
We wish you all a happy new year!
Family Barnhard

He wears costumes, roams the streets of Japan showing us that even the Japanese know their culture is different. Really funny videos – fans of Japanese strangeness will love this site. Pongi has achieved international stardom as an alternative comedian with his idiosyncratic Japanese cultural observations.
Website: http://robpongi.com/

1. Lay shirt face-up on a smooth surface, long side facing you, with the neck on your left. With the edge of your hand, draw an imaginary line from shoulder to hem on the far side. Along this line, pinch the shirt with your left hand at the shoulder and with your right at the middle of the chest.
2. Fold the shoulder over, crossing left hand over right, to meet the hem along this line. Now pinch the hem and shoulder together with your left fingers.

3. Lift the shirt and uncross your hands, pulling the shirt taut. Give it a shake.
4. Lay the shirt down sleeve first, then the body face-up on top to finish. (For long sleeves, lay the shirt fully facedown in Step 4, then fold the sleeves in neatly before the final fold.)
Watch the shirt-folding video
this post is pretty Retro
retrievr – search by sketch
retrievr is the image search tool designers (and me too!) dreamed of. It doesn’t work flawlessly yet but the results it returns now are fantastic already.
Found on blog.Tijs.org
The Dutch government as of January the 1st has started the DigiD initiative to get all citizens a single digital ID that they can use for all online government services.
Their information on you is freely available to you alone. It purpose is that it is more easy to contact the government, fill in your tax bills or ask for a license and more of that kind of stuff. Until now you had to go to the specific governmental branches and wait in line. Now you can do it at home or make an appointment online.
Again found on blog.Tijs.org

Models are reshaped more and more with photoshop, I found that Girlpower shows the power very well on this page.

Raffaele Iannello chose to probe the world of black magic with this knife set and distinctive holder.
The striking result has gone through several iterations and is now to be produced in commercial form by Viceversa.
Website: www.gizmag.co.uk
This is the download and documentation page for the Video Blogger plugin I’ve made for WordPress 2.0. This plugin allows for simple video blogging of content hosted by Google Video, YouTube, and vSocial. I’ve only tested this plugin on WordPress 2.0, although it might work on WordPress 1.5.
Website: http://helmetcameracentral.com
American Government wants porn searches of google… beside funny notes as “The solution is obvious! Let’s all submit pornographic requests to Google“, I found this more interesting:
`This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared,” said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. “The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about letting Google deep into their lives.”
Update1: another solution?
Update2: smart one to let them know

Conservative? Liberal? Republican? Democrat? No matter how you vote, it’s unlikely that any one of these words perfectly reflects your views. Politcal beliefs are often intuitive and personal, and no party, platform, candidate or external label can encompass them exactly.
Website with test: www.okcupid.com/politics
My test results: (more…)
A mini-doc about the World Adult Kickball Association.
Kickball must be high in the top ten of nerdish sports ever, some 25.000 people are playing it in the States. I never heard of it before.

“The world is flat” book review by Thomas Friedman himself at the world bank, with nice insight how he came up with the idea. video duration: 1.5 h.
A ban on alcohol aboard the International Space Station (ISS) could be lifted in 2006 to allow crews nips of liquor after grueling work assignments, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported on Tuesday.
Article: ISS allows alcohol again, yeeehaa!

365 days of MP3s.
Nice tunes I think, you can download all 365 of them. Enjoy!
UPDATE: You can grab the whole year all at once with this torrentspy,
1.8 GIG (!) of music madness. A seed is all we need.. (Thx. Tijs!)

Museum for media history has a nice flash, I doubt the journalistic part of it, but its interesting anyway (maybe a bit doom-say though) .

Yahoo has been doing well with buying social networks online. They got mail, news (del.icio.us) , flickr (art), so what about..
a bit of tech (digg) ?
Digg just passed slashdot in visitors (I’m not choosing sides here), looks big to me. There is no clear no, everyone has a price in that case I guess. They are waiting for the hype to push the price or due legal matters have to wait till the end of the week… its all rumours, I do my bit..
Update: Price too low? Wait till rumours die? anyway not this week apparently..