Posts tagged “WebLinks”

• News & Notes
  • Couple married 72 years dies holding hands — from kottke.org
  • Jason Kottke also published an epic round-up of all the best stories, comments, obituaries, collections, videos, etc. about Steve Jobs.
  • Top Ten Misused English Words — from listverse.com
  • 4 Personal Finance Principles That Would Make Your Grandfather Proud — from The Art of Manliness
  • Stellar.io is just awesome. Seriously. Trust me on this one. (Let me know if you want an invitation.)
• Apps
  • Amazing Breaker is a fun (free) breakout game.
  • Can anyone explain the difference between the Starbucks app and the Starbucks Card Mobile app?
• Tech
  • If you have an iPhone running iOS5, open the iTunes app on your phone. Click “More” in the lower right-hand corner. Choose “Tones”. You’ll see that there is now a new section of Star Wars ringtones. (I can’t understand how this wasn’t front page news.)
  • See also: How to make custom tones for your iPhone — from macworld.com
  • If I’m going to get a MacBook Air, then it looks like I’m also going to get a new Thunderbolt display. — via Shawn Blanc
  • Incredible macro photographs taken with iPhone 4S camera — from campl.us
  • Shit Siri Says Is, indeed, quite funny. (On Sunday I was upset when Siri couldn’t connect to the Internet and was unable to tell me the distance from Key West to Cuba. When I said, “Blow me!” in frustration, she said, “David! The language!”)
• Sports
  • Quote of the day: “…it’s clear that marketing people underestimated [Tim Tebow’s] intangibles and popularity.” — Tebow’s Eye Black

• Declaration 1776 sells Revolutionary t-shirts celebrating the origins of our nation. (*These are badass.)
• I used the free version for about a month and last night finally decided it was time to cough up the $3.00/mo for my Instapaper subscription. “What’s Instapaper, David?” It’s only one of the most brilliant apps EVAH! Basically it lets you save webpages to read later, but it’s so, so much more than that. You really need to try it for yourself. I use this every single day.
• Color me shocked. A new study finds that all plastics are bad for you.
  2019-11-30 Update: It looks like rodale.com is no longer around, so that link is dead.
• Everyone knows that you’re born left-handed or right-handed or ambidextrous. But did you know that you have a dominant eye? (And apparently there’s no such thing as ambidextrous sight.) It’s pretty simple to determine which eye is dominant. (Thanks, Shawn!)
• TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) gave a glowing review of 3D4Medical.com‘s iMuscle, calling it, “a must for exercise aficionados.” Andy Faust wrote a much more in-depth review at AppAdvice, though, and let’s just say that he wasn’t quite as impressed.
• Honestly I had no idea that at some time in the 1930s some Nazis built an elaborate compound in the hills around the Pacific Palisades.

• The Timeless Beauty of National Geographic is a wonderful article examining the stability of a famous brand aesthetic. (I used to love reading NG in my elementary school library when I was a kid and just last year decided to get my very own subscription. Every article in every issue is fabulous, just as they always have been.)
• “The most well-known use of Spencerian script is, arguably, the Coca-Cola logo. The logo was designed in the 1880s by the company’s bookkeeper, Frank Robinson.”
• Repeat after me: Taking Photos In Public Places Is Not A Crime
• National Public Radio is changing its name to NPR. (I guess that’s better than Dweezil.)
• Finally! More photos of kitties in wigs!
• “Losing friends is inevitable. Making enemies is not.” — from 35 Lessons in 35 Years
• “This year is the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars sequel that many fans consider the pinnacle moment in a franchise that has pulled in $16 billion in box office and merchandising. But 1980 was also the year that Kurtz and Lucas realized the Jedi universe wasn’t big enough for the both of them.”
• Technology is great, for sure, but you’ll never pick up your iPad and find a perfectly preserved, century-old press pass to a World Series game in its digital pages.
• “Resizing my browser window to make sure it fills up my entire screen will not make me focus on your pretty pictures or admire your wicked design.”
• If you’re looking for seriously advanced computer knowledge — like how to determine the size of an image of Robocop riding a unicorn — take a look at Unicorn Tips.

• James Franco seems to be everywhere right now. There was a great article in New York Magazine last month — The James Franco Project — and it looks like he is going to be the star of September’s issue of Esquire. The crazy thing is that he legitimately sounds really interesting.
• Console jocks, by Tim Carmody (alt link) (guest blogging at kottke.org) is a great read, especially for fans of the Madden franchise. (Tim also wrote an excellent blog piece on one of my boyhood heroes: Charlie Chan.)
• “Tony Nijhuis’ incredible R/C model plane not only looks just like the real B-50 bomber on which it’s based, it actually flies. The plane has a 19-foot wingspan, and took 2 years and $9000 to build.” (via @theawesomer)
• It’s pretty tough to complain with this ESPN list of the Ten Best Sidekicks.
• Do tigers like catnip? Yes. Yes, they do.
• A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… we didn’t have fancy-pants computers to make scrolling text.
• I did not know — but am not surprised to learn — that Shaquille O’Neal is working on his PhD.

Bonus: Five Feeds I Recommend

1. Daring Fireball (subscribe)
2. Friends of the Program (subscribe)
3. Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room (subscribe)
4. Cats Who Code (subscribe)
5. Catalog Living (subscribe)

• “When I see a guy alone at a café without a device open, I assume that he’s either got the iPhone antenna problem or that he’s a serial killer… I’m almost never alone with my thoughts anymore.” (from Blogging from the Shower, by Dave Pell)
• I really love these vintage social media advertisements. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would be proud. (See also: The Periodic Table of Mad Men)
• The last six pictures from July’s massive oil spill in China are terrifying and heartbreaking.
• It’s pretty tough to argue that Apple doesn’t do everything better and smarter than everyone else, especially when you look at how amazing they made a simple battery charger. (I want one.)
• Research proves that happiness is probably not as expensive as you thought.
• “A 95-page court ruling on a college volleyball budget sounds like a Monty Python sketch — because Title IX itself has become a Monty Python sketch… Title IX strictures that were needed a generation ago simply aren’t needed any longer. But because no government program is ever shut down, they slog on, causing asinine intrusions.”
• It’s just not a real party until one of the guests decides to start smashing watermelon fruit bowls on the heads of the dancers.
• I absolutely must get a speech bubble whiteboard lamp for my office.

Bonus: Five Feeds I Recommend

1. Snarkmarket (subscribe)
2. shooshee (subscribe)
3. A Conversation on Cool (subscribe)
4. the impossible cool (subscribe)
5. All Day, Everyday (subscribe)

• The Banana Song will haunt your dreams.
• The photo of an iPhone 4 on the cover of the September 2010 issue of Macworld was taken with an iPhone 4.
• “He needed to know how Big Bird could possibly have arisen from evolutionary history: What are its relatives? How did it achieve such a unique bone structure? What happened to the other members of his species?” … The Taxonomy of Big Bird, Grandicrocavis Viasesamensis
  (This is the same guy who is running The Beibignorance Project, a scientific exercise to determine just how little one can possibly know about Justin Bieber.)
• There’s more to the story of how America got her name than just ol’ Americus Vespucci.
• And while we’re talking about maps… Check out this awesome map of New Jersey (larger) based on the music of Bruce Springsteen.
• Serenity Now! could be the scariest movie of the summer. The Oregon Trail is going to be the big one at the box office, though.
• The Periodic Table of Swearing is now available in color.
• “Two Michigan coffee shops have said that since throwing their employees into bikinis to serve up cups of joe, they’ve experienced a sizable jump in sales.”
• I pity those who suffer from RAS syndrome.
• It’s nice to know that according to Laver’s Law, I have always been shameless.
• “There’s an age at which it is no longer cool to have your own name and number on the back of a jersey. That age is 10.” from Sports Rule #2

• The story of the creation of the “Wanted” posters for Jonah Hex is pretty fascinating.
• About five years ago, on September 1, 2005, I sat at a coffee shop across the street from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and could not believe just how much it leans. And that was five years after they fixed it.
• Everybody loves lists, so Listiki — a site for finding, making, and sharing them — should be popular.
• Adjusting to today’s dollars, the United States has incurred more debt in the last decade then during the entire combined previous 211 years of the republic’s existence.
• How to Create a CD Ladder, from FrugalDad
• “In an era when very little remains shocking, Pierce might have actually managed to create a genuinely disturbing work of fiction, the literary equivalent of Schindler’s List rewritten by the Marquis De Sade and filmed as a Tim Burton animated feature.” (hat tip to rb)
• Just about 100 years ago — on July 24, 1910 — the New York Times featured an article titled “Will Future Generations Lose Historical Documents of To-Day?”.
• “When you are parting with your money, know the person on the other side of the deal thinks you are not so smart and is depending on the anchoring effect when they tell you how much you are about to save.”

• One thing this country has always enjoyed is a good drink. Whether it was rum on the Atlantic, bourbon at the races or that Bloody Mary at Sunday Brunch, alcohol is the American Drink.
• Boom! Dexter returns at the end of September. (Don’t watch the trailer if you didn’t see season 4 yet!)
• Don’t Eff With Fudgie the Whale, Lindsay!
• I cannot wait to see Bad Universe (featuring BadAstronomy).
• Mister Gunther makes horoscopes fun!
• Betty Goes Reno: A visit to the glamorous divorce ranches of the Mad Men era.
• He hasn’t taken a single snap in a real game yet, but Tim Tebow is already leading the league in jersey sales. (Nike has some cool Tebow sneakers, too.)
• Do you think you can identify who voices each character on The Simpsons?
• I didn’t know that there are ATMs in Antarctica.
• Being President of the United States is probably the loneliest job in the world.