• Cobblers in lab coats, or, how it’s made: Louis Vuitton edition.
• Why do I feel like there will be a day when I wish I didn’t know what a nano quadrotor is?
• Star Wars Uncut: A shot-for-shot remake of the entire first Star Wars movie stitched together from hundreds of user-submitted snippets. Hilarious and charming in a hundred different ways.

My sister, Darien, has long been a musical theater dynamo, but now she is starting to work professionally as an actor. When you go to auditions, having a personal website is near an expectation these days. At its simplest, a site is a place to provide a resumé and headshots, but it can also be more than that—one might find clips and reel footage, review excerpts, blog-style professional updates, and, hopefully, even learn something of the person through the site design itself.

I built a site for her with these things in mind. After an unscientific survey of the many WYSIWYG portfolios and flash monstrosities out there, I had a shortlist of what I wanted for a clean, modern site: styled web fonts, lightbox-like gallery functionality, mobile device friendly, no flash or surprise PDF links, and a flexible news section that she or others can update. The site is built using WordPress, and, while there are still a few finishing touches to put on, it is ready to go—which is a good thing, since she’s already sharing the web address on business cards!

• Solar System Scope is a nifty Google Maps-like application for checking in on our closest neighbors. I like the real-time view.
• Simple, reliable examples of chord progressions spelled out with Nashville numbers. The first few have people actually singing the numbers.
• This call for an open wireless movement from the EFF sounds good, but it doesn’t even get into privacy and location tracking from things like Skyhook. It seems open wireless would enable those technologies as well, or maybe it would add an important layer of deniability. A lot depends on the vague new protocol they propose.

ProPublica got together a dream panel of Ira Glass (This American Life), David Remnick (The New Yorker), and Raney Aronson-Rath (Frontline) to discuss “Long-Form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.”

The combination of radio, magazine, and television experience makes for some interesting parallels and a few stark differences. All have great stories to tell, and each has been around long enough to really see the changes in media over the past decade (ie its convergence on the internet). At the same time, they each hold steady on the benefits of their own format.

Google’s Art Project is amazing. Collaborating with museums around the world, they’ve already brought a large number of extremely high-quality images online. Using some Google Maps functionality, you can even browse the museum rooms themselves (for example, Versailles). That part seems a bit clunky, actually, but once you’re looking at a painting, the zooming ability is fantastic.

If you didn’t notice the thumbnail, above is a close detail of The Starry Night. The Birth of Venus is also stunning, along with many, many more. Finally, a short making-of video.

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and other science fiction classics, thinks about cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and Google.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Read the full piece at the NYT.

• “During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced a series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian ‘types.’ These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation.”
• Chicago’s Adler Planetarium could get a Space Shuttle when they are retired next year, but competition is fierce from Texas, Florida, and New York.
• I knew Groupon was doing well, but I didn’t think they were doing THAT well: according to Forbes, it is one of the fastest companies to reach a $1B valuation (YouTube being the fastest, but it has yet to see profit).
• Finally, a particularly depressing list from Wikipedia: list of last occurrences.

• Tracking the evolution of the Windows through its icons. Makes me a touch nostalgic actually.
• This extensive ‘oral history’ of Galaxie 500 on Pitchfork recounts the band’s history in their own words.
• John Pozadzides, CEO of Woopra, analyzes where most of the referral links on the web come from (and where marketers ought to spend their time).
• Design homages: If Saul Bass had continued doing movie posters, and a motorcycle that looks like something out of the Rocketeer.

oflate.org is an experiment in aggregating and presenting content. It combines the utility of an RSS reader and the casual browsing of a blog into one simple stream.

The site developed out of my own needs—there was no good way to get a snapshot of all the New York Times blogs without adding 60 different RSS feeds. This site does all the work for you; it updates in real-time with posts from dozens of the best NYT blogs.

You can filter by blog, by category, or by update frequency. Each entry gives a 1-3 sentence preview, but the headline links directly to the original post. With the “Save” link next to each headline, you can save posts for later reading (to access them, use the “My Saves” link on the top bar).

oflate.org is starting with a collection of blogs from the NYT, but I’m planning other aggregation topics. Please check out the site, and use it if you like it. Send an email to oflate.org@gmail.com if you have any thoughts.

• Google’s interests extend into the energy industry. Google Energy, a new subsidiary, is registered as a power utility company in Delaware. At this point, they plan to be a reseller to wholesale customers.
• The Times created a neat interactive graphic to demonstrate how incredibly close the Olympic finish times are. Click the play button on the left and imagine them all racing at the same time.
• I would love to stand in front of this 3D, perspective-bending painting from the British Library, but this Flickr clip does a good job of showing it off.