Wow! Every time I see it, I am stunned by the virtuosity of the performers in the grand 10 minute finale to 1943’s Stormy Weather. Talent drips from the stage with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and the incredible Nicholas Brothers. It is unsurpassed!
Special thanks to Stephen Worth, who posted this as Adventure in Music #15 on boingboing.net
Here’s MAD TV’s risqué version of the forthcoming Apple tablet.
John Boswell’s Symphony of Science project takes excerpts from famous science videos and converts them into song via Autotune.
The Unbroken Thread features Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, and Jane Goodall:
A Glorious Dawn features Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s Universe:
I thoroughly enjoyed this entertaining reminder of some of the memorable parts of Sagan’s great work, which influenced my junior high self when it aired back in 1980. And the next year I watched all of Attenborough’s Life on Earth series in my high school sophomore Biology class. That reminds me…I really need a bigger HDTV to fully appreciate Attenborough’s spectacular Planet Earth series…
Nerd alert! It is painful to watch some folks interact with their computers so inefficiently. I like this short video from Tom Merritt of CNET on the 15 best keyboard shortcuts. I use all of these on a daily basis and highly recommend them, although I know they’re old hat to power users.
I love to read long articles which I gather from websites. Here are some of the tools I use to make the experience more enjoyable:
Instapaper Link Saver/Reader
Instapaper is the best way I’ve found to save links to web articles and quickly pull them up for later leisure reading on my Kindle, iPhone, netbook, or desktop computer; here’s an explanatory video. I keep its “Read Later” bookmarklet on my computers and iPhone to quickly save articles for later reading.
The Instapaper iPhone app is splendid, and you can also send a digest of articles to your Kindle (Amazon charges a small fee for the conversion). But I prefer to access my RSS feed of Instapaper articles on my Kindle and pull each one up that way (establish an account and copy the RSS link from your main page into a Kindle Basic Web bookmark).
Readability Webpage Reformatter
Readability is a great bookmarklet for ridding a website of the clutter; here’s an explanatory video. It reformats a site into a single column of text and pictures in the font and format you select when you create the bookmarklet. I especially like using this tool on my netbook, which has limited screen space.
Of course you need some content on which to use those tools. Here are my most reliable sources of articles:
Happy reading!
Meador Manor 