Panic just released a whole new version of Unison; their Usenet Browser / Newsreader for OS X. While I am sure that the number of people tackling usenet in this fashion dwindles every day it's nice to see a progressive and respected company making a piece of software to keep things contemporary for those that are still into it.

Chuck Klosterman is a bit of a polarizing writer; likely due to his affiliation with music and "hip" culture. I get the feeling that a lot of people don't like him simply because he's a recognized music writer that has taste that not everyone agrees with. That being said, I finished reading his latest series of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, and rather enjoyed it. There are a couple of chapters on Sports that I glossed over but, on the whole, the subject matter is pretty intriguing. He compares Kurt Cobain to David Koresh, postulates on the Garth Brooks phenomena Chris Gaines, trumpets the greatness of ABBA and ponders why people feel the need to respond to interviews (beyond the obvious promotion scheme).

I'm going to make a conscious effort to complete a bit more reading this year and talk about it here. I've got no shortage of books in the "To Read" pile but it takes a bit of forced will to dive into them. Eating the Dinosaur was a great way to start off the year as a way to get the gears churning and get excited about reading regularly again. I suggest you pick it up and dive right in.

I spent a good bit of timing poking through the portfolio of Jesse Lenz - much of the work reminds me of the influences of BEAST, Stefan Sagmeister and other such dirty / textured favorites. The Cargofolio interface makes it easy to sort through and quick to see a lot of the work. I'd love to see some larger versions of the Monsters and Marilyns pieces...

Benjamin Kyle was found discovered behind a fast food restaurant in 2004 beaten, naked, unconscious and sunburned. He also has retrograde amnesia - leaving him devoid of any information about himself or concrete details of his past. After years of attempts to properly identify him his past is still mostly unknown. Rick Rosner has some of the highest IQ test scores ever recorded but is known for his exploits of the genuinely non-genius type. He's been in a Domino's Pizza commercial, he's been on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (lost, and sued the show for the question being flawed), tricked his way back into being a high school senior four times after he was well beyond the age of it being acceptable and many other odd activities. He was also the subject of an Errol Morris episode of "Obsessed" that I'm quite curious to see. Do some googling on this guy.. there is a lot to unearth.

In an attempt to not fall too far behind with the latest and greatest in the world of HTML / CSS markup I stumbled across the following articles that I suggest anyone involved in the world of web development take a look at:

• HTML5 Web Forms - a great writeup about the new form elements available in HTML 5, their compatibility with existing browsers and the kind of results they create. I had no idea spinboxes, sliders, date pickers and color pickers were part of the HTML 5 set of available tools!
• Image management, naming and attribute selectors - not exactly a compelling title for an article but provides some great insight on the ability to style elements based on more than a predefined class. While I am not sure on the browser compatibility of all the techniques I think it's good to have these sorts of tricks at hand.

The renewed interest in biking that's taking place all over the globe has spurred a great new invention from some MIT Research - the Copenhagen Wheel. The specially designed wheel has an electric motor inside that stores energy every time the cyclist brakes - allowing them to use that energy when needed for uphill battles. The device will also be able to communicate via Bluetooth to keep track of speed, direction, distance and even data on air pollution. While the motor aspect of the wheel may upset some bike purists that it detracts from the physical benefits of cycling I say that anything that makes biking easier and gets more people out there is a good thing. If this were available today, I'd get one.

This, supposedly forthcoming, device from L5 Technology will enable you to add an IR attachment to your iPhone and turn it into a universal remote control. This article points out that it will run about $50 and is set to debut at CES sometime this week. While the proof is in the pudding I have to say this sounds like an excellently obvious idea.

Via Daniel.

It turns out that Mark Weaver has a brother - the talented Keith Weaver - who has quite a repository of images he's calling iPhoneography. There are loads of great images to be found within; all taken with the iPhone camera and processed by some sort of app. It sort of begs the question of where the line is drawn between a Photoshop'ed image and a true "photograph" - particularly in this situation where the level of control is random but still intentional. Regardless of the theoretical take behind it, the majority of images are certainly a treat to partake in.

It's going to be hard for the Internet to top Nic Cage as Everyone as best single serving blog of 2010. A good (or bad) Photoshop job is always a treat but when every single one of them involves Nicolas Cage it takes it to a new level. Well worth browsing through the archives.

Paige posted a link to this article about the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - a web service that will, once you've provided some passwords, access your account and prevent you from ever signing in again. It all sounds a bit extreme but there is some merit behind the idea of ditching all your Social Network profiles and just enjoying the Internet as an informative / educational tool; rather than constant flood of updates. Granted, you could just curb your usage and control yourself but that doesn't sound anywhere near as grandiose!

I caught this NPR report the other day entitled The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse and it's something everyone should read who listens to any form of contemporary music. Overall, it serves as a good primer as to why music progressively gets louder even if it's not getting better and also dives into the rudimentary insights of how digital compression works / warps the original analog sound. It's a quick read but an insightful one.

While I have yet to try it out myself I have to say I am highly intrigued by the concept behind the Joshua Davis project HYPE. This sums it up best I think:

HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program.

From what I can tell, it's a way to decomplicate coding in AS3; a feature that I can entirely endorse. I'm not sure if the new methods could properly be evoked in a production environment but I'm glad to see someone is trying to take Flash back to being an enjoyable tool to use, and not exclusively a dirge of code.

Via Will.

Over the break I made a legitimate attempt to be off the computer a little more than usual and get some reading done (more on that later). However, some of the best reading material is found right here on our very own internets. For your consideration I submit The Wikipedia List of Unusual Articles. On the surface it's a lot of trivial information like The World's Shortest Street but there are also some slightly mind bending insights like World's Weirdest Grammatically Correct Sentence or The Definition of Ghoti. It may end up being just a bunch of facts to bust out in a social setting but you can never have too many of those at hand.

I sorta forgot that the way my blog works is that if I neglect it for a week, the homepage becomes blank. I should probably work on that at some point.. maybe a resolution for 2010.

Regardless, here's a handful of things to get you through the remainder of the year.

• Star Trek vs Mad Men - I really should find this to be ridiculously stupid but I find it quite entertaining. As a singular image, not that funny but once you drill down into each mashup, it's great.
• Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Address - a quick 15-minute inspirational speech from Mr. Jobs. While he says nothing most people don't know it's interesting to hear it from his own mouth.
• Hipstamatic App - this looks like a really well designed iPhone camera app with a "Hipster" vibe attached to it that, to me, makes it almost embarrassing. Anyone tried this out?
• What an RC plane sees when you try to kill it with fireworks - awesome video and the AC/DC soundtrack is an additional bonus.
• Enter the Chronotherapists - interesting article on the "next big thing" for health care. I don't know how legit this will be but it's interesting to read about the different body rhythms and best time of day for various activities.
• Legit Delorean - I honestly think the 60k pricetag is actually worth it.

Have a Happy New Year and regular posting will resume on Monday!

It's that magical time of year again when the Internet pretty much stalls out entirely for a few weeks and the amount of new content free flowing your way actually subsides to an alarmingly slow level. With that in mind, this will be one of the last posts of the year for me until 2010. There's probably one or two more left in me but maybe not.. we'll see. Anyway, I hope everyone has a great Christmas, a Happy New Year and partakes in some hardcore R&R.

Today's playlist and the breakdown...

• Nintendo 64 Kid - yes, you've seen it. Yes, you need to see it again. The box scratching is out of control hilarious.
• Jingle Cats - What Child is This? - sit through the whole thing. No scrubbing through it or skipping, really experience the Jingle Cats! Everything from the looped cat videos, the insanely poor blue screened dog, the almost demonic pitch shifting and the absurdity of the concept in general is just too perfect.
• Sledding Accident - very AFHV style but I won't deny the appeal of those. Also, I'm fairly sure I've personally done this a load of times.
• Welsh Corgi Puppies - because your heart needs warming.
• Fozzie and the Snowman - sadly this cuts off a little prematurely but Muppets make Christmas just right.
• The Christmas Song - the video is not really something to watch but I was reminded this past weekend how great this song is.

If you're still in need of some Christmas video goodness - be sure to look at last years Friday Videos and BetaMaXmas to fill the void. Oh, and don't forget these tunes that you need in regular rotation.

Merry Christmas!

• RGS Xmas Gift Guide - granted it's probably too late to order anything from here but this is one of the oddest Gift Guides I've encountered. There are two items for making your own butter? A Cannibal Curry bath mix? Treadmill for dogs? A CCTV Birdhouse (awesome)? And at least one inappropriate item for family viewing.
• Sketchy Santas - if you haven't seen this single serving blog yet, go ahead and partake.

Janet over at Out the Other is something of a Christmas Music freak. By that I mean she has an immense collection of legitimately Good Christmas songs. The past two weeks on her blog and radio show she has shared some of this good. If you're looking for something a little different but high on the goodness scale you may want to check her Christmas playlists (as well as all the other Xmas posts) and get to downloading. Partytown Hospital has just released a bit of Christmas music of an entirely different variety. The music is vaguely unlistenable, poorly performed and most assuredly scatterbrained. Fortunately, the bad performance is intentional, so it's actually pretty amusing. I found myself almost legitimately enjoying "O Partytown of Bethlehem." Almost.

I've posted my take on the 2009 Best Of mix. It's incredibly difficult to pick a handful of songs from the past year as "the best" but with a little last.fm research and some smart iTunes playlists I was able to boil it down to a pool of likely candidates. Not all of this music was released in 2009 but it was new to me, so I think that constitutes the best of the year. You may already be familiar with the majority of music contained within as most of it has been featured on previous mixes but it's a nice time capsule for myself to listen back and remember what I was into at the time.

On a slightly related note.. if I had to crown someone New Artist of the Year (within my personal realm) it would be Richard Swift; who I have listened to an ungodly amount of times over the past 365 days. Whoever introduced that to me, thank you very much.

→ Download 2009: Best Of

Say what you will about SNL as a whole but the Digital Shorts are, hands down, the best part of the show. The Lonely Island guys honestly rejuventated the show and it's great to partake in their offerings. The latest, The Tizzle Wizzle Show, is ridiculous, absurd, hilarious and a bit psychotic. A kids show song with the line "The pills take hold of your mind and flesh / Your brain is strong, you don't fear death" is just my kind of humor. If you haven't seen it yet.. enjoy.

Yule Burn is a simple service, large video to play in the background of your family gathering to provide a heartwarming fire feel. The difference being they're providing a slightly different type of fire from your typical fireplace scene; this is a barrel of burning trash with some hobo's having a drink and roasting marshmallows. Uplifting? Probably not. Amusing as long as it's not real? Absolutely.

Via Chris.