If you’re at all concerned about the new Instagram terms of service as many seem to be, you’ll want to check out Flickstagram which claims to be “the best way to import your Instagram photos to Flickr”.

The process is very easy, and the system preserves as much information as it can. With Flickr coming out with some renewed vigour, this might be something to look at.

Pretty amazing video called The Birth Of A Tool. Part III, with John Neeman making a knife out of Damascus steel (from scratch).

If you thought not having the world end a few days ago was a miracle, you didn’t see this coming: Enlightenment 0.17 released.

E16 is old, but technically, so is its successor whose release we celebrate today. The first bit of code for Enlightenment 0.17 (yes, 0.17) was committed to cvs a long, long time ago. “The first wave of files were committed to CVS on Friday the 8th of December [2000] at 22:52:54 UTC. More will certainly follow in the next couple of weeks and months,” Martin Geisler wrote 12 years ago.

Just wanted to say a huge Merry Christmas from the team here at the UFies.org mega-conglomerate. 2012 has been a great year. Almost 900 posts were written, and more than 21,000 unique visitors hit the site and were (hopefully) entertained or at least redirected to somewhere interesting.

I have a confession to make… this isn’t really a mega-conglomerate. It’s not even a mega-corporation. It’s just me, one guy, posting things I find interesting day by day. I don’t do it for money (I have adsense running on the site, but my earnings for the last year were $121), or the fame (the most I can say is that I’ve gotten a bit of minor notoriety), but because I spend the day finding interesting things online and like to share.

For the upcoming year, here are a few things I’m planning:

• To bring the site out of it’s 2002 era design, and perhaps explore a few web design philosophies that were invented in this decade. Maybe give that new “Cee Ess Ess” thing a try. Responsive design to avoid the horrible mobile site would be great too.
• Upgrade the backend CMS. I’ve used Moveable Type since 2002 or so, and moving to either Wordpress or even a newer version of MT would be great.
• Site improvements like better search, some category reorganization, tags, etc.
• Dedicate myself to actually making the site interesting to look at. Images with posts for example.
• Actually survey my users to find out what they want. Yes, that’s right, soon the first annual UFies.org user survey will be showing up on the site to find out what sort of things interest you.

(I don’t have a lot of budget for the first item, so if you’re a designer who feels generous, or would be interested in some sort of a services trade arrangement, please email me (as a photographer though I know that creative people really don’t love being asked to do stuff for free)).

Long story short, I value being able to write on the site and post interesting things, and I appreciate my readers for continuing to make the site a success.

http://www.flickr.com/holidaygift

Capitalizing on instagrams issues, and no doubt their increased attention from yahoo. Good on them.

I have no idea what the movie is about, but the ‘This Is The End’ Trailer is pretty damn funny.

LEGO® Back to the Future DeLorean Time Machine.

Awesome.

Via here.

xkcd on Instagram. To the point and always the best.

Saw on C|Net via reddit this morning that Facebook is testing a $1 fee for inbox access. Note that this isn’t for you to send a facebook message to your friend, this is to allow others to message you even if you’re not connected (remember that on facebook only your friends can send you messages).

Translation: “We’re going to allow big companies to pay us a wheelbarrow full of cash to spam you to hell and back.”

This combined with the recently announced auto play video ads coming soon, might be time to drop Facebook. I thought they were making a ton of money already, but I guess greed begets greed begets more ads.

Want a bit of a tearjerker? Watch this 2012: What Brought Us Together video on youtube.

The Verge has a good video series on The End: A journey through America’s doomsday obsession, preparing for the end of the world, just under 24 hours away (don’t believe what the Australians are saying, they’re not on GMT.

Seriously, if you really think that anything is going to happen at 11:11 CST (UTC -6) on the 21^st, give your head a shake and grow up. Or send me all your money and possessions, since the world’s ending anyway.

2012 Year in Pictures: Part II from The Big Picture. Don’t forget to hit Part 1.

Great video in 3 minutes.

Evernote has updated their Food app to Evernote Food 2.0 and it’s gorgeous.

iOS only at this point, but if you’re an iPhone or iPad user you’ll enjoy some of the nice new features:

• Universal app (works on iPad too)
• Great new layout and look
• Integrates places so you can explore just the places you’ve been
• A “My Cookbook” section
• Exploring restaurants (powered by foursquare) with a great map view on iPad, as well as saving favorites
• Nice updates to the traditional “save pictures of my food” part of the application

It’s not perfect, there is some confusion (at least on my part) as to how a recipe is tagged as a recipe for the my recipes section.

Does this mean that web clipper will magically know if it’s a recipe? Is it pulled in by tag or notebook? I’m sure that it’s easy to figure out though.

I take it back, the next paragraph says it’s all magic:

To make the My Recipes section work, Evernote analyzes the text of each note in your account to identify the ones that are recipes (no special tags or notebooks necessary), while filtering out your travel itineraries and work projects. A really cool side benefit of this process is that you can now author recipes and Evernote Food will recognize them and magically display them next to everything you’ve clipped.

End result, it’s a gorgeous app from my favorite web company, so go out and get it now.

First thing, head over to the main Youtube page, note the awesome logo modifications in the top left. Then click on it for the YouTube Rewind 2012. Gotta say that Google went all out with this one, it’s awesome.

Also… Felicia Day. Yowza. Call me k?

If you’ve been all angsty about the new Instagram terms of service, you’ll want a look at Instagram vs Flickr, however they (Instagram) wants you to know that they’re listening to your concerns.

Also lets be honest, no one is selling your crappy pictures of a latte no matter how artistic they are.

Since the end of the world is approaching, you’ll want to know How to photograph the Apocalypse. Some great tips in here, even if you’re only an amateur photographer, but want to capture some stunning or informative images of the end of all humanity.

Wunderlist 2 - Your beautiful and simple to-do list has been completely rewritten from the ground up and is cross platform (iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, web). The new design uses the “swipe from side” design paradigm, and implements subtasks, collaboration, push notifictions, and other.

First of all, dammit, I missed this, I was just talking about CaH and even went to the page to show a friend and saw the “pay what you want” as I scrolled by, but never really registered it. Apparently they had a ‘pay what you want’ event and here are the Cards Against Humanity Statistics for what people paid, what they made, and what they did with the money.

Via reddit where we also are shown how envelopes are addressed when you pay $0.

Star Trek Into Darkness hit the Apple Trailers site.

Only 5 months to go, only 5 months to go…

Singing Terrified Jingle Bells While Riding Around Race Track in a BMW is the sort of Christmas Music I can get behind.

Boston.com’s The Big Picture has 2012 Year in Pictures: Part I. Great stuff.

RIM’s getting ready for their new line of devices and OS by Sending Out Media Invites for a BlackBerry 10 Event Set for Jan. 30.

Earlier today, Rogers announced they would be offering BlackBerry 10 in the new year and noted the Rogers Reservation System will let you reserve a device if you want one.

Very interesting to see how RIM and Blackberry does in this new smartphone world we live in.

Pinokio is basically the Luxo Jr. lamp from Pixar, brought to life.

TAKE MY MONEY I WANT ONE OF THESE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

First Trailer For Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Pacific Rim’ via Geeks of Doom.

Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk, via my buddy @milesforrest on twitter.

What I saw on twitter was yet another comment from an open source “elite” - a person of high visibility with a project that is well known by tens or hundreds of thousands of people - making fun of someone else trying to contribute. Again. And again. And again. Over and over. And it makes me very very sad.

This has been on twitter and in the newsfeed all morning, the story of the horrible tragedy in Newton, Connecticut where Children and adults were gunned down by a crazy nutcase. Horrible. I debated posting this as it’s a terrible thing and I have no desire to do more than bring interesting links and cool sites to people, but this news affected me more than usual, and I felt I had to post it.

This isn’t a time to debate gun control or do anything but hug your children tight and pray (or whatever you do) for those who were needlessly killed this morning.

Great story on How Obsessive Fans Built a Better Han Solo Blaster. If you like this, you’ll love Adam Savage’s Ted talk about obsessions and building.

MailboxApp is a new way of dealing with mail on your iPhone, turning your gmail mail (apparently only gmail :( ) into mail + task list + scheduling. Very cool. 9-5Mac has their take as well.

Just wish it wasn’t GMail only.

Google Maps App for iPhone Goes in the Right Direction says the New York Times. I found out from my buddy John who ignored me so he could post his story as soon as possible.

Here’s the iOS App Store link

The app looks good, with driving directions, vector based maps, transit/walking directions, google and a nice UI. Of course it’s not integrated with Siri (and won’t be, unless Google and Apple kiss and make up), and it doesn’t seem to have voice-search like capabilities (like the Google Search app), but I’m sure that’ll come.

Saw on OSNews that 386 support has been removed from Linux, meaning your computer from the early ‘90’s won’t boot linux anymore.

I wonder how long before the forks and petitions come out? I agree with Linus. Good riddance.

Chasing Ice movie reveals largest iceberg break-up ever filmed. Looks like these guys had no idea what they were about to catch on video.

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” has been released. The main focus here is working with media, making creating gorgeous media galleries and working with images far easier.

The Flickr blog Introducing their Flickr iPhone App with a score of new improvements over the old one (last updated sometime in the era of the iPhone 4 I believe).

Updates include a great new UI, better sharing integration, and more.

Amazing and powerful thread over on Quora asking the question of What images will change the way a person sees the world after viewing them?

Absolutely breathtaking collection.

2012 Year on Twitter, cool to look around and see what’s been going on on twitter this last year.

ForeverGeek has All of the VGA Trailers compiled in one place.

The AMA (Ask Me Anything): I am Jón Gnarr, Mayor of Reykjavík. AMA. If you don’t know why this is completely cool, you’ll want to read the 12 reasons why Jon Gnarr is the world’s most interesting mayor.

The only place I could find a working version of the Man of Steel Teaser Trailer 2 was on Facebook.

Gotta say it’s pretty awesome looking.

I link to this because I love everything that the Oatmeal does and everything that he writes: I wrote a response to Jack Stuef’s BuzzFeed article about me.

Saw that Amazon Kindle Ebook Store Quietly Launched Canada recently.

Amazon has quietly launched the Kindle Store in Canada over the weekend. First spotted by the Digital Reader last Friday, Amazon’s landing page revealed the debut of the Kindle Store to allow Canadians to purchase ebooks with their local account, instead of going through a US portal.

Nice that we now start getting at least a tiny bit of the US gets in terms of Amazon content. You can hit the kindle store directly here.

Fascinating view (through tweets and commentary) of An iOS user migrating to Android via Storify. Really interesting to see the pain points and the places where iOS has fallen down.

Kim Dotcom says Mega Will Turn Encryption into a Mass Product and revealed some details today, like it will use military grade encryption, and the file manager screen.

Betanews is reporting that there’s no longer a Free tier for Google Apps for Business:

Google has announced that one of its cloud-based services, Apps for Business, will no longer offer a free tier. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search leader now asks customers to pay a yearly fee for the service, which includes Google’s popular Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Calendar specially designed for private enterprise deployment.

Wonder if this is part of a play to get more money, or that they have enough from paying customers that they don’t need the extra support hassles from having free clients.

13 minutes of Driving in Russia. Most of your questions will be answered by reading the text below the video. IE:

Question #1: Why did I end up watching all 13 minutes of this video? A: Because it’s one literally unbelievable thing after another.

The Register has a great look at the development of OS/2, with all sorts of interesting little tidbits.

Microsoft developers on the OS/2 team were promised a week in Hawaii if they got the thing finished and, of course, had share options. IBM tried to compete with a trip to the Azores, which wasn’t quite as good. It was irrelevant anyway because Big Blue’s HR vetoed our prize on the grounds that IBM rules prohibited that many IBMers being on the same aeroplane.

Damn You Auto Correct has released their Funniest texts of the year (via Mashable).

Snapseed for iOS (itunes link) is my go-to on-the-go editor, and now a couple of weeks after Nik Software was bought by google, the app has been updated, made free (was $4.99, and worth every penny), and updated with some extra functionality (Google+ sharing) and given a swanky new icon.

Doing nothing but linking to the GoD page because I’m so damn excited that the First ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ Teaser Trailer has been Released](http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2012/12/06/watch-now-epic-first-star-trek-into-darkness-teaser-trailer-released/)!

I haven’t heard about this series before, but the Honest Trailer for The Avengers is pretty damn funny.

If you’re familiar with BrowserShots, and familiar with some of the limitations it has (no interactivity), you might be interested in the tool that my boss found today: BrowserStack. Not free, but essentially it opens up an in-browser VNC client to the selected browser, fully installed with all the dev tools you need. Cool stuff, and reasonable prices, if this is something you’ll need on an ongoing basis.

The Beard has some good insights in his Microsoft forgot to solve a problem post on the Microsoft Surface.

What occurred to me is that Microsoft’s critical flaw is that they don’t solve a problem with the Surface. In fact, you could argue that the Surface actually causes more problems for users. That’s not a good start for a new product.

I disagree a bit with it not solving a problem, it solves the problem of Microsoft not having a Tablet computer in the marketplace.

Via 9to5Mac: NSFW: Apple’s Russian iTunes launch plagued with bug displaying escort/pornography sites.

It appears Apple’s launch of iTunes music and movies in Russia is running into a bit of controversy with several Russian users noticing advertising for pornography websites and escort services in the iTunes’ movies section. As highlighted in the many tweets below, and reported by local blog iPhones.ru, a section titled “more films in different languages” is displaying the pornographic content. iPhones.ru speculated it might relate to an issue with temporary xxx placeholder links (machine translation):

Personally I could have predicted the headline:

“In Soviet Russia, Porn blocks Apple.”

This is completely hilarious.

Foldify is the perfect example of how a 50 second video can sell an app (and I’m sure they did a lot of this thanks to the link from Daring Fireball.

Personally I’m going to get it the second I get back upstairs it’s available (the 13th).

This Nostalgic Windows 7 launch party fan-fiction is worth if purely for the video.

Saw via Daring Fireball that The Daily is set to Close.

The Daily’s editor in chief Jesse Angelo and publisher Greg Clayman will meet with staff today at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. to discuss details of the iPad-only newspaper’s closure later this month. Below is the full memo from Angelo and Clayman, obtained by TPM:

It’s a bit of a shame, The Daily was my first experience with an iPad news source, but I can see how with free programs like Flipboard it’s hard to justify the costs of producing a full on magazine, daily.

Looks like Event noted is the service I’ve been looking for. I’m a self-admitted Evernote addict, and having a system that I can simply and easily use Evernote to get things onto my calendar is super awesome. This requires that you authorize your Evernote account, and then there are instructions on how to manage getting your calendar synced up depending on the platform you’re using.

Great look from a couple of days ago of The Inside Story Of Pong. Pong was my first video game. My parents got it (or at least a version of it) for me at Value Village when I was maybe 12 or 13? I remember it had 3 modes, Tennis, Handball, and…. something else. Of course, all three different modes looked and acted remarkably similarly.

Saw this being passed around this morning: Look at this Instagram (Nickelback Parody).

I love College Humor.

The (as noted in the title of the site, NSFW) site Terrible Linux Wallpaper is a great collection of some of the worst examples of wallpaper for linux. I know I might be a bit of a design snob, but come on guys really? (Lets ignore my own work from long ago in this area).