My Christmas music mix from 2004 still stands.

• Ground Zero: Google Maps and Nuclear Weapons
  This mapplet shows the thermal damage caused by a nuclear explosion. Search for a place, pick a suitable weapon and press "Nuke It!
  (tags: google nuclear visualization maps)

• NOAA Acoustics Monitoring Program
  Ocean noise audio samples recorded by NOAA and the US Navy's Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network of underwater hydrophones. Be sure to check out the "unidentified" section.
  (tags: sound ocean)

• Cartype : a museum of automobile typography
  (tags: history auto typography design)

• British Man Cobbles Together Last Jaguar E-Type From 31-Year-Old Factory Leftovers
  At the end of a production run of cars, there are inevitably bits and pieces left behind which aren't assembled and have to be taken off the production line in the boxes they came in. When production on the Jaguar E-Type ended at Browns Lane in 1974, just such a thing happened, and a Jag fanatic picked up those truckloads of leftovers and kept them — for 31 years. When he got tired of being their steward he sold them to an enterprising fellow who thought of another Jag fanatic who might be able to make something of these parts. Turns out the kit was complete enough to finish one final 1974 Jaguar E-Type V12.
  (tags: jaguar auto vintage)

If I had thought to check earlier (Heavens Above really needs a custom RSS feed) I could have grabbed the requiste time-lapse satellite trail photo, but this underexposed over-enhanced photo will have to do.

To the left is the moon. The white dot to the right is the International Space Station as it passed directly over Los Angeles this evening. Thanks for the heads up LA Observed.

• Spy Type
  The hand crafted typography for the location cards in Quantum Of Solace
  (tags: film typography james.bond)
• Nick McCabe: No Guitarist Left Behind
  Verve guitarist Nick McCabe on the guitars/amps/effects he's using these days.
  (tags: verve guitar effects)
• Paris 1962 - a set on Flickr
  Images from Paris cafés and nightlife in 1962.
  (tags: photography vintage flickr fashion paris 1962)

Unsolicited testimonial…

I’ve been so accustomed to switching computers via FireWire target disc mode that when it came time to upgrade the quaint 5400rpm/160GB internal drive on my notebook to a speedy new 7200rpm/320GB drive I was all ready to plunge into the hassle of booting both drives on a second computer and then cloning. I figured there had to be some locked or in-use files that wouldn’t copy over no to mention the morass of file permissions that needed to be tracked.

Carbon Copy Cloner (donation-ware even!) couldn’t do all that by itself, that’s way too unnervingly easy. In the end it was that easy: hook up the new drive via FireWire, tell Carbon Copy Cloner to clone to the new drive, open up the case and replace new drive with old drive, and finally shame yourself for thinking in Mac OS 9 still.

I immediately jumped on FontShuffle as soon as I ran across it, but it immediately gave me an idea. If I were advanced enough of a programmer I’d try it myself but I’m nowhere near that point. Here it is:

Take a picture of a font sample, and the app identifies it. Take more pictures to get a better match. That’s it.

It’s analogous to how TinEye can dig up information on an album by simply taking a picture of the cover. Call the app FontEye for now. I strongly suspect that you could sell a copy to every single person on Typophile’s Type ID board.

Remember that you heard it here first!

Revisiting modern myths yet again…

What’s better than a barn find? How about, preserved under a Ponderosa Pine tree! The second owner of this early ‘54 Vette drove this car to a friend’s house to have the seats reupholstered and took them out, set an old wooden Pepsi pop bottle case in place of the driver’s seat and drove it home and parked it under a Ponderosa Pine tree. That was 1963 in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado at an elevation of 9,000 feet.

Well, 43 years later, I had the good fortune of rescuing this gem. All of the tires were flat and sitting on the ground, one would think there wasn’t much of a frame left. Well, not only is the frame rust free, but the original painted frame stamp from the factory is still on the frame and very much legible. The umbrella of green pine needles above and 6-inches deep on the ground miraculously saved this car, along with the rare hardtop.

Other similar stories.

OK, so there’s the still the occasional rare car find out there. Surely all the major mountains have been climbed, right?

There still exists today large unclimbed peaks in the Himalaya. But they are generally very remote, closed to climbing, or perhaps uninteresting sub-peaks of larger mountains. To find one without these characteristics is not only rare, but also alludes to a very special peak. To find one that is the visual centerpiece of a major Himalayan valley, the Rolwaling; a peak that hundreds of trekkers and climbers pass by every year; a peak so prominent, you can view from its summit six 8,000-meter peaks plus every major peak in the Rolwaling and Khumbu valleys; a peak that rises over 3,000 meters above the valley’s largest Sherpa settlement – this is extraordinary. This is Kang Nachugo.

Puryear and Gottlieb’s story of the climb is worth a read. So many climbing stories these days feature military-styled assualts with troubled millionaires that’s it’s nice to read about a couple of life-long climbers who figure things out, have fun along the way, and succeed at it.