Old Spice Week
Here are some links I've shared recently. Some items below have additional elaboration, beyond the 140 characters allotted by Twitter. This will be a new trend for me, hopefully a daily one where I sum up the things I've shared each day on Twitter. Obviously, these kind of posts won't be cross-promoted like my usual written posts.
The only context you'll need for some of these to make sense is the Youtube videos done by Old Spice. Everything linked below isn't even remotely as hilarious as those videos, so check some of them out first.
- Smartphone Antennas Exposed. Translated from Apple PR-speak: "It's not just us, see?!"
- It's official: Software will be unpatentable in New Zealand. This is good news for New Zealand, but even much better would be if it creates a ripple effect across international borders.
- Droid X: now with extra spam you wish you could remove from your phone.
- A truly sultry HTML5 canvas demo. I was listening to some electronic music as I saw this, and imagined a visualizer built out of this together with HTML5 Audio. Probably too complex (I'm aware of no beat detection in JavaScript), but it's still a fun idea. UPDATE: Kroc Camen pointed me to an HTML5 Audio experiment which does exactly that. So cool!
- Need to do some feed parsing in python? Mark Pilgrim's FeedParser is where you need to go.
- What would happen if a pandemic truly took over? Experience it yourself and watch it play out in a way that seems all too plausible in today's Facebook-connected world.
- Study like a scholar, scholar! In the style of the Old Spice commercials, students promote their university.
- The most prescient footnote ever by Paul Graham, about Apple turning the iPod into a phone with a web browser. When? Oh, sometime in 2004.
- FastCompany interviews Iain Tait of the Old Spice team on their online saga. Not much about the technical process, but fascinating nonetheless.
- BankSimple: because Your Bank Doesn't Care. I have a request for an entrepreneurial reader: create a new startup that takes the ideology of BankSimple, but applies it to domain registration and processing.
- Dos Equis has the most interesting man in the world. Old Spice has the most likable man in the world.
- The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS. If you're a web developer, you need to check this out—and don't think it doesn't apply to you if all you build is small-to-medium websites!
- So long, and thanks for all the silverfish: the personal YouTube responses by @OldSpice Man have come to an end.
- Speaking of Old Spice Man, though: your voicemail is now diamonds!
- And lastly: how the Old Spice Videos were being made.
Sources and/or subjects for some of these items:
@brucel, @cameronmoll, @KierDarby, @michaelowens, @newsycombinator, @nicepaul, @OldSpice, @spin, @stubbornella
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