Catching up on cool stuff

I’ve been inter­act­ing with the world pretty much only through my iPhone for the past sev­eral days; it really is a lit­tle brick of magic, but it also starts to feel like a port­hole after a while. I’m happy to be look­ing into the wide-open win­dow of my lap­top screen again. (So yeah, basi­cally the same story as Tim, except he was in the hos­pi­tal and I was in the south of France. Get bet­ter soon, Tim!)

Any­way, here are some things that just caught my eye on this panoramic 1200-pixel wide internet:

• The Pen­cil Factory’s 15 uses for newsprint. Fif­teen newsprint posters for $10! How cool is that? More newsprint posters, please. Make them totally zeit­geisty, totally of-the-moment. Do full CMYK so they can be as lush as Wednes­day Comics—but make ‘em disposable.
• Ori­gin of Mass, a video by Alek­san­dar Rodic. “It was inspired by demoscene, ‘3D pipes’ screen­saver and sub-atomic par­ti­cle col­li­sion images.” I really like the look of this video; it has a sur­pris­ing soft­ness. (Via Design Tools.)
• Here’s a cogent take on America’s fifth war—the war in Afghanistan—by Hen­drik Hertzberg. I like the way he put it into con­text with the other four major wars of post-WWII Amer­i­can his­tory: Korea, Viet­nam, the Gulf War, and Iraq.
• Necrophil­iac book­porn from Rachel Leow. You really feel the whole books-as-bodies, corpus/corpse thing here.
• The most notable thing about the blissed-out text edi­tor Ommwriter is the way it uses audio—key-clicks echo into an ambi­ent back­ground. I actu­ally like this a lot; I think one of the things the iPhone does so right, and so sub­tly, is give audio feed­back. The clicks and whooshes tell you, at every step, “you just made some­thing hap­pen” or “you just did some­thing right.” More apps, iPhone and oth­er­wise, ought to have great sound design like that. (Via @couch.)
• Tim releases an unstop­pable alien organ­ism, and now we see it, lurk­ing in the shad­ows… the ten­sion builds. The day of the book­fu­tur­ist is nigh.