From the monthly archives: November 2011
This is actually pretty cool!
From Google’s Gmail Blog:
How often do you have something scheduled at 3am? What about 10pm? If the answer is almost never, you might want to try out the Hide morning and night lab in Google Calendar.
With a simple drag of a slider you can fold all those empty hours into a single row to set the time range you want to hide. The folded rows still show all your events, just in more compact form.
We’re launching this in Calendar Labs (Settings > Labs) to gather feedback on how people end up using this feature.
Too funny! Her giggles are infectious! Be sure to see towards the end when she cycles through the webcam themes….
From Mashable:
Webcams, amirite? Here’s a totally refreshing, embarrassingly honest video about one woman’s first brush with a webcam. If you can make it past about a minute and a half of infectious giggling and merriment you find out the video was taken to send love to Lisa’s family.
The actual meat of the message is standard fare — she needs to feed the cats, clean up, watch Dancing with the Stars — but the real point is capturing that moment when we were first charmed by tech. Lisa spends most of the video trying to wish “Mesha” but inevitably breaks down into fits or marvels at how weird it is when she turns her head. Simple joys, but who hasn’t been there.
The real highlight comes later in the four-minute run time when she discovers you can add clip art to a webcast and then promptly cycles through themes.
We have to give props to Mesha for not only recognizing the comedic/sweet potential of the message, which was posted to her Facebook profile. Also, a tip of the hat to Mesha for MacGyver-ing what looks like an iPhone stand to film the video off-screen.
Hmmm – what can I say.
Not sure HOW or WHY or even WHAT made him think of this, but take a look at what this guy does with $200+ in change.
From Gizmodo:
I don’t know how this guy managed to build a 3,118 coin coin tower on top of a single dimeon the corner of a table but boy did he do it. It took him 7 hours, over 200 dollars in change plus some presumably insane weed smoking to pull it off.
The final tally of coins used: 600 quarters, 501 dimes, 313 nickels, 1699 pennies and 5 coins from foreign countries. Screw a Coinstar, I’m going to try to do this next time I have a stack of change. One question though: where’s the video of him knocking the tower all over and making it hail? [YouTube via The Awesomer]
I don’t know about you, but I love maps – and interactive maps are even cooler! Take a look at this one and play with it! Find out who moved in and out of your county and from/to where:
(click on the map below to be taken to the live map)
![American Migration Interactive Map Forbes American Migration [Interactive Map]](http://www.danlikesthis.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/608x488xAmerican-Migration-Interactive-Map-Forbes.png.pagespeed.ic.xg01PoHKpu.png "American Migration [Interactive Map]")
From Forbes:
Close to 40 million Americans move from one home to another every year. Click anywhere on the map below: blue counties send more migrants to the selected county than they take; red counties take more than they send. Published on November 16, 2011 | By Jon Bruner | More about the map >
This is a very interesting list of ‘tools‘ (or applications) that are popular with online designers now. I don’t consider myself a designer (all those genes skipped me and went straight to my kids and grandkids!), but it turns out I use many of these!
From FastCo:
Designers, in many ways, are quintessential first adopters and ideal test customers: They’re technically savvy and demanding, with an extreme attention to detail and polish. Please them, and it’s pretty certain that you’ve got a great product on your hands.
All of which makes this infographic commissioned by Best Vendor particularly interesting: Drawn from a survey of 180 design pros, it shows the favored apps in their toolkits. At the very least, these charts will show you a few apps that you might consider:
Maybe the most striking thing here is how little Microsoft you see–Word, for example, is barely an afterthought. The areas ripe for some real disruption though are generally those where one single app is dominating the scene–surely there’s something better out there than Dropbox, a web app for sharing files on the cloud, great as it is? Evernote, a program for writing reminders and clipping important notes, is likewise something that people love, but I wonder how you could improve something like that.
Along those lines, the survey also pointed out some fascinating little apps that might be worth picking up, and that might evolve into big things or even industry standards:
I love this one! Almost looks like a letterpress person’s hands! 
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Wow – the entire Bach works - available free as a download! Very nice!
From OpenCulture:
We mentioned this one long ago, and it’s time to mention it again: You can download for free the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach. They were recorded by Dr. James Kibbie (University of Michigan) on original baroque organs in Leipzig, Germany. Feel free to start with a collection of Favorite Masterworks, or get the complete works that have been divided into 13 groups for easy download. Once you download these zip files, you will need to unzip them before playing the tracks. Enjoy!
