A really great Tumblr site with a ton of photos from NYC Past.
Awesome
Map of the Star Wars Galaxy
A stunning and beautifully detailed map of the Star Wars galaxy, including the travel routes of the space ships color coded for each of the six Star Wars episodes. Also available without markings.
Redhead Festival
The town of Breda in the Netherlands held the 6th Annual Redhead Festival. Approximately 5,000 fellow redheads showed up and they also set some sort of world record when over 1,200 redheads gathered for a photo (who keeps these records?).
The redhead fest was launched somewhat by accident in 2005, when a local Dutch painter was recruiting 15 ginger-haired models for a painting. When he received 10 times the number of responses than what he needed, he decided to amass them all for a photo shoot. And the number of redheads present each year has grown exponentially, as has the number of boring-haired spectators. These non-ginger gawkers numbered more than 7,000 in 2009, the BBC noted, although that total hasn’t been updated since.
According to the article, us redheads are said to make up 2% of the world’s population, although I’ve heard differing reports that the number is closer to 5%. I think I need to put this event on the calendar for next year.
Minimal NYC Subway Poster
I love this. Built by Lineposters. Their Etsy Store has versions from Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo and a few others.
Great Scott! 1.21 Gigawatts
For the time traveler on your holiday list, you can go over to O”Reilly Auto Parts and pick up a Flux Capacitor along with a Mr. Fusion upgrade kit so you can use everyday trash to generate the 1.21 Gigawatts you need to travel back to 1955. Â DeLorean not included. :P
Move Pandora Favorites To Spotify
OK, so I’ve been using the free version of Spotify on my desktop since I got my invitation and have been impressed by the service…especially the playlist sharing and the overall social element of the service. However, I have not yet taken the plunge and forked over the $10/mo ($120/yr) for the upgraded/unlimited plan.
My logic has been that using a service like Pandora satisfies my music need to discover new albums, artists, and songs since I can listen to songs I’m familiar with and it also enables me to discover new music similar to what I’m familiar with. Plus, when I look at my music purchase history these days, I generally buy 8-10 MP3 albums a year which is roughly equivalent to the Spotify annual cost plus I already have several thousand songs already in my personal music library. In essence, it’s been:
MP3’s I Purchased/Owned + Pandora = Musically Happy Steve
However, my music world has now been thrown for a tizzy as I have just discovered via Buzzfeed an insanely cool plug in for the Chrome browser that may have tipped the scales towards Spotify. The plug in basically enables you to take all the songs you have “thumbed up” on your Pandora stations and import them into a Spotify playlist (click through to original post to see the details).
So for example, on Pandora, I have a Say Hi (To Your Mom) Pandora station (based on the awesome Seattle band of the same name) and, as with my other stations, regularly “Thumbs Up” several songs per session. Now, this plug in takes that curated list that has been compiled over time and puts it in your own Spotify playlist.
For those of you Spotify users, here is the link to the aforementioned playlist – Say Hi Favorites
I can now pump all the songs I’ve ever “liked” via Pandora into Spotify. I can discover new songs, albums and artists by discovering shared and public playlists. No decisions have been made yet, but Spotify is moving to the head of the class really really quickly.