the last seven days.

I stumbled across it because of Creative Review's article on their new ident design. I'm always impressed with Channel 4's ident design and this one doesn't disappoint.

I wonder whether this TV channel concept will work. I feel like watching TV nowadays is more about live events than reviewing what is popular. Is this applying the CNN/ESPN style repeat-repeat-repeat format to regular TV?

Yesterday, Patricia and I went to MoMA. Even after all those visits to New York and after living here for nine months, I still hadn't managed to go until now.

I love the New York MoMA. It's an incredible collection they have and so many things that inspire me here.

One of the exhibitions that really resonated with me is their special exhibition on Alighiero Boetti. I'm really into maps, and one of my favorite is the Mappa (Map) piece where he designed a map where the flags of the individual countries were imprinted on to the outline of the country. The twist he made was to not produce it himself, but he got Afghan weavers to make a tapestry that looks modern, even by our standard, but made with hand and such traditional means. In this special exhibition, they also included a precursor to this which was drawn on paper, the Planisfero Politico (1969)

This is MoMA's picture of one of his maps:

But this is actually the one I saw (not part of the special collection):

Notice that the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation flag is different. I wonder he managed to make one every year.

There were other great pieces in his exhibition though, like the Manifesto (1967) which looked like an infographic before its time. I also like the scale of the Biro drawings where he employed other people to do his bidding but also had an infographic element to it in I Sei Sensi (1974). Finally, there's a piece of work that looks like the Game of Life called Storia Naturale Della Moltiplicazione (1975) where it just looks like blobs one multiple pieces of large graph paper.

There was a lot more to this exhibition and all the other collections I managed to see at MoMA. Let me try and get around to writing more about the other collections in a later post.

Just in case people missed the venus transit, here is the replay of the venus transit, sped up 30x.

Patricia and I loved the idea of exploring a new city. So she laid down some rules when we first arrived:

For the first six months in New York, we are not allowed to repeat any restaurants, except:

• when entertaining guests from out of town,
• when it is a local place,
• when it is a coffee shop,
• when we are taking out,
• when the other party is not present,

We ended up not using these exceptions much. The exception we used the most is when entertaining out of town visitors. And the rule is there because we don't want to try and mediocre place if visitors are spending precious hours here.

The local restaurant exception we've only invoked a few times, mainly for Shake Shack which is less than 4 streets away. Even then, we've only been there two times under that exception.

Recently, a delicious food fair opened up very close to our place called Madison Square Eats, and they have some delicious food from notable restaurants that we've been going back to repeatedly (Aracini Bros, Momofuku Milk Bar, Roberta's Pizza). This is a grey area, but they do fall in to both the exception of being local, and mainly take out.

The other party not-present repeating exception has also only been invoked when I go to a fabulous place that I want to take Patricia to or vice-versa. I think in recent memory that has only been used two or three times.

Even the coffee shop exception has only been invoked once when we recently repeated one of my favourite coffee shops in New York, Everyman Espresso.

I find it pretty surprising that we've managed to stick to this rule for about eight months.

I'm unsure whether we'll stick to these rules for the next few months, but the spirit of them lives on. There are just so undiscovered things to try in New York, there is no time for dwelling on a favourite. One regret though is that when we stumble across a great place, or a place has a menu that is worth repeating, our rule stops us from revisiting.

So I ended up focusing on curating a list of my Repeatable places we would try out again if we stopped following this rule and also a list of my all time Favourite places in New York.

Where do I start with New York?

It is everything people say it is, plus some more. It has been eight months since I've been here, and wow does time fly.

There's so much to say about it, there's so much to show about it. I need write down my impressions. I've been wanting to do that ever since I moved here. But the best I've been able to do is to document it with photos.

See my New York 2011 and New York 2012 albums. Whilst I scatter photos in the wind amongst Instagram, G+, Twitter, and by proxy, Facebook, the two albums above are my permanent collection of the amazing things I've seen. Looking through those photographs make me excited and happy.

I hope to write more thoughts down in the coming weeks on all sorts of things that excite me, like street art, typography, signage, architecture - and the amazing vistas this city provides. Like this one:

I resurrected some code I had from about two years ago when I would often monitor a stream of small textual data source and repurposed it as a twitter stream viewer.

liquidx.net/projects/ticker/waterfall/

The javascript behind it is a bit messy, but it's pretty fun to have as a screensaver, especially if you use my WebViewScreenSaver for Mac.

I stopped posting to my blog some time in 2010 (two years ago). It was down to me finding Twitter and Google+ way easier to use as a publishing platform and vehicle for my thoughts.

Fast forward to 2012. A lot has changed in the mean time. I moved to New York. I'm more interested in writing some longer form posts that can persist in a more controlled way.

So over the last few weeks, I re-wrote my website backend, ported all my posts, pages and projects over from a few of my sites that I hosted on my co-lo servers over to AppEngine and Google Cloud Storage.

I also un-designed my website, stripped out everything that was extraneous. I'm not quite done, but I think it more reflects what I want in a web site these days.