Here is the trailer for French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre's album "Electronica 1: The Time Machine", that's due for release on 16 October 2015.

When Lara Hogan, Senior Engineering Manager at Etsy, has achieved something noteworthy in her line of work, she celebrates this by devouring a donut, thus taking the time to reflect on the good that has happened.

Years ago, I found that whenever something awesome happened in my career – maybe I got published, or promoted, or launched a project – I wouldn't take the time to celebrate the achievement. I'm an achiever by nature, the kind who feels like every day starts at zero. Not deliberately marking these moments left me feeling like I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything. "Oh cool, that A List Apart article went up," I would think, then move on with my day.

Once I realized that this was happening, I decided to be deliberate about marking achievements by eating one donut. Well, sometimes more than one, if it's a really big deal. The act of donut-eating has actually helped me feel like I'm accomplishing my career goals. As I started to share this idea with more people, I found that it resonated with others, especially young career-driven women who are routinely achieving goals and furthering their career but don't take the time to note their own success.

Lara's donut to celebrate the release of her book "Designing for Performance", and for giving a talk at Rent the Runway:

Featured image: Glazed donuts by Carnets Parisiens.

Watch some great waves and surfing in Teahupo'o, a village on the island of Tahiti, French Polynesia, in this drone edit entitled Teahupo’o: Du Ciel (Teahupo’o: From the Sky) by Brent Bielmann and Eric Sterman.

Via Devour.

Jordan McInally did an amazing job by photographing the Milky Way at The Remarkables ski field, New Zealand.

A 21 vertical shot, 2 row panorama. This is the hardest panorama I've ever tried to put together! Photoshops photomerge did not like this one and I had to do heaps of hand stitching and puppet warping to get things looking ok.. Its still not perfect but it will do! Pretty stoked with how it looks, not too bad for a spontaneous 2 row panorama! I was just killing time and shooting the Milky Way between Aurora bursts =) Taken half way up The Remarkables ski field road

A photo series displaying the abandoned theme park Six Flags New Orleans, 10 years after Hurricane Katrina.

Image credit: Photographs by Seph Lawless.

Here, a hockey stick chart, showing the increasing wealth of Warren Buffett.

The Dadaviz blog put together the chart below with help from Dividend.com to show Buffett's journey from prodigious teen to the octogenarian behind Berkshire Hathaway.

Some notable Buffett milestones include his net worth topping the $1-million mark at around 30 years old and then taking out the $1-billion hurdle at 56 years old. The stretch from 59 years old to now hasn't exactly been unkind, either. […]

In Michael Jackson's video for "Smooth Criminal", the light, special effects, and choreography are perfectly done, but watching it in Blue-ray certainly doesn't do it any harm. And the little kid who's emulating Michael's exact dancing moves, is the actor Brandon Quintin Adams.

The popular iPhone/iPad app VHS Camcorder will make your HD footage of today look like it's shoot in the 80's. What began as a fun small-scale project, has earned Thomas Worth, who works with visual effects, some serious sales in the App Store:

Thomas Worth swears he didn't expect any of this. He never expected that, 10 days after it launched, VHS Camcorder, his goofy $3.99 video app, would be No. 2 on Apple's chart for paid apps, second only to Minecraft. Or the torrent of email, tweets, and castigating for an Android version. (It's coming, by the way.) Most of all, he didn’t expect people to love this crappy retro look as much as he does.

[…]

Worth is 38, a child of the '80s, and an unrepentant lover of that decade’s wacky graphics and messy technology. He's been doing post-production and effects in LA for years, and in his free time occasionally would screw around in After Effects and upload ultra-'80s takes on the logo of his company Rarevision. One, featuring laser-lit stencils flying in to the sound of an epic synth track, struck a particular chord. "I put it on YouTube just for the hell of it," he says. "People were like, 'Oh my god, that's so cool, can you show me how to do that?'" He realized there was something nostalgic but also flat-out appealing about the decades-old aesthetic. He wondered, Could you make an app that would make your video look like an old tape?

YouTube user Steve Mays demonstrates the app:

Via Highsnobiety.

With the photo project Past Present Project, photographer Christian Carollo honors and relives his grandparents travel experiences from the late 70's and early 80's. This project inspires me to both get back to photography, and journal writing, but also to start travelling more.

The Past Present Project began as a way to showcase my grandfather’s vintage photography from around the United States, but the project that resulted happened purely by chance. It all started in October 2012 with a randomly selected box of slides that contained his photographs of the Oregon Coast, which is exactly where I would be traveling a week later. Most of the images were scenic shots, but one shot displayed a building in the small coastal town of Winchester Bay. I wondered, what if I could replicate my grandfather’s photograph 30 years later? I did just that and my new mission was born.

Upon returning home, and seeing the interest that built around that single photograph, I wondered how many more I could possibly capture. With the help of my grandmother’s detailed travel journals from their cross-country trips, I have managed to discover the location of dozens of my grandfather’s images. A project that began by chance, now often determines where my next journey will take me.

Since I largely have my grandfather to thank for my love of travel and photography, I wanted to honor his memory by replicating the photographs he took from his trips all across America. This is my Past Present to him!

Groveland, California, April 1979 and May 2015:

White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, April 1979 and October 2014:

Cafe Du Monde worker in New Orleans, Louisiana, February 1978 and April 2014:

Via @hacerfotos. H/t Fubiz.

Ben Perry has collected close to 1,500 images of propaganda and advertising posters from the Soviet Russia and Soviet Union between the years 1917-1991. The collection is impressive and full of good art, but unfortunately it's lacking with detailed descriptions, such as translations and the name of designers.

Let's Fulfill the Plan of Great Works by Gustav Klutsis, 1930:

Value the Bread!:

We Are a Sportive Family – Father, Mother, Brother and I:

Where a Liqueur Glass Is Leading to…:

Additional great resources with Soviet Union posters:

• SovietPosters.com
• Soviet Art Me

The graphic editor Photoshop celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Up until the release of this magnificent graphic tool, it was a time-consuming and skilled labour to design and produce printed materials.

Sean Adams, professor at Art Center College of Design, demonstrates the process of re-creating the mockup of a print ad, that are being sent to the printer with layout instructions. So many people were simultaneously involved in this process, which make their work even more impressive.

The documentary and Kickstarter project "Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production", due for release Summer 2017, will deal with this subject more extensively.

Via @alexred.

Welcome to Dismaland, artist Banksy's own amusement park. Not the most colorful place on Earth, but probably one of the most honest ones.

Via Highsnobiety.

Featured image: Immigrants in the boat pond. Via The Telegraph.

By drinking coffee before taking a powernap, you'll sort of getting a double energizing effect, since the caffeine starts to kick in after your powernap comes to an end after 15-20 minutes. This is one for my personal toolbox, which already includes breathwork, mantra meditation, Reiki, yoga, and hypnosis with the use of a "Inner Mental Room", all good alternatives for getting rid of tiredness.

The phenomenon was first studied by British scientists at Loughborough University, looking into ways to combat driver sleepiness. After measuring the participants’ brainwaves whilst in a driving simulator, they found that the caffeine/nap combo worked better than either caffeine or napping on it’s own, cold air, or a break with no nap. The caffeine nap was most effective at improving driving performance, virtually eliminating the mid-afternoon drowsiness peak that the other groups exhibited.

Featured image: A cup of espresso. Photography by stylist Ginny Branch. Via One Chapter A Day.

You have probably one time or another seen her work – artist and graphic designer Susan Kare laid the foundation of how symbols used in graphical user interfaces look today. In the early 80's, Susan joined Apple, and is the one responsible for designing many of the typefaces and icons found in the original Macintosh operating system. After leaving Apple, she started to work at NeXT, a computer company co-founded by Steve Jobs after he was forced to leave Apple, which gave her clients such as Microsoft and IBM. Here, from Wired's piece "Meet the Woman Who Launched a Billion Clicks":

In the early 90s, when Wired was founded, Kare was designing icons for Windows, including the logos for Solitaire and playing card designs for Windows' games, some of which made their way into the book. Since then, she says, "The basic problem that you're trying to solve by designing an icon for a screen has not changed: you aim to create an image that's a visual shorthand for a concept. If you do your job well, that image becomes meaningful as a symbol – something easy to recognize and remember."

[…]

"Visual complexity is not necessarily directly proportional to effectiveness," she says. "Key to the creative process is still the fundamental effort to present a functional image which works well as a symbol for its intended audience."

Featured image: Screenshot of Susan's website.

Laso Schaller is the new world record holder for the highest dive, jumping from 58.8 meters (192.913 feet) on 4 August 2015, in Maggia, Switzerland. A daring jump indeed, but jumps from divers like Dana Kunze, Randy Dickison and Rick Charls in the 80's are absolutely fantastic and terrifying to watch, since the divers also changed positions during their way down.

Watch Dana Kunze's world record high dive from 52.4 meters (172 feet), at the World Record High Dive Challenge in San Diego, 1983:

Rick Charls ties the new world record during the same competition:

Randy Dickison sets a new high dive world record with 53.2 meters (174 feet 8 inches), at Ocean Park in Hong Kong, 1985:

See the full footage from the World Record High Dive Challenge 1983.

The latest solo album from Morten Harket, the lead singer of A-ha, is entitled "Brother". The other day, I heard the album's single by the same name, which I found to be beautiful, both music and lyrics-wise.

Last year, Morten gave a great and intimate performance at NRK TV – Studio 1:

Featured image: Morten Harket together with a fan in the documentary "Hemland" by Sara Broos.

Oh, these water toys seem awfully funny to me. Just like a dolphin would; jump, dive, roll around.

Featured image: The watercraft Seabreacher X.

In The New York Times from 2011, the rise and popularity of meditation. This article focuses primarily on Transcendental Meditation, and its growing popularity, that among many things, stems from lowering course fees, high profile endorsements, and most importantly, science that validates the efficiency of the technique.

At Trinity College in Hartford, the women's squash league began meditating together after every practice last year. The Doe Fund, an organization that assists the homeless, has begun offering TM to its residents along with computer skills and job training. And Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge-fund manager of Bridgewater, has long credited the success of his funds to his daily practice.

And here's what Dr. Mehmet Oz said, during the David Lynch Foundation's fundraising gala "Change Begins Within", in 2010:

"It's like, imagine the ripples on top of an ocean," Dr. Mehmet Oz, who meditates in an armchair in an enclave off his bedroom, said at Mr. Lynch's benefit. "And I'm in a rowboat, reactively dealing with the waves and water coming into my boat. What I need to do is dive into the deeper solace, the calmness beneath the surface."

Featured image: David Lynch speaks at the "Change Begins Within" gala in 2010 (video link), held at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photography by Evan Sung / The New York Times.

Barcelona seems to be a great city, but so does Madrid. Take a 36 hours city tour, in less than 5 minutes, with The New York Times.

I still keep my business cards in my wallet and/or in a little cigar box, which suits me just fine for the moment. But, an alternative to these are the hand-knitted card cases by James Lotter, called Business Cardigans (sadly sold out, as of now).

Which book are you when having your morning coffee? Here, book titles on mugs from the Penguin Collection.

"A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf:

"The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler:

"Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens:

Via Sunday Morning.

Roz Weston, the co-host of the radio show "The Roz and Mocha Show" on Toronto's Kiss 92, and former Howard Stern intern, shares among many things, how Transcendental Meditation has giving him much more physical energy, and the ability to handle things that come up much more easily.

A few years ago I was feeling very overwhelmed by the pace of my life and the responsibilities I had. I was looking for something and I didn’t know what. I heard about transcendental meditation [a form of “relaxed awareness” meditation founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the mid-1950s and practised by notables such as Jerry Seinfeld and Oprah Winfrey] from a friend. I’m not a religious person at all, so it was nothing to do with that. It was first described to me as yoga for your mind. You shut everything down, you go deep and when you come out of it you have so much energy. It is a literal recharge. In the middle of the day when we all break for lunch, my colleagues all go to the cafeteria and I go to my dressing room and meditate for 20 minutes and then I’m good to go. A 13-hour workday with five hours’ sleep is not a problem. It’s not like the kind of meditation where you sit cross-legged and clear your head of all thoughts. Thoughts come into your head and they sit there and you let them go and you go deeper and deeper. I now have the ability to deal with issues, thoughts, information so much more effectively than I did before. I no longer feel overwhelmed. I used to feel overwhelmed every second of the day.

Featured image: Illustration by Rachel Idzerda / The Globe and Mail.

Via @kenchawkin.

During an episode of Channel 4's "Grand Designs", I was mighty impressed when witnessing the perfect machinery of assembling the shell of a prefab house by German house manufacturer Huf Haus. The German builders were efficient, skilled, organized, worked fast, and maintained a high work ethic.

Seen as the Rolls-Royce of kit homes, Huf Haus prices start at about £500,000, before land costs. Once they have planning permission in place, customers are invited to Germany to choose everything from the size and layout of the rooms to light switches and bathroom tiles.

Factory production takes four months, after which the flat-pack home is shipped to the UK along with a team of German builders. Assembly of the shell takes a week or less, with the interiors (including electrics and plumbing) taking a further 12 to 14 weeks.

Watch the full "Grand Designs" episode. The really fun part starts at the 22:00 minute mark:

Watch Spencer Seabrooke break the world record for the longest free solo slackline by 7 meters. Without the use of any safety equipment, he has to make a daring 64 meters long walk, being 290 meters above ground. The drone footage coupled with the recorded clear sound of Spencer's breathing, add to the overall excitement.

Want more? Take a look at Alex Honnold's free solo climb in Yosemite National Park, or highwire walker Bunny Dryden's daring stunts from 1936 in Downtown Los Angeles. And to finish it off, watch Alassan Issa jump over a speeding Lamborghini Gallardo.

Via Devour. H/t kottke.org.

I have just seen the film "Bad Words" with one of my favorite actors, Jason Bateman, who also did his directorial debut with this one. The story revolves around 40-year-old and eighth grade dropout Guy Trilby, who thanks to a loophole, enters a National Spelling Bee. I had no idea a spelling bee could turn this nasty!

Besides the great acting by Bateman, actors Kathryn Hahn, Allison Janney, and Philip Baker Hall make this a wonderful film experience, together with a funny script. And 10-year-old Rohan Chand, who acts alongside Bateman, does a phenomenal job.

Watch the trailer:

Despite working as a fashion photographer, Mark Reay found himself homeless for 6 years living in NYC, a life event that's been documented in the documentary "Homme Less". Here, from the review by The Hollywood Reporter:

Reay, a handsome 52-year-old with the kind of hair that makes a man not mind the thought of graying, grooms himself in city-park restrooms and at the YMCA, where a few lockers contain his natty wardrobe and assorted possessions. A camera, cell phone and laptop make him a one-man photo crew, allowing him to shoot the backstage action at Fashion Week, edit and upload pix using coffee-shop wi-fi, and maintain as much of a digital presence as anyone else who works outside an office. He has health insurance and a bank account, thanks to his actors' guild, and friends — most of whom don't know he's been sleeping rough for five or six years. In fact, his current camp is on the roof above an unwitting friend's apartment, requiring him to move stealthily from sidewalk to rooftop lest he bump into the man in the stairwell.

Short footage from the documentary:

Reading about the film and having watched the trailer, I wondered how it came about, that Mark wasn't able to get him a place of his own. Film critic Mark Dujsik answers my question:

Reay pretty much admits he's homeless by choice, as a way to save on the expense of renting an apartment. After all, he needs the little money he earns in order to do the work he wants to do, which often includes networking at bars until 2 o'clock in the morning. He could get a "normal" job if he wanted, but he doesn't want to. Reay speaks directly to the camera, telling the audience that we can feel free to come up to that roof and tell him to get a regular job. "Kick my ass," as he puts it, and we can't tell if he means that literally or figuratively.

And the same does the following BBC segment:

Via kottke.org.

People who are meditating, are to be found literally everywhere. Now, in the world of corporation, meditation is booming and some companies offer their employees to meditate during worktime, in some cases even providing them with meditation rooms.

"More and more companies are offering meditation rooms and allowing employees to meditate on company time, because if you're dragging at 4 p.m. and you have to keep going until 6 or 7 p.m. and you're just exhausted, you don't want to just grab a tenth cup of coffee," said Bob Roth [Executive Director of the The David Lynch Foundation and TM teacher], a renowned meditation teacher based in New York City.

[…]

Such meditation programs [the Transcendental Meditation course] are proven to have boosted the bottom line of businesses and the productivity and job performance of employees, in addition to reducing healthcare costs across the board. But a unique benefit of holistic health options like transcendental meditation is the sense of well-being and connection each practitioner finds within themselves.

"The benefit that people notice right off the bat is that they start sleeping better almost immediately. They also wake up feeling fresher in the morning," said Roth. "They also have a sustained energy that isn't nervous or agitated but very settled, powerful and creative energy."

Featured image: Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street" (2013), taken from Bloomberg's meditation article. Illustration by Jamie Chung, and the portrait of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement, by Philippe Halsman / Magnum Photos.

I think it was back in the late nineties, when I watched a TV segment about blogger Justin Hall. A TV team was invited into his home in San Fransisco, and he talked about sharing his life on the internet, something that back then was a bit unusual, or maybe I should say very unusual. Several years later, I was reminded about this fascinating interview once again, when I read one of Justin's articles in Yoga Journal. "Ah, the internet guy" I thought, mistakenly thinking that he wasn't blogging anymore. Fast forward to today, and I just found out that Justin has released the documentary "overshare: the links.net story", and that he's been blogging for 20 years.

Hello, my name is Justin Hall and I've been sharing my personal life in explicit detail online for over twenty years. Starting in 1994, my personal web site Justin's Links from the Underground has documented family secrets, romantic relationships, and my experiments with sex and drugs.

overshare: the links.net story is a documentary about fumbling to foster intimacy between strangers online. Through interviews, analysis and graphic animations, I share my motivations, my joys and my sorrows from pioneering personal sharing for the 21st century. In 2004 the New York Times referred to me as "perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging." I hope this documentary reveals that I was a privileged white male with access to technology who worked to invite as many people as possible to join him in co-creating an internet where we have a chance to honestly share of our humanity.

Visiting the documentary page is pure nostalgia, reminding me of the early days of the web, with simple webdesign layouts, animated GIFs, bulleted lists, and those tables. As a side note, the recent website re-design of artist Vanilla Ice, brings many of these elements back to life once more.

Via kottke.org.

In our consumer society with planned obsolescence, a computer has an average lifespan of two years. When they get thrown away, some of them might show up at Alaba International Market in Lagos, Nigeria. Every month, around 500 shipping containers with used electronic goods arrive to the market, and business is thriving.

One in three electronic items arriving at Alaba is broken, but highly skilled technicians are paid to repair them. “If you have two computers that aren’t working, you take bits from both of them and make one working computer,” says Julius Monye, 52, a secondhand-computer seller. “After my technicians have worked on them, 90 percent of the computers will function.” The refurbished computers are tidied up with some spray-paint and put on display for the 300,000 people who come to Alaba every day. Despite the paint, the origins of the computers are part of their appeal. “Secondhand products from America or Europe can have a better quality than new Nigerian ones,” explains Julius.

One of my favorite graphic designers, Aaron Draplin, talks about his haven, the studio, in New York Magazine's article "A Design Guru's Work Lair".

When I worked out of my home, the reason I left was I ran out of space. I go out and grab stuff from the dead world and hoard it. The language they used on these nameplates was really cool. The type is so beautiful. There’s no cake-decorating going on because it’s better work. I’ve made business cards like this for people. The beauty of some of this stuff — weird patches from over the years, old office supplies, whatever. Now when I do a patch for somebody, I know where to go.

For more Draplin, watch the making of Field Notes' Shelterwood Edition.

Photo credit: Leah Nash for New York Times.

From French photographer Francois Prost's photo series "Faubourg" depicting suburban architecture of Paris.

Les Choux de Créteil, Val-de-Marne, Paris, by architect Gérard Grandval:

Giralda, Saint-Blaise, 20th arrondissement, Paris, by architecture firm Delaage-Tsaropoulos:

Cité Michelet, 19th arrondissement, Paris, by architects A. Coquet, H. Auffret, D. Auger, P. Hayoit de Bois Lucy, J.P. Cazals and B. Massip:

Les tours Nuages, Nanterre, Hauts-de-Seine, Paris, by architect Émile Aillaud:

Porte de Clignancourt, 18th arrondissement, Paris:

H/t Colors Magazine.

The ski film "Afterglow", produced by Sweetgrass Productions, was shot during the night on location at Golden Alpine Holidays, British Columbia and Alyeska Resort, Alaska. It includes the talented skiers Chris Benchetler, Daron Rahlves, Eric Hjorleifson, and Pep Fujas, together with lots of powder and colors.

Via Malcolm Brown.

Meet Jake Weidmann, a perfectionist and Master Penman by trade. Today, there are only twelve certified Master Penmen in the world, and Jake is the youngest. In his work, he likes to blend calligraphy into the art, which infuses them with more life and meaning.

Via Devour.