• Font Combinations App - a little app to inspire your typography choices in future projects. I'm not sure I'd pay $1.99 for such a thing but it may end up being a worthy resource if you find yourself completely flustered when it comes to choosing some fonts.
• resizeMyBrowser - a simple Javascript grid to get your browser sized to just the right dimensions for all your responsive designs. via Will.

I'm loving the portfolio of Gavin Potenza. The illustrations are simple but not without personality, the textures are just the right amount of subtlety and the color schemes are perfect. Make sure not to miss the Flight Path, Duke Medicine and IEEE Time Machine pieces. Lovely stuff.

Looks like NPR Music now has their very own Tumblr. While it doesn't seem to be everything they cover on the main show it is a nice consumable version of the "best bits." I recommend this piece on MoWest and 100 Songs That Messed with Texas.

Uhpinions is one of those repositories of collected ridiculousness from around the web - think Lamebook or Regretsy. Uhpinions focuses on silly product / business reviews. Sites like this are typically kind of low-rent (no offense to those that created it) but there's a good chunk of legitimately entertaining reviews available. Items like the Laptop steering wheel or How To Survive a Robot Uprising are undeniable.

This ReadWriteWeb article has some insightful information about the GeoLoqi API that just went live. The site is designed to be:

a private, real-time mobile and web platform for securely sharing location data, with features such as Geonotes™, proximal notification, and sharing real-time GPS maps with friends.

Which, mostly, sounds entirely like gibberish. The main goal, I believe, is to augment physical locations with Internet data - i.e. you walk past a historic building and get a notification that you can learn more by reading the Wikipedia entry on it, or you go to the grocery story and your significant other has left a notice there for you to remember to pick up an item.

Part of me absolutely loves this idea and part of me finds it terrifying to potentially have my geolocation data tracked so frequently. I suppose this is the way of the future and I should start getting used to it. Right?

The jQuery plugin Supersized! makes it easy to add fullscreen, rotating, background images to your site. While you don't really need a plugin to make this happen, sometimes it's nice to have one around for quick implementation. The default skin it comes with is well designed and the functionality seems well thought out. At the very least it's a handy tool to have in your bookmark reservoir.

HT Derble.

Find a chunk of time today to sit down with Vincent Fournier's ongoing "Space Project" photography series. Browsing through the set you quickly realize there's no one, single, representative image to fully "explain" the set. The helmet shown above might properly represent the portion of the series that focuses on equipment used by astronauts but it fails to even hint at the surreal space landscapes that are captured or the retro-future buildings shown throughout. It's an immersive series well worth carving some time out of your day for.

via Kate.

There are some beautiful captures in the photostream of Sasha Faq. I'm curious to know what level of post-composition is applied to them or what kind of double exposure techniques are used but despite that inquiry, they're gorgeous images. I particularly enjoy the above and other such creations such as this.

via Up the Line.

There are plenty of great pixel works from Diego B but I'm particularly smitten with "Anatomia." Be sure not to miss out on some of the more minimal / faux-pixel works like this or various text layouts like this.

HT Nevver.

How has Skate Painting not been done before? Surely it has, right? Brilliantly simple and beautiful results. Be sure to watch the making of video.

via Peter.

Apparently 37Signals has started doing a series of "Founder Stories" interviews with companies they respect. The first installment is The Slicehost Story, which gives a great bit of history on how Slicehost got started, sold to Rackspace and what they're getting into now. It's great to hear founders talk with such passion and to hear how hard they pushed themselves to reach the rewards they received. Inspiring!

via Matt.

You know the drill. The playlist, the breakdown below and bonus videos below that.

• Jetpack Show Open - "It Starts Right Now!"
• Sloth Road Help - if you don't absolutely lose it on this I'll be impressed. via Casey.
• Best Worst line in screenwriting history - the line is bad but the fact that Peter Parker looks to be about 40 is even more ridiculous. via Matt.
• Pizza Machine Promo - yea, the first minute or so of this is super boring but once you hit 1:17 you will see why this is worthy of Friday Video status. A pizza so big that it requires a chandelier mount to move it around. America.
• BEP - Everybody Poops - I can't help that I find this amusing. It's ridiculously well integrated. Or maybe this is the real song and I'm just totally ignorant.
• Humpback Whale Rescue - not a funny or ridiculous video.. just a rather phenomenal story. A group of whale watchers end up rescuing a beast and then it celebrates for an hour with them. Nuts.
• Mario climbing a beanstalk for 10 hours - how long can you endure? Oh, and please take note that this is actually a meme of lots of very long ridiculous goodness.
• Count Tarakan - Istanbul not Constantinople - Duncan points out that it'd be a travesty not to include this one this week and I agree. What is going on here? So much production value for such a ridiculous verison of this song.

BONUS

• Panda Bear - "Surfer's Hymn" - phenomenal music video. It's appalling how much I love this.
• You Got Mail - 5 second film starring Patton Oswalt. Also, this.
• Porn Rental with Michael C Hall and Ben Schwartz - ridiculous premise but pretty amusing as well. Ben Schwartz never ceases to amuse me.

Have a great weekend!

I'm quite pleased that Chad pointed out that gmunk has an inspirational tumblr. Well worth following.

It should also be noted that I haven't checked out the gmunk portfolio in some time and his output is as impressive as ever. I had no idea he was so involved with all of those TRON sequences but it makes total sense. Be sure to watch every single last one of them. Seriously.

So, if you somehow managed not to hear yesterday, Spotify launched in the US yesterday. Invite codes have been pretty abundant but if you're having trouble getting in you can sign up through this Klout promotion that should get you in. It also gets you a Klout account which you may or may not want.. but probably worth it just to try out Spotify.

My initial impressions of the service are quite favorable. The available catalog is impressive and the speed at which things stream is blazingly fast. My only complaints so far stem from unfamiliarity with the way things work (i.e. how do you tell the difference between something local and something on spotify? If I share a playlist of just local songs, no one sees them. etc. etc.). It's not the prettiest looking application but it's certainly not poorly done.. kind of a B-grade iTunes.

The interruptive radio ads are a real bummer but it's just more incentive to actually pay for the service. I didn't think a subscription service would fly with most people but after using this, I don't see why it wouldn't.

Lastly, I'm told this article is a Must Read for anyone curious about the origins of the service, the tech behind it and how it benefits labels/artists. I've not had a chance to consume the whole thing yet but I'm curious.

What do you think of it?

My brother pointed out a nice NPR article about effect of The Space Age on everyday designs. I don't think I was familiar with the term Googie Architecture prior to said article but now I'm definitely quite curious to explore more on the subject. There's something instantly nostalgic and equally classy about all the designs.. even if they teeter on that line of being of a little absurd. Love it.

Given that this was posted back in January it is possible that it's old news to most of you but I'm just now stumbling upon the Errol Morris directed, Philip Glass scored short documentary film They Were There. The thirty-minute undertaking covers a bit of the 100 year history of IBM and ten of the major points of development they tackled. The entire thing is rather incredible - particularly the portions regarding the Space Program, the UPC and the team that developed the first PCs.

I understand the whole thing is a bit of an advertisement for IBM but they really have been involved in some serious innovations. There's more on their 100 years here but I can't say that's a worthwhile substitute for the above film.. make time to watch it!

There is much to love about Raygun52. Their mission is to share a new Raygun Illustration for every week of the year - 52 weeks, 52 rayguns. Thus far, the offerings are quite diverse and engaging. Their site design seems to be a tiny bit of homage to Raygun magazine and their Initiative Information is a playful bit of sci-fi prose. I'm filing this one under "Yet Another Site To Check Back on Regularly."

via Mark Weaver.

The last episode of A Life Well Wasted was released roughly a year ago as the host, Robert Ashley, departed to focus on his music career collaboration as I Come to Shanghai. I found it baffling that he would drop his very popular podcast for music - it couldn't possibly be as good! Well, the fruits of his labor (along with Sam Frigard's labors) are available as Eternal Life: Volume I. Much to my surprise and delight, it is incredibly good. Each track contains three movements, all covering a range of styles and blending electronic and indie influences quite smoothly. It is also, sadly, only 20 minutes long. There is a promise of a Volume 2 in the works and I hope we don't have to wait a year for it to emerge.

Insta-Earth is a clean and interesting way of cobbling together the geodata from your Instagram feed and putting those points on a map of the planet. You probably know where most of the people live that you follow but it's still nice to see it represented. More interesting is to map Your Photos once you've given the site access to your account. It's great to see how tight or spread out your realm of photo sharing is.

• Flash Files, Domains and Security Errors - I was working with loading SWF files from a CDN yesterday and kept running into security errors. This article was extremely handy in rooting out the problem. Ultimately, I still didn't get things working properly but at least I figured out why. Flash earning more negative points in my book!
• Diff Checker - finding the difference between two files may not be something you encounter often but when you do, this makes it a lot easier.