Build Your Own DIY AC – A reader’s guide

As McGuyver (or MacGruber) can teach us, there’s a lot of things you can build with duct tape and a bunch of “readily available materials” — bombs, crystal meth, and as it turns out, a super-cheap alternative to that $600 window AC unit. Perhaps afraid of ending up in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Manolith only commissioned us to draw up this last one:

Manolith: Build Your Own DIY AC

For source material, we cribbed heavily from Geoffrey Milburn’s garage experiments.

Geoff's original design setup

But as we were researching, we discovered that he had inspired a whole community of duct tape designers who came up with some pretty awesome concepts.

Spencer's design, using a '74 Triumph Spitfire radiator

A closed-loop system, using a fishtank water pump

And finally, Geoff’s final design (the “Black Beauty”) was pretty impressive.

The Black Beauty

But despite all the technological progress and innovation on display, ultimately we decided to stay pretty true to the original intent of the project — as you can see from Dan’s original concept sketch.

Dan's original concept sketch

Outside of the copper tubing and some bags of ice, there’s very little shopping (or even boring details like planning or measuring) necessary to produce the unit, which is its genius in the first place.

Reader’s Companion to “The Story (so far) of Twitter”

Twitter overload

Firstly, my thanks to @scotthogrefe for introducing me to @davepeck, who is a card-carrying social media guru and gave us some good early pointers on where to look, including a whale of an article by @dom Sagolla. Even though Dom is writing a book — plug plug, 140 Characters: Style Guide for the Short Form — he still took time out to exchange emails on the early days of development, a thread I hope to continue as we expand the web version into print form.

The Origins of Twitter

LA Times | Technology blog – Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site’s founding document

- great article, inspired biographical reading (via Wikipedia, of course) on Jack, Biz, and Ev

140 Characters – How Twitter Was Born

- compelling behind the scenes look at development, gave us lots of fuel for the early alpha and beta time period, and helped us identify some of the “big wave” events that brought exponential growth, including SXSW Interactive 2007 and the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.

Wikipedia – various entries on the foundation technologies behind the Twitter UI, including Instant Messaging, LiveJournal, SMS, and Unix Talk.

Twitter Culture

There was a lot we wanted to capture, but space constraints insisted that we hit the high points. But we found some cool resources, including the mystery of how many people are actually using Twitter. (one guess is as good as another).

I really wanted to document the first known usage of the term “tweeps” – which just irritates the hell out of me. According to the Dictionary of Twitter lingo, @scottk75 gets credit, but there was no link to the original post. So we left it out.

And finally, everything you could possibly want to know about Yiying Lu’s illustration, now infamously known as the FAIL WHALE. (I also found out that Mike really hates the fail whale. I was shocked! I really dig it.)

Fail Whale - an homage d'lego

Twitter + Fame

Maybe we’re missing the point, by trying to make any single twitter post into a noteworthy event. But it was cool tracking down the following tweets:

@barackobama’s first entry

@the_real_shaq’s first entry (cited by the NY Times article)

@britneyspears’ infamous hacked entry (and there were others, as well)

And this…

The timing of the piece was interesting. We were doing layouts when the word of the Twitpocalypse started floating around, and by the time we finished rendering, it had already passed. Then, the same day we submitted final art, some of our friends’ avatars started turning green.

Finally, I’ll mention that the artwork at the top of this post was Mike’s first attempt at the gonzo Dan Z style, and that he sent it in to me before I sent him any story elements to work on. Brilliant.

InfoShot: The Story (so far) of Twitter

Our latest InfoShot has been published by Manolith, and it’s a gonzo visual depicting the origins of the last three years of everyone’s favorite 140-characters: http://www.manolith.com/2009/06/21/the-story-so-far-of-twitter/

This graphic is a reverse timeline, where we start at the present day (insanity) and work our way back to Twitter’s origins. Kind of mind-bending, when you’re reading vertically, but it’s all part of the fun. Here’s our original design concept:

Our original design concept

Illustrated by Mike Costelloe, designed by 600 Series.

We had some research help from former Odeo developer Dom Sagolla and social media guru Dave Peck on this one … a full “Reader’s Companion” will be coming out in the next day or so.