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It’s all over the internet and mainstream media by now, but I just had to link to this because watching it made me inexplicably happy. I can’t quite figure out why — maybe it’s the nostalgia evoked by the songs from half a lifetime ago, or Jewel’s thoroughly pleasant and down-to-earth nature, or that heartwarming show of audience support for “Karen”.

I also really liked that bit at the end with the elderly gentleman who was so very surprised and happy when he found out about the joke. Great close, too, with him racing off into the distance… I’d like to think it was because he couldn’t wait to go tell his loved ones what an evening he just had.

Well worth 6 minutes of your time. I grinned from ear to ear watching this.

It’s the scene where Princess Leia gets apprehended by Darth Vader and the stormtroopers, courtesy of Improv Everywhere. I also like their Ghostbusters one in a library.

I’ve done a quick redesign of this blog. There are very few visually discernible changes unless you were paying attention, but I did develop a WordPress plugin along the way (perhaps not “develop” as much as “become really surprised by ending up with”).

Mainly, I’ve changed my link posts to behave more like they do at Daring Fireball – now, clicking on article titles in link posts (on the blog and in the RSS reader) will bring you straight to the linked item (this post isn’t one; take a look at the homepage for examples). RSS feeds will indicate these items with “Link” in front, and also include an extra footer with the link again and the page permalink.

If you’d like to try some of this on your own WordPress site, I’ve done up a quick WordPress plugin (which, keep in mind, adjusts your RSS feeds only), adapted from Jonathan Penn’s original WordPress linked list plugin (via Shawn Blanc).

To use, download the plugin (direct download link), put it in your plugins folder, and then activate it. When posting, you just need to define a custom field in WordPress called “linked_list_url”, which will be the link that your post goes to in your RSS feed, and it’ll behave like a link post.

A quick note, though – the plugin’s behaviour is much closer to DF’s RSS feed, in that it adds a ★ glyph for the permalink at the end of your post item, and also adds the glyph in front of your non-link post titles. Just remember, this affects your blog’s RSS feed only, so you’d have to adjust the look of these link posts on your blog yourself. You can do that by editing the template and making use of the built-in functions.

I’ll add in an option to change the glyph and toggle some of these behaviours in a future version, which I might then submit to the plugin directory. For now, it’s available on a MIT license, so do whatever you’d like with it.

More to come if I continue to procrastinate on real work.

The concept behind this 4chan prank is amusing enough, but BBC’s typically sardonic take just gives it that ounce of laugh-out-loud hilarity. Check out the captions they put under pictures of Bieber and Kim Jong-Il.

Nedroid Picture Diary is the kind of comic I desperately want to make. This particular strip is a gem.

(In case you’re wondering, stupidchicken returns August 20. It probably still won’t be very funny then, though.)

Smoking Apples does a great summary of what Instapaper is, and why it’s become my most-used iPhone and iPad app by far. Good article to send to anyone who owns an iPhone, reads a lot on the Internet, and hasn’t tried at least the free version yet.

The second comment in the article is interesting – the commenter was turned off by Instapaper developer Marco Arment’s attitude, and decided to switch to competing service Read It Later. The author of the article replies, commenting that RIL developer Nate Weiner is indeed more “down to earth”, but also that he thinks Instapaper is a better product.

Personally, I do tend to like my software more when I know the developer is actively listening to his/her users. On Instapaper, I’ve given up on emailing Marco feature suggestions, so he’s not so great on that front. However, I’ve come to realise that he’s really building a product for himself, which is what a good developer should be doing – making something you yourself would want to use. I guess it helps that he has good taste, so he’s managed to shape an excellent app out of his own fancies.

Er, oops. What can I say, I got distracted by the shiny new toy. Anyway, guaranteed hilarity, or your money back:

• Electron Boy: An amazing act of kindness, nerdiness and heart-warming…ness. The Make-a-Wish Foundation, with apparently half of Seattle’s celebrities, helped a boy with cancer become a superhero for a day. Everyone involved is a hero in my book.
• Chinese campus traffic accidents: Actually somewhat entertaining once you get around to convincing yourself that nobody got seriously hurt.
• SCOTT PILGRIM!!
• MORE SCOTT PILGRIM!!: I had some initial doubts about casting Michael Cera in the lead. No longer – now I just sit here and squirm in glee watching the trailers over and over again.
• Credit Card Concierge Experiment: You know those credit card concierge services they advertise on your super double platinum express mastervisa cards? Ever wondered what they can actually do for you? The author did, and the results are very amusing.
• Hunter Davis does very funny video impressions of Ian McKellen narrating famous pop culture lines. My favourites are Popeye the Sailor Man and Fresh Prince.
• DC covers in the Fringe alternate reality: What might have been for the DC Universe. A What If…?, if you’ll indulge my bad crossover reference. I caught up on Fringe after Lost ended, and the last few episodes of season 2 were very strong. Looking forward to season 3.
• Ambiguous (and often funny) newspaper headlines are apparently called crash blossoms. Article has some good ones: “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim”, “McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers”, “British Left Waffles on Falklands”.
• The Office Professional 2010 box apparently has a picture of a man trapped in a suitcase and surrounded by Office icons. The humanity!

Just a few more hours until the Lost season finale (which I’m seriously considering taking a half-day off to watch). What a show! Some links:

• Video: I’ll Never Be Lost Again. Ridiculous as it sounds, it’s a heartfelt hip-hop love song for a TV show. I love it (even though bearded Jack’s contribution to the chorus becomes quite silly after the first two times).
• Video: The Cast Says Goodbye. A great retrospective from the cast.
• The excellent online recaps / analyses really added to the enjoyment of watching the show, although for some reason I never bookmarked the sites and just searched for them by memory after each episode. So here I am, listing them out just in time for one last read-through after the finale: EW’s Totally Lost (only annoying thing: being unable to Instapaper Doc Jensen’s 12-page reviews as a single page), Maureen Ryan, Alan Sepinwall, Cultural Leanings and the Onion’s AV Club.
• Almost forgot another video: Lost re-enacted by cats. Lost is awesome, cats are awesome. Together they are unstoppable.
• My favourite Lost moment – the scene at the end of The Constant between Desmond and Penny. Heartbreaking and beautiful. Watch here, but only if you’ve seen the episode.
• Check out the amazing piece of 8-bit Lost pixel art below by designer Neven Mrgan. His site also has a downloadable Photoshop file with the remaining characters, as well as iPhone and iPad wallpapers.

I’ve had an iPad for about three weeks now (thanks to two Kevins for bringing back the iPad and case).

I’ve noticed that, despite the 69 million reviews already out there, anyone who gets hold of one feels the need to write about his initial thoughts on the device. Ick! Such self-absorbed twats!

Anyway, my initial thoughts on the device:

• It’s been great for reading a variety of things on. I’ve been plowing through articles on Instapaper, PDFs on GoodReader, and books on iBooks.
• Other apps – NewsRack for RSS, Twitterrific for Twitter, SimpleNote for note-taking, ArtStudio for finger-painting, NYT and BBC for news, PenUltimate for quick sketches. So far so good. All these apps are very distracting when I want to settle down and read, though. (Multitasking in OS 4 will probably destroy my attention span for good.)
• GoodReader could do with an icon that doesn’t remind me of the eye of Sauron.
• Hasn’t replaced my laptop yet. However, doesn’t burn my lap when watching videos in bed. (To convert, erm, non-iTunes TV and movie content, I bought iFlicks, which converts videos into iTunes-compatible formats, downloads cover art and fills in episode info.)
• One complaint, I guess – the iPad’s screen could do with greater pixel density. I keep noticing jaggies while reading text.

Summary: love it. As Stephen Fry wrote in his giddy TIME review, the iPad is truly the closest thing to the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy humankind has devised. Douglas Adams would have been proud.

(Wallpaper from talented Apple designer Louie Mantia.)

Jónsi, lead singer of Sigur Rós, just released a new solo album which I can’t get enough of. Thoroughly melodic and immersive if you like guys who sing / screech (melodically!) in high-pitched voices. Listen and buy from his site.

I also just realised he did the theme song, “Sticks and Stones”, for the animated movie “How to Train Your Dragon”. Impressive choice by Dreamworks! Also, ha ha, very funny, getting an Icelandic singer for a movie about Vikings.