More ideas and inspiration to be creative: “Design Something Every Day!”

Interesting: “Eight cool social media infographics.”

These sites are fascinating: FFFFOUND! (image bookmarking), grain edit (modern graphic design inspiration blog) and Black and WTF (seriously, WTF).

Flight 1549 and marine animals

This animation (with audio) is based on all currently available data concerning the US Airways Flight 1549 crash: Flight 1549 3D Reconstruction, Hudson River Ditching Jan 15, 2009. Hard to believe it’s been almost a year now since that Hudson River landing. Even though you know the plane lands safely, it’s still a tense experience to hear the audio again, especially in the context of the flight animation. Worth watching.

Check this out: A pod of bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Florida have developed a remarkable hunting strategy in order to catch fish: Life: Bottlenose dolphins mud-ring feeding.

This is amazing: “Solar-powered sea slug harnesses stolen plant genes.”

These photographs are stunning: “David Liittschwager – Marine Micro Fauna (8 pics).”

Holidays

More photography: “A Very Tesla Christmas.” Take a Tesla coil and a super-long camera exposure and you can have an “electrifying display of holiday cheer.”

From Stereogum: “New Indie Rock Christmas MP3s For 2009.”

I bought a pineapple to eat over Christmas break. I’m also thinking about trying to grow a new pineapple using the crown of the old one: “How to Grow a Pineapple at Home.”

Krampus

Speaking of holiday cheer, I really like this Shirt.Woot t-shirt designed by Missmonster: “Greetings from Krampus.” It celebrates the annual return of Santa’s old pal Krampus.

Happy New Year!

(In case you need it: press in dire situations.)

I’ve browsed through a number of non-Flickr sites lately that have provided excellent inspiration for my own photography projects. Here are some:

• Scott Wade’s Dirty Car Art Gallery
• “Rubik’s Cube Sandwich,” which I plan to make someday (but with different, more colorful fruit and vegetable ingredients)
• James D. Griffioen’s photo sets, including Feral Houses
• “Gallery: Inside Alaska’s Answer to Area 51“
• The Ruins of New York
• The ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which still has an actively burning Silent Hill-style mine fire (also see Johnny Blough’s Centralia set on Flickr)
• Russian plastinochnye (record) collages

Weeds, fruits and vegetables

I will probably want to refer to this article later. From The Oregonian: “Get rid of those weeds once and for all.”

This list by the Environmental Working Group will help you decide what produce is the most important to buy organically grown: “The Full List: 47 Fruits & Veggies.”

I’m thinking about trying some Vegiforms-type molds for my garden vegetables next year. Who doesn’t love novelty vegetables with little faces? These clear plastic forms are very similar to how the Japanese create square watermelons for easy refrigerator storage and stacking.

Technology and gaming

Cool: “Five Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH.”

Amanita Design’s Machinarium looks amazing: “Machinarium has become too gorgeous.”

Insect technology

I found this fascinating: “Hacking a remote-controlled moth with insect venom.”

Cats and baby animals

He’s quite the cat: “Pet cat catches the daily bus for four years.”

Need to replace your toilet? Make your next one a toilet-tank aquarium: Fish ‘n Flush.

Lastly, here are three more of of these blogs: FYBA, Item Not As Described and Probably Bad News.

Short film series

On June 1, David Lynch will launch Interview Project, a 121-part documentary series featuring portraits of Americans from all over the country. Check out a sneak preview: “David Lynch Presents his 121-part ‘Interview Project’: An EW exclusive.”

I might have written about this before, but I’d just like to reiterate that Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno series of shorts for the Sundance Channel are very weird: “Salute Your Shorts: Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno.” The series is about the mating habits of various animals.

Entertainment and advertising

Here is some recent creepiness from BK: “Star Trek – Burger King glasses ad.” Yes, the insanity of the BK Kingons goes even deeper on YouTube. I still think the live-action King is the greatest (read: most awesomely creepy) costume of all time. Not sure about the Kingons. More or less creepy?

I was amused by this: Star Wars vs. Star Trek. The Death Star destroys the Starship Enterprise over San Francisco. (Make sure the sound is turned on.)

Guess who was on a boat last Wednesday night? Take a good hard look, shorty.

There are so many brilliant ecards at someecards.com.

I found an image of Abraham Lincoln riding a tandem bicycle with a beaver (or otter?) by accident. I like it: Rozerem Abe Lincoln. I liked it less once I realized it was part of a Rozerem ad campaign.

Cancer

A friend of mine is now obsessed with electronic cigarettes (or e-cigarettes). I think her rationale goes something like this: “You’re saying I can foster an acute nicotine addiction without the lung and throat cancer? Sold!”

I question this article: “Pollution Can Change Your DNA in 3 Days, Study Suggests.” But, yeah, we’re probably all going to get cancer anyway.

Gardening

Here is a helpful vegetable planting guide: Companion Planting. And another gardening article: “Aphids cause sticky situation.”

I bought a hardy kiwi plant today (among others). Here’s a guide on pruning and training the vines. Also, more comprehensively: “Growing Small Fruits for the Home Garden.”

Graphic design (suffering)

I love these so much: “You Suck at Photoshop, Hilarious Tutorials by Donnie Hoyle.” They’re entertaining as hell, plus I actually picked up a couple of different Photoshop approaches.

Memorial Day weekend

I am looking forward to attending the annual WebVisions conference in Portland this Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, I’ll be heading to the Sasquatch! Music Festival at the Gorge. On Sunday (and maybe Monday) I’ll be in Seattle. Then it’s back to the routine.

I’ve spent a lot of my free time gardening lately. I guess it’s mostly garden preparation (read: shovel rage and weeder fury) at this point. Maybe next weekend I will plant some everbearing strawberries, probably Hecker (read about strawberry varieties). (I also plan to reference Oregon State’s Landscape Plants: Images, Identification, and Information to finish figuring out what’s growing in my backyard.) You can follow me on Twitter for more details about my gardening progress and other random thoughts.

Animation and entertainment

First, here’s an Easter leftover: “Swedish parishioners unveil Lego statue of Jesus.” The colored Lego blocks were placed on the inside so people could only see the white form of Jesus. Hmm.

“A Wolf Loves Pork” is an awesome stop-motion animation short by Takeuchi Taijin: “Wolf Chasing A Pig Stop-Motion Animation Using A Series Photographs.”

Hadn’t really thought about this before: Watch This: Disney Re-Uses Their Animation. Makes sense.

I like this parody of the Where the Wild Things Are trailer: Spike Jonze’s Everyone Poops.

Ah yes, Michael Bay, Joel Schumacher and Roland Emmerich all get mentioned: “Michael Bay Signs $50M Deal To Fuck Up ‘ThunderCats’.” The Onion wins again!

Science, business and economics

Whoa: “Weird Science takes on economics and the sex trade.” Learn about “the downsides of career advancement, the dynamics of shopping carts, a product that will feature in your future spam, and trading sex using meat as a currency.”

Here are two Gizmodo features: “This Is How the Sky Would Look if Both Your Eyes Functioned as Telescopes” and “London Bar Pumps Gin and Tonic Into The Air: Please Breathe Responsibly.”

That’s quite the collection of brands on this list: “The world’s 10 most powerful brands.” Here’s another interesting list of brands: “Twelve Major Brands That Will Disappear.” Recession depression!

Technology, legal and politics

Network neutrality? It’s Comcastic! Here’s a comparison to the UK: “Pick your poison: bandwidth caps or throttling?”

The court decided to make an example of The Pirate Bay founders: “Pirate Bay founders jailed, ordered to pay $3.6m in fines.” I mean, they didn’t call it The Pirate Bay for nothing.

Vaguely animal-related

Have you heard the Animal Collective’s “Zero” remix? Interesting what they’ve done to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song.

This is amusing: Fuck You, Penguin. It’s a blog about cute animals, kind of.

I liked this article on the evolution of visual perception: “Color Vision: How Our Eyes Reflect Primate Evolution.”

In April of 2009, Boaz is setting out on an Un-Road Trip. He’s criss-crossing the United States using every mode of transportation except for car. This may include a horse or dog sled, thus this link totally fits within my animal theme. So there.

I’ve been listening to the free NIN|JA EP (made available on Friday), featuring exclusive unreleased tracks from Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails and Street Sweeper. It’s all right.

I’ve been watching The Lonely Island’s YouTube channel, mostly older stuff I hadn’t seen before. Highlights for me include Nintendo Cartoon Hour (loved it) and Jorm Dances To Fleet Foxes (so randomly goofy). Awesometown was sort of funny, but probably not worth 20 minutes of your life (well, except the last five minutes include humorous 3D-glasses interruptions of “The ‘Bu” by Frazzles, the Awesometown squirrel).

It’s getting to be the time of year for gardening. Here are two articles I found that I’ll probably refer to in the future. They include many tips for fruit tree pruning and vegetable planting:

• Bend Bulletin: “When pruning, look before you leap.”
• Eugene Weekly: “Spring Planting Guide.”

Instead of garden gnomes and pink flamingos, perhaps you’d like to add this to your yard: Bigfoot, the Garden Yeti Sculpture.

Lastly, this is weirdly compelling: Amazing LED-light Art by Sheep.

(By the way, following my smartphones post from last month, I selected the Shadow model because I gave up on the Shadow II coming out in a timely fashion and also refused to splurge on a G1/iPhone touch-screen phone because of the annoying mandatory data plans.)

Here’s one important (and idiotic) tip for adjusting the Shadow’s volume: Make sure you remove the plastic screen protector (or at least the top quarter-inch) the factory-sealed phone comes with, because it covers the ear piece (speaker). This was not immediately obvious to me. I was just trying to keep my screen from getting scratched up right away. I didn’t realize that the thin plastic sticker could have such a significant effect. Just peeling off the plastic from the silver speaker slot dramatically improves in-call volume. However, if the volume still seems too low when maxed out, give the following a try.

Grab your T-Mobile Shadow phone and take it over to your Windows XP computer, then follow these steps:

• Download and install Microsoft ActiveSync 4.x
• Download and unzip Mobile Registry Editor
• Connect the T-Mobile Shadow to your PC via a mini-USB cable
• Quickly run through the initial ActiveSync configuration

(Note: With ActiveSync installed, you can freely and easily drag & drop photos, music, background images, ringtones and more between your Windows Mobile phone and computer.)

Now, to turn in-call volume up, open Mobile Registry Editor and navigate to this location in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\SoundCategories\InCall\InitVol

Set the new InitVol key to a value of “10″ or so (and be sure not to change anything else). The default InitVol value for my phone was “3,” which was rather quiet when trying to hear someone during a call. Seems like going any higher than “10″ for InitVol could blow the cell phone’s speaker (or make you deaf, unless you already are). After performing this registry mod, you will need to restart your device (power cycle) for it to take effect.

(One more thing: I’d recommend buying a snap-on clear/crystal hard case and screen protector for $10 on eBay, if you want to protect your T-Mobile Shadow. Get the two-piece case that slides open with the phone. It also includes a swivel belt clip.)

Hardy kiwis

Pomegranate season just started, but I want to mention another fall fruit instead. I recently learned that you can successfully grow kiwifruit in Oregon. Smooth-skinned hardy kiwis, that is. Native to northern Asia, hardy kiwis are about the size of large grapes (about one inch long) and are often sold by the trademark name Kiwi Berries or Baby Kiwis. The ones I’ve been eating were organically grown in Eugene, Oregon. The Oregonian covered this last month: “How do you use hardy kiwis? Just pop ‘em in your mouth.” Kiwi Berries are deliciously sweet. Their packaging says they “are a nutritional powerhouse and a healthy food source containing over 20 nutrients. Kiwi Berries contain twice the amount of Vitamin E, yet only 60% of the calories of an avocado; 5 times the Vitamin C of an orange; and more potassium than bananas. Kiwi Berries are high in fiber and rich in folic acid.”

Random trivia: The vines of the hardy kiwifruit possess a catnip-like smell which can attract cats. Maybe I can try growing some hardy kiwifruit vines in my backyard next year. Until then . . . nom nom nom.