Welcome to this week’s edition of our Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Pour or brew yourself a refreshing drink, find a comfortable place, and relax.
📺🚘🎶: Drive & Listen is an entrancing browser experiment — created by Turkish graduate student Erkam Şeker — that takes YouTube dash-cam videos from cities around the world and pairs them with local radio stations, so you can recreate the experience of driving through those places while jamming to various songs, all from your couch or desk or wherever.
The site gives you options to speed up the video by 1.5x or 2x, enable or disable street noise, and skip music tracks (which is decidedly un-radiolike, but hey, I’m glad the option’s there). Hide the HUD for full-screen viewing by clicking/tapping the eyeball at the top right, then chilllllllll.
My own very first experience involved riding through London while listening to Simply Red’s cover of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now”, which was…oddly melancholy?
🗿➡️👨🦲: Have you ever looked at an ancient statue of someone and wondered, “But what did they REALLY look like?” Well, thanks to some vaguely unsettling and AI-assisted work by Daniel Voshart, you can at least see the ‘real’ faces of a bunch of Roman emperors. I simultaneously want more of this and absolutely no more of this, thank you.
🎤: Rick Astley’s back with another great song cover, this time featuring David Guetta and Sia’s “Titanium”:
🪐✨: Absolutely loving Sibylline Meynet’s rather magical 19th-century-style portrait of Ms. Frizzle (of The Magic School Bus) based on John Singer Sargent’s 1893 portrait of Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler.
⌨️🌐📑: Fluently is an “online text editor with a multilingual translator, dictionary, and synonym library built-in.” In other words, you can write whole documents in your native language on the left, and have them translated into other languages on the right, with all your formatting intact. Pretty neat, right? No more having to copy and paste snippets into Google Translate.
It’s still in beta, so the translations can be a little rough at times — languages are rarely 1:1 translatable anyway — and they only currently support screen sizes wider than 1280px, but for such an early effort, it’s already quite impressive.
🙍🤳: We all have That One Friend™ whose social media feed is a nonstop litany of doom-and-gloom, even if they’re a perfectly tolerable person offline. The Endless Doomscroller is essentially that, distilled into satirical form. “An endless stream of doom, without all the specifics.”
In the words of its maker, Benjamin Grosser:
Yes, it may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, The Endless Doomscroller acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more.
📈➡️🖼: Gladys Estolas is a data artist who turns stock charts into lovely landscape illustrations. (via Nathan Yau of FlowingData)
+ If you like this, you’ll probably enjoy the r/dataisbeautiful subreddit, even though it’s not exactly the same kind of thing.
👩💼📝: Julie Zhuo — co-founder of Inspirit, author of The Making of a Manager, and former VP of product design at Facebook — knows a thing or two about managing teams. But even she was taken by surprise some years ago when an anonymous survey of company employees showed that her communication style didn’t necessarily mesh with what they wanted from management.
So, she created a user manual that colleagues can fill out and share with one another to bridge those kinds of gaps in understanding. Give it a try!
Neat Stuff We’ve Published Recently
- Gear Guide: Vlogging Essentials Kit
- When you’re comfortable taking road trips again, install ‘Weather on the Way’ on your iPhone to get detailed weather information along your route, right down to the times you’ll be driving through each place.
- …and if you decide to take up RVing (even if just on weekends), get a water pressure regulator so you don’t have to deal with burst pipes. Oh, and don’t forget a pair of camper levelers!
- We’ve been pleasantly surprised how nice the Crouton recipe/meal planner app is to use.
- Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts is the definitive biography of the great French soldier-statesman.
- A telescoping extension ladder lets you reach the places you need to, then packs down to a size you can easily fit into a car trunk.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.