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This is a story about the coolest astronaut in human history. If you haven’t heard of this man yet, his name is commander Chris Hadfield (53), who was the first Canadian to walk in space. Helped by his two sons, he harnessed the power of social media to give millions of people access to space, to the incredible views he was seeing and share basic scientific experiments like showing that you can’t cry in space. He slowly turned into something like a space celebrity, amassing a huge crowd on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit while doing an IAmA.

I have been reading and writing a lot the past 8 months when I came across Noah Stokes’ birthday lists. Inspired by these I figured I could highlight some learnings myself. Scanning through my scribblings I tried looking for the ones that appear to me as important or beautiful. These are probably lessons that have shaped me into who I am, it will be interesting to see how this will look a year from now.

Disney Animation recently published a short film called Paperman. They put the whole thing on Youtube for us all to watch Update: the original video is gone, here’s a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM6cLnscmO8 Apart from the incredible technicalities & overall mood it gives you, I’m really amazed how they manage to capture the “Disney feeling” in such a short film. Check out more artwork and background information on the Disney Animation website.

Lately my (online) reading experience has been improved a lot, partly because of Quote.fm. I noticed I was storing a lot of good articles for later use, but wanted to share these with people but at the same time keep a log of what I’ve been reading and what good stuff I came across. To keep track of what inspired me or what I simply marked as “awesome”, I’m going to keep a log of interesting articles. I’m not set yet on a rythm for this, but here’s a first attempt.

The answer turned out to be a bit tedious so I tried fixing that. Say hello to Viewportmarklet:

Example of the Viewportmarklet

How does it work?

The tool is build around the assumption that you need an actual letter m on your canvas in the base font size. The width of that letter m is what the browser will use as 1 em. When working on a frontend project I found myself struggling with the sites current viewport width in em and in pixels. To save myself and others from demotivation problems I build a small tool that helps you to wrap your head around em usage. Check out the repository on Github.

I like music a lot. I enjoy listening to it, let it grow on me, let it define me for that moment. Maybe I build up a connection to a certain song because of my mood, or because of the memories I’ve attached to it over time. Discovering music has changed a lot the last years. There are great online services helping you find amazing gems from all over the globe. But I realized one thing: this whole thing around timing and newness of music is slowly fading away. It’s not important anymore if you discover this band right after they released their new EP, or if you heard that song on the radio the first day it aired. Here are a bunch of music discovery services I use myself in no particular order:

Of course you remember Primer. That film from 2004 that would keep you puzzled for days. After nine years Shane Carruth is back with a new project, Upstream Color. Go watch it, don’t read anything else. https://vimeo.com/57342043

Anticipation

While most film critics collectively claim one shouldn’t spoil more then the plot outline for this movie that already has been published, I’m going to stop here and wait for the film to play at Berlinale with only this quote:

Last week my friend Peter Bihr tweeted about this Gotye mashup that was being played at the Wired 2012 conference. Yes- we’ve all about died of how many times this track has been played on the radio, tv, well everywhere and ALL THE TIME, but I must admit my interest was raised when I found out Wally De Backer (aka Gotye) was giving this mashup “back to the internet”. You’ll find a writeup of this talk here.

Browsing my Spotify playlists I stumbled upon this great album again zZz - Running with the Beast. I saw them once years ago as a support act and was really impressed by the energy and performance these guys were putting up. A bit later they released their album Running with the Beast, for which Roel Wouters aka Xelor has made this awesome video. I agree, it’s pushing quite some moral boundaries but I think that’s mostly because of the switching of contexts, both creative and biological. There is an animal welfare statement on Roel’s website to make sure you won’t loose any sleep. If you want to know more, check out todayandtomorrow for more posters and the ‘making of’ video. This video is 3 years old so no HD quality unfortunately, but still a great watch. Enjoy.

Erased Tapes did a tour featuring Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Winged Victory for the Sullen. I attended one of their shows in Berlin and it was amazing. This should give you a good impression:

Check out more of their music on their site or SoundCloud profile.