I must confess that I am an addict. I have become addicted to creating computer-generated images. Having recently posted about Processing and Oxidizer, I have found another image generator called “Context Free.”

Context Free “is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.”

Creating images with the software is a piece of cake. One can download from a gallery of “grammar” files or create your own scripts. Downloaded scripts can have their output modified by entering a three-character code into the Context Free application, leading to millions of permutations of the work.

It’s a fascinating program to play around with and some of the output is simply stunning.

Best of all — the software is free, open-source and is available for Windows, OS X and various flavours of Unix.

The hidden treasures of the world’s public photography archives.

Having read Smashing Magazine’s recent article, “35 Phenomenal Fractal Art Pictures” and being stunned by the images presented within, I wanted to have a go at creating my own fractal flame image.

A quick Google led me to the free OS X software, Oxidizer. A few minutes of experimenting and I was soon creating great fractal images of my own.

It’s great fun and I highly recommend you give it go. Post your best images in the comments.

flickr Panda: More flickr goodness!

The epic history of the Blinkenlights project in advance of a whole new Blinkenlights installation in Toronto, Canada - Stereoscope. Learn more about Project Blinkenlights.

Found! A collection of decent desktop wallpapers of varying resolutions.

I am becoming increasingly impressed and intrigued by the multimedia produced with the Processing framework. There are some stunning artworks and videos emerging and it’s all serving to make me ever more curious about the capabilities of the system.

A lot of the work produced reminds me of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST demo scene of the eighties and I find myself feeling terribly nostalgic.

But Processing isn’t just about art — the framework is also used for some very serious data visualisation too.

It’s all very impressive.

Further Reading:

The History of Visual Communication
Visualisations and Infographics
Information Aesthetics

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

The much-anticipated (especially by yours truly) Nikon D90 has Live View, a 12.3 megapixel sensor (shared with the D300), GPS tagging and shoots HD720p video! I’m suffering from gadget envy yet again. [via]

Lenova has announced the ThinkPad W700, a laptop featuring a trio of snazzy features that are sure to impress designers, graphic artists, photographers and CAD artists. The W700 has an integral Wacom tablet, a professional grade, WUXGA display with 400 nit brightness and an auto colour-calibration sensor that allows for on-the-fly adjustments. If that’s not enough to make you salivate then notice the separate numerical keypad and the fingerprint scanner - sweet!

The machine also boasts some fairly impressive specifications including:

• 3 GHz Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor
• up to 8GB DDR3 RAM
• 1GB NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M graphics
• dual HDD bays offering RAID 0 or 1 configurations (SSDs are an option)

There are other goodies too!

But what a butt-ugly machine it is. I mean seriously, can’t Jonathan Ive be cloned and installed in every hardware designers shop? I’d hate to have to type on that thing - the keyboard looks to be awkwardly placed relative to the front edge of the case.