Matthew Lang

I won’t lie, I’ve been watching a lot of the television coverage following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

Tonight, I watched some of the events from today including the service at Westminster and the Scottish Parliament’s motion of condolence at Holyrood. I also watched the Vigil of the Princes where members of the royal family stand guard during a lying in state of relation. This tradition started with the death of King George V in 1936 and was continued in 2002 for the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. It was a lovely moment to see the Queen’s children together standing guard.

Jason Kottke shares his.

I love this idea as a recurring post.

Parents with young kids on long haul flights rejoice!

In all seriousness though, it’s about time Netflix added this feature. It’s surprising how many places still lack a decent signal or even wifi.

Selected by Time magazine to be the most influential images of all time.

Warning. Some people may find some of these images distressing.

The complete mix of human emotion. Photographs that feature amazement, happiness and sadness. An amazing collection.

via Kottke.org

I don’t know about you but the Execupundit drive-time show trumps them all.

I love these. Mashups of classic albums with Star Wars.

via kottke.org

An interesting point about technology companies and how even just a small price change can have a negative impact on customer numbers.

Hastings blames the media, sort of. He says reports about the price hike Netflix is instituting this year, which raises the price of its most popular plan by a dollar a month, confused people and got them to stop paying even before their actual price hike kicked in.

— Netflix blew its Q2 subscriber numbers, and blamed it on press about its price hike by Recode

As a regular viewer on Netflix, I’m happy with the current service and even the price hike. The more money that Netflix can get behind it, the more quality programming they can create.

I have one gripe though. Having sorted out my in-laws Netflix account while on holiday in Canada, I did notice that in Canada you get a much better selection of content than we do in the UK.

I don’t know if the same selection of content applies to both Canada and the US but I would love to see a better selection of movies and programmes here in the UK as part of the upcoming price hike.

We’ve all seen them. People showing off their GoPro footage of a mountain bike run down the alps, snowboarding down the Rockies or even those crazy people that enjoy free climbing tall structures.

For me though, this is the best use yet of a GoPro.

Some truly amazing work by Tom Joyce.

An extremely interesting and yet haunting visualisation of all the nuclear weapons that have exploded on Earth since 1945. The silence of the visualisation with the intermediate pings to denote each explosion is quite eerie.

Trinity from Orbital Mechanics on Vimeo.

via kottke.org

I’ve never seen pictures of the bridge while it was being built. Quite amazing.

via Eclecticity Light

A visualisation of military and civilian deaths in World War II. The numbers are staggering.

via Kottke

XKCD delivers again with the Emojic 8 Ball.

An amazing flyover of the ruins of Berlin after Allied air raids during World War 2.

Always loved these posters but never got round to buying one.

via Star Wars

This is amazing. As you ride the elevator to the top of 1 World Trade Centre, you can watch an animated time-lapse of the New York skyline starting from the 1500s to the present.

via SwissMiss

A brilliant five minute guide to the history of the One Ring.

via kottke.org

I’m a big fan of both Mike Vardy and Patrick Rhone, so I was really pleased to see Mike had asked Patrick to be a guest on his Productivityist Podcast. Listen and enjoy as they chat about ideas, task systems and other great stuff.

An amazing account of a USMC pilot who ejected from his F-8 Crusader over a thunderstorm.

As the parachute opened, he felt the familiar tug upwards. Except instead of a slow descent, he experienced a rapid ascent. The powerful updraft filled his parachute like a sail and rocketed him vertically thousands of feet at a velocity of nearly 100 mph. During his ascent, he could see hail stones forming around him. The lightning was described by him as “blue blades several feet thick” and incredibly close. The thunder was so loud, he could feel it resonating in his chest cavity and remembered this more so than how loud it was.

— Lt. Col William Rankin - Ejects Into a Thunderstorm by WeatherImagery

via Kottke.org

… by Curtis McHale.

An amazing account of how an American photoreconnaissance team, in a battered B-17 called Old 666, carried out a mission to gather intelligence on a Japanese base on the island of Rabaul.

During the first fighter pass the plane was hit by hundreds of machine gun bullets and cannon shells. Five crewman of the B-17 were wounded and the plane badly damaged. All of the wounded men stayed at their stations and were still firing when the fighters came in for a second pass, which caused just as much damange as the first. Hydraulic cables were cut, holes the size of footballs appeared in the wings, and the front plexiglas canopy of the plane was shattered.

— The Most Honored Photograph by LensRentals

via Kotte.org

This has to be the goal of the season.

via kotte.org

… where you are.

…blue or gray?

Thanks to Execupundit for this reminder that it is 70 years since the Dambusters raid. The Spitfire was my favourite as a kid and still is.

Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich.

— World War II’s Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together by The Daily Beast

How could this not be made into a movie!

via Execupundit

Amazing account of the moving of these spy planes from the Lockheed plant to Area 51.

Dorsey Kammerer was appointed to head up the activity to build and use the transportation carriage system. An early-on step was to equip a pickup truck with a set of extension poles sized to the width, height of the main transport carriage trailer. An initial plan was to drive the best estimate route of travel, noting the obstacles to easy movement of the carriage boxes. Several photos show this arrangement and its use along the roads.

— Transporting the A-12 by Roadrunners Internationale

… Rebel Alliance or The Empire?

With Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw or Slytherin?

… with some teaser posters from the fans. Really like this one.

via DBSW

These are fantastic recruitment posters for the Rebel Alliance.

via Distracted By Star Wars

Absolutely fantastic animation. I would love to see this expanded further into a series.

via DBSW

Last year I did a favourite four of 2010. I listed my favourite blog, book, tweeter and podcast. This year I am trimming it down to just my favourite blog and book.

The reason I am skipping the favourite tweeter is that I am no longer gaining much value from Twitter like I did the last year. I’m starting to see that some people are posting stuff more to do with their personal life than what they’re up to with work and projects. Yeah it’s nice to hear that someone has just met the love of their life, or seen their kid take their first steps, or something else along those lines, but in 2010, I was spoiled with people who were tweeting some really good stuff. In 2011 this didn’t happen so much. I’m as just as guilty as the next person of this.

The flip side of this is that I have started to see more of a benefit in reading blogs again. There was a lot of talk of social networks becoming the blogs of this decade but I don’t see it happening. While I’m still subscribed to just over 200 blogs and feeds, I’m managing it easily on a day to day basis.

I used to listen to podcasts alot. However since moving to a new job, I haven’t much time to tune into the podcasts that I used to listen to. Maybe this year I’ll get back into catching my favourite podcasts again.

Favourite blog

Nicholas Bate has done it again. Last year his blog was my daily recommended reading. This year, I stand by his blog again as being recommended daily reading. His
Instant MBA book and series was a great read and his current series on strategies for success is brilliant.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Nicholas will produce this year. His blog just keeps getting better and better.

Favourite book

Patrick Rhone’s book, “Keeping It Straight” was my favourite book of the year. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the different sections of the book and the way in which it was written was brilliant. I found it to be quite similar to Stephen King’s book “On Writing”.

You can find a more detailed review of it here.

There we go, my favourite blog and book from 2011. What’s yours?

You know those end of year award ceremonies where organisations award people with prestigious titles? Well I thought it would be fun to list my favourites from 2010. They might not be prestigious titles, but they do make an impact on both my home life and my work life. I thought I would select one from each of the four different mediums that I consumed on a daily basis last year.

Best blog

I first subscribed to Nicholas Bate’s blog a few years ago and since then it’s been a consistent part of daily reading ritual. His posts focus on productivity and business, with most following a list format or a simple link to an important article. His Brill@BasicsOfBiz series was a highlight for me last year and there were many more great posts throughout the year. For this year, Nicholas has already kicked off the New Year with the start of a new series of posts on 2011 as the year of transformation.Nicholas also has a great list of mini-books for sale that cover topics from his blog such as personal success, sales techniques and performance.

If you’re interested in one blog to keep you right on the topics of business and productivity then I highly recommend you make Nicholas Bate’s blog part of your daily reading list.

Best tweeter

When I follow people on Twitter I tend to prefer to follow people that not only tweet about a topic I’m interested in, but also tweet about personal topics and people important to them. If someone simply tweets about the topic they’re interested in, then I quickly lose interest in what they’re saying.For 2010,
Patrick Rhone had to be my favourite tweeter of the year. Not only did he use Twitter to link up to great content on his Minimal Mac blog, his own
website and his tumblelog and other places, but he also posted a steady stream of individual tweets that got me thinking about how I work.

Along with tweets on the subject of working, writing and creativity, Patrick also tweets about his day to day to life, family, side projects, hobbies and other things. His timeline is a great mix of subjects and ideas and one that I’m going to continue to follow in 2011.

Best podcast/screencast

Last year I spent most of my spare time building a Rails application for a local business. It’s was never a project that could allow me to make a move to freelancing full-time so I worked on it when I could afford the time. Usually during a couple of quiet nights during the week and sometimes at weekends. Investing time in a project this way meant that I had to use my time wisely to explore new features and options in Rails.

This is where Railscasts came in.Railscasts is a weekly screencast by Ryan Bates that features tip and tricks on working with Ruby on Rails. Quite often I wanted to use a specific feature of Rails, but rather than reading the Rails documentation first and then figuring out what I needed I used the Railscasts archive of screencasts to find the relevant information to get me started. Quite often the relevant Railscast provided me with all the information I needed to get started, and there has only been a few times where I have needed to explore the Rails documentation further to get exactly what I wanted when implementing a feature or refactoring an application.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what Ryan Bates has planned for Railscasts this year and I’m looking forward to eventually porting my Rails application to the lastest version of Rails with the help of Ryan’s Railscasts!

Best book

As an ERP developer working to a single programming language, my career isn’t exactly varied. Probably the most varied part of my job is the different customers that we have and having to adapt to each different business domain. Therefore trying to stay on top of my career can be a tad difficult. There isn’t much scope for introducing other languages into my day to day job and therefore I’ve found it difficult to keep up with the programming languages that I am really interested in.

Then came along Chad Fowler’s book, The Passionate Programmer. This book re-invigurated my career as a software developer. Now rather than focusing on the little tips and techniques that programmers are talking about on a day to day basis, I’ve my eye on the longer term goal than I’m willing to invest in rather than simply using job hopping as a solution. I’m still working through a plan I put together as a result of reading this book a couple of times and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of results I get in the year ahead.

That’s my 4, what’s yours?

So there you have it, my favourite blog, tweeter, podcast and book from 2010. Now that you’ve heard mine, do you have a favourite 4 from 2010?