Valhalla Island

An Australian sculptor who’s pieces look breathtakingly real. Some are much larger or much smaller than the real thing adding an extra layer of surrealism. I love it!. Via Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

My obsession is with wonderful, thoughtful software and gadgetry. I love the iPhone because it’s fucking amazing, not because it’s from Apple.

People that use Apple products love them because they are good. They get excited about new Apple products because Apple has a reputation for making good products. No one wants competing products to suck because that helps no one. It’s in everyone’s (consumer’s, competitor’s, even share holder’s) best interest for competing products to be great, even better than Apple’s equivalent. Like Gruber, I also desperately want Android to be fantastic but I don’t expect it.

Usually lists like this are rubbish Digg attention whoring, this one’s no different except the selection and presentation are of a high quality. My favourites are the Zipliner, K12Reader and Core Cider logos.

Fantastic video. I love his dancing style, it’s very fluid. He’s even been to Brisbane, my town. Via Garrett Murray.

Incredible detail. Even more detail than those crappy Simpsons themed games they sometimes make. Via Waxy.

That’s a link to a blog post on the creation process. Links to the very large originals are here and here. Probably safe to say these are not safe for work. Via Cpulv.

Follow it and you’ll be a better writer.

Rosecrans Baldwin:

I asked a French co-worker what the kids were celebrating. He squinted, looking into the sun. “That it’s May,” he said. “That they’re French, that they’re young. You will not understand.”

Full of more funny and interesting anecdotes. France is so weird.

One of my favourite posts from the fantastic new blog — The Big Picture — from boston.com. If you haven’t seen The Big Picture yet it’s an news presented in a series of large press photographs with captions. Worth checking out everything they post.

Incredible. Clusterflock:

[...] computers are really not that popular, and I don’t think this Internet thing has much of a future anyway.

I think this is a great representation for how old and stuck in his old fashioned ways McCain is. Firstly he should realise how massive the part that computers play in modern, Western society is and realising that, he should make the effort to learn about them. Either he doesn’t realise how important and useful they are which shows gross ignorance or he does realise but won’t learn the basics of using them which shows stubbornness and unwillingness to learn new things or move with the times.

A YouTube channel full of some really funny skits with high production values. They’re all definitely worth watching but some of my favourites are Showdown, Serious Actors and Pitch Meeting. Fact Checker’s Unit is another great one but it’s longer at almost 10 minutes.

Terrible name but this very compact, 1080i camcorder looks like the video camera I’ve been looking for. I’ve been following and reading about the new, much less expensive Flip Mino but it seems short sighted to buy anything that’s not HD right now. The VPC-HD1010 is not yet for sale which will give me time to save up. Via Uncrate.

Fantastic song and one of the best music videos I’ve seen.

John Nack on the new all-in-one window option in Photoshop CS4. This makes me happy, I hate having to deal with floating panels and windows, it’s just so messy. Although the screenshot Nack provides isn’t the cleanest of UIs. Via John Siracusa.

Jeff Atwood on websites that hook into others and require their passwords, especially those that require email service passwords. My rule is simply not using sites that require my complete login for another service.

Great article on the tools fantastic illustrator Kevin Cornell uses to draw. I love that he uses a mechanical pencil and the lack of pretentiousness associated with that.

It’s like newspapers on the web as saying: here’s all the static stuff we produced for the paper — you want all of our dynamic web innovation? Oh, that’s downstairs, in the back room. Knock twice before you enter.

It’s about the Washington Post but it applies to just about every newspaper. The blogs section is the only section I read at the NY Times. Via Waxy.

I’ve been keeping my eye on this for what seems like forever. I won’t get a good chance to play with it for a couple of weeks but I can’t wait to try it out. Beautiful website and app icon.

Extensive and in depth Photoshop tutorials. They’re all very specific but following them along you get a great feel for what results different layer styles create. It’s given me new appreciation for Photoshop.