The release of Google Earth 5 has some pretty awesome features in it, and I think my favorite so far is the historical imagery. When you have a location up, a little clock icon in the toolbar at the top allows you to browse through past satellite images, in some cases going as far back as 1940!
Check out San Francisco in the 40’s, Las Vegas in the 50’s, and much much more in the new Google Earth 5.
Portland-based beardstress Erin crafts beards for folks out of felt and yarn. View and purchase the assortment of beards at her Etsy shop: imadeyouabeard.
MyFonts has posted the top 10 fonts of 2008 as determined by sales, and unsurprisingly they are mostly retro-fabulous. It’s a good collection of new fonts, and I think it supports the idea of a taste trend towards the hand-made, away from the bland, put-it-together-quick design that was so prevalent not too long ago. They are homages to things that take a long time to do, which is becoming increasingly less desirable as the economy becomes even tougher.
Metroscript, Corinthia, HandMade, and more at MyFonts.com.
I was stuck at a Borders this weekend and browsed through the latest issue of MAKE Magazine, which happens to be entirely dedicated to DIY spy-tech! There was an awesome article about building your own laser-pointer communicator device for sending super secret messages via LASER BEAM, and honestly, I can’t think of a cooler way to send super secret messages. Thankfully the giving season lingers, and MAKE has made the PDF of the article available for free online.
Download it here, and after a short trip to your local electronics shop you’ll be beaming you voice incognito, via laser. Awesome.
Amazing paper-based stop animation short to celebrate UK publisher 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary. Also, behind-the-scenes time-lapse video of the set creation and more on Vimeo.
Obama Moves Into the Whitehouse(.gov)
At noon today, even before he was officially sworn in, Barack Obama officially became the 44th President of the United States of America, and as quickly as he said his oaths, the www.whitehouse.gov website was re-launched. The new design reflects the aesthetics of the Obama campaign, and is clean and accessible to a very broad audience. Sections are large and obvious, and it seems to be easy enough to navigate.
My one complaint would be their typographical choices for the blog section, although most of the content on the site is well-formatted. On the front page, the list of articles could use a bit more spacing to read easier, and is inconsistent with the list on the actual blog page. It does however feature an RSS feed (which, along with the weekly radio address, I will be subscribing to!) There’s also a weekly video address which will probably show up on Youtube and other sites as well, so the new administration is definitely a few steps closer to “web 2.0″ than the previous folks!
Stop by and check it out, and bookmark it, because I have a feeling that the new people in charge will be using it a lot more than the old.