2. Television is (or at least, can be) really funny. Maybe the greatest loss in the era of Reality TV is the demise of funny TV writing. Where are those writers now?

So far, Netflix is the enabler and the holiday provides the time. It’s kinda great that Netflix allows that history to live on. But did you know things expire from Netflix? I didn’t. One of the greatest all time classics is expiring today, January 1st. Instantwatcher is a recent find and is a must-have if you’re any sort of Netflix regular. (Yeah, I spent a lot of time exploring Netflix this Christmas.)

3. Collaboration is terrific. It brings life. It amuses me. Music, for instance. Check out Broken Bells and Das Racist. Total surprises, totally satisfying. This is the time of the year for best of lists so plenty more to explore.

4. The “traditional” social network (e.g. family & friends & a big dining table & plenty of wine) won’t ever leak your embarrassing Christmas carol video to millions of people. But depending on wine consumption could still be a little uncomfortable later.

5. The wonderful taste of coffee. I gave up caffeine for 2010 and coffee was the first to go. With all the holiday treats I’ve been eating, I ran back to coffee (decaf this time!) to help with balancing the sweet. So yes, coffee you’re back on the list. Thanks for waiting.

Here’s to remembering more in 2011!

If you’re not enjoying Fast Company’s Co.Design, why not? It’s Boston.com’s Big Picture meets the business of design.

Carl Burgess, Director of the Year’s Creepiest, Coolest Music Video. Also from Co.Design. They’re all over the place, eclectic, stylish and always interesting. Put them in your rotation.

So I was checking out some new kitchen gear the other day and noticed how similar the fancy new induction (glass, ceramic, all touch, etc. etc.) cooktops are to the handheld touch devices like the iPad.

In particular, the touch devices running audio/dj sorta apps. This is a sample of the Lemur from Jazz Mutant. Not an iPad, but you can connect the dots.

“Earworm (thanks to Jonathan Feinberg for the name) makes it possible to extend or shrink a song to any length you might desire, without changing the tempo. It does this by constructing a network graph of the piece, using The Echo Nest’s analysis data. Each node in the graph is a beat in the song, and an edge exists between two nodes if the two beats, and the several beats that follow them, sound similar (close in timbre and pitch).” The Echo Nest Blog

They use a tune from Phoenix for the samples. Check it out!

CDM brings us up to speed on Octane Render, a GPU renderer from Refractive Software.

This isn’t a demo of some futuristic research tech at SIGGRAPH, though: it’s a product in beta right now you can use, today. (A beta license, amazingly, costs just EUR99 during the beta.) Friend of the site Marc has kept us posted on his new employer, and it’s amazing stuff. Refractive Software’s Octane Render does photorealistic rendering right on the GPU.

Go check out the complete gallery and demo videos too. Pretty amazing.

Special introductory price: $19.99USD.

The application offers, at the touch of a finger, access to an encyclopedic, illustrated history of 1,000 timeless design classics by not only renowned designers, such as Marcel Breuer, Achille Castiglioni, Le Corbusier, Jasper Morrison, Dieter Rams, Eero Saarinen, and Philippe Starck but also anonymously designed pieces, such as the clothes peg, the corkscrew, and the chopstick, that have stood the test of time.

Again, for emphasis: the book version is $175. The iPad version $19.99.

I started from scratch with Wordpress. Trashed a bunch of plug-ins I thought where necessary (they aren’t!) Got something fancy going with Amazon Cloudfront (it’s faster!) And upgraded my MarsEdit (awesome!) Back to blogging.

SyncLost is a multi-user installation for immersion in the history of electronic music. From a complex timeline, rhythms and sub-rhythms merge to create new sounds.

The project’s objective is to create an interface where users can view all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through visual and audible feedback. The choice is individual and leads to a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information.

What do you get in an OS designed for tomorrow’s netbooks? You get a lot less. You’ll more than likely run it on a very cheap feeling plastic computer. Keep in mind today’s $300-400 netbook isn’t what Google is targeting, they’re looking at something around $200, your future “second” computer.

So a cheap machine running a free (or heavily subsidized?) OS that’s essentially a glorified web browser. You use the Google-branded apps for all your work and store your files in Google’s data center (oops, I mean the cloud). You might even have some cheap wireless (i.e. slow) data service available so you can access your stuff on the go. If you can get by with just spreadsheets, text docs, calendar & email then this might just work for you.

Man, that’s depressing. Pretty certain I’ll stick with my current second computer, my iPhone.

Bur I don’t believe this is what Google sees as the future. The Chrome OS vision seems at odds with what CEO Schmidt sees. From a talk back in October, Schmidt sees big things for the web in 5 years. A couple of choice quotes:

• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

But Google wants you to enjoy all this great stuff with a substandard hobbled little machine running Chrome OS? It doesn’t add up.

As a post-mortem, I’d say you could get a lot of mileage out of not terribly sophisticated Ruby code that you spin up and tear down many times throughout the day. If you need to keep your Ruby running longer then you have to do something sophisticated, think Curb or EventMachine vs net-http/open-uri. TokyoCabinet is a great choice and keeps getting better. Sinatra & Passenger remained a reliable constant. But I don’t think I’ll ever use Haml or Sass again. I started to dread having to touch the Haml so I eventually stopped; that’s never good. Keeping track of spaces was hard! Ultimately, nothing controversial.

Big in Twitter will be back of course. Someday.