Noortje pointed me to Halls. Quoted from Last.fm:

Halls is the solo project of 21 year old South London musician Sam Howard. Formed in London, UK in early 2010, Halls worked on material that would appear on the debut EP “Halls EP”, released in January 2011, which was described as having ‘ambient soundscapes buttressed by skitter-step beats.’

There is something incredibly mesmerizing about long slow harmonics in big spaceous buildings, especially when performed in a church, so here’s Halls performing in a church. Enjoy: https://vimeo.com/62278754

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: