The Verge: Listen to Spotify on this nostalgic iPod-style web music player. “In an era before multitouch displays, the iPod’s click wheel was the king of music playback control. Now, a new project from frontend software developer Tanner Villarete has attempted to emulate its classic controls as a web app, complete with support for your Spotify and Apple Music library.”
I was searching YouTube when I came across a channel called Mrs. Reid, the Science G. From her About page: “Me and my sisters would remix songs when we were younger (waaay before YouTube), so it’s safe to say, I have had years of practice on how to create songs. As a science educator, I get to blend my two loves: music and education and I’m so EXCITED to share this journey with you!!!” I don’t know any of the music she’s redone because I’m old, but I did enjoy a remixed Cardi B called BODY PARTS AND BODY REGIONS; her music tends to focus on Anatomy & Physiology topics. She also has some A&P lectures available. Really good and recommended.
Boing Boing: The Met just posted Hilary Harris’s Organism (1975) to YouTube. “It took documentary filmmaker Hilary Harris (1929 – 1999) 15 years to make his short time-lapse film depicting Manhattan as a living creature. Called Organism, it was completed in 1975 and is considered to be a forerunner to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982). It’s also fun to see New York in its grimy heyday.”
KIMT: Mayo Clinic Launching “Carillon Cam” Livestream. “The decision to have the tunes streamed comes as more people are still working from home. People who are no longer in The Med City have also reached out and told Mayo Clinic they miss the sounds from it. Carillonneur Austin Ferguson is super excited to have his music reach more ears.” A carillon is a musical instrument consisting of bronze bells which are “played” with a keyboard. You can learn more about them here.
PC Magazine: Watch NASA’s Historic Ingenuity Helicopter Flight on Mars in 3D. “If you thought watching NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter fly across the Martian sky last month was exciting, you’re in for a real treat. Engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration rendered the historic third flight in 3D, lending what the agency called ‘dramatic depth’ to the short trip—as the chopper lifts into the air, zips off screen, and returns moments later for landing.”
CNET: Yayagram: A 20th century phone switchboard for Telegram instant messages. “If you want to talk to your grandmother on messaging app Telegram and she doesn’t have a smartphone, she’ll need to get one. She’ll need to learn how to use iOS or Android. How to manage notifications. You could teach her all of that — or you could just build her a 1900s telephone switchboard that does nothing but send and receive Telegram messages.”
Screen Rant: How To Find Google Search’s NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Easter Egg. “Google is no stranger to hiding Easter eggs in Search and now there’s one to celebrate NASA’s historic Ingenuity Mars helicopter flight.”
NOLA Gambit: Shining down: Doreen Ketchens releases two new albums. “Clarinetist and vocalist Doreen Ketchens has aimed to release an album every year since the mid-’90s — and occasionally has hit two or even three releases. The plan going into 2020 was to keep up the pace when she and her band, Doreen’s Jazz New Orleans, booked studio time in February and started working on the new recordings. Of course, no one’s plans worked out in 2020.” The first time I heard Doreen Ketchens play clarinet was on a YouTube video. I wanted to run down the street and knock on people’s doors and tell them about this brilliant clarinetist. Do yourself a favor and listen to her play and sing “When the Saints Go Marching In”.
CNET: Google’s Suez Canal Easter egg brings boatloads of fun. “Now that the Ever Given cargo ship has finally been freed after spending nearly a week stuck in the Suez Canal, Google has launched a celebratory Easter egg in its Search results. A search for ‘Suez Canal’ and ‘Ever Given’ pulls up an animation of little boats rolling across the top of the page. “
Gizmodo: The Boat in the Suez Canal Is Still Stuck, But You Can Now Stick It Anywhere You Want With This App. “For all who have been captivated by the Ever Given, the ginormous shipping container boat that has been stuck in the Suez Canal for days, we have some good news. Before you get excited, no, the boat’s still stuck. But you can now stick the Ever Given anywhere you please thanks to the clever people of the internet, specifically one Garrett Dash Nelson.” I believe by the time you read this the boat will be unstuck.
Mashable: See the growing Suez Canal traffic jam from space. “One of the largest ships in the world, Ever Given, is lodged in the relatively narrow canal, a major artificial waterway where some $9 billion in merchandise passes daily. Around 12 percent of global trade carefully navigates via the historic canal, which opened more than 150 years ago. Satellite images captured by the European Space Agency show the backlog of ships created by the accidentally stuck Ever Given, which is deeply lodged in the canal’s sandy floor.”
The Register: Ticker tape and a binary message: Bank of England’s new Alan Turing £50 must be the nerdiest banknote ever. “Due to hit circulation on 23 June, the design replaces the relatively short-lived incarnation featuring Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Instead, the update will show the scientist Alan Turing and the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) he developed….Also celebrating Turing’s imminent arrival on the note is UK agency GCHQ, which has created a set of puzzles that produce 11 words or names to be tapped into the agency’s Enigma machine simulator.”
Reddit: Fantasia Archive – The free, offline, world-building software with a unique spin. “Fantasia Archive (or FA for short) is an offline, free software that was created as a reaction to the lack of proper offline world-building and writing tools as most of such programs focus almost entirely on just writing instead of on the world-building and all intricacies it brings. This is what sets FA apart: The focus on the structure of one’s works and relationships of all parts of it to each other instead of solely focusing on the writing experience itself.” Windows-only, unfortunately.
Hackaday: Web Pages (And More) Via Shortwave. “If you are a ham radio operator, the idea of sending pictures and data over voice channels is nothing new. Hams have lots of techniques for doing that and — not so long ago — even most data transmissions were over phone lines. However, now everyone can get in on the game thanks to the cheap availability of software-defined radio. Several commercial shortwave broadcasters are sending encoded data including images and even entire web pages.”
Laughing Squid: A Visualization of the Space That Bytes on the Internet Would Occupy in Comparison to Real World Objects. “For example, using this ratio, a 100 MB would be smaller than a typical soda can, while 1 PB (Petabyte) would be taller than the Statue of Liberty. All information on the internet in 2001 would be represented by 1 EB Exabyte and one ZB (Zettabyte) in 2020. 1 YB (Yottabyte) of information would cover the better part of North America.”
