If you're looking for some Great Links you've come to the right place.

Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns.

Cathy Oke, Melbourne City Council’s environment portfolio chair, had this to say about the more than 4,000 emails sent to their trees from around the world:

I think one of the great things about it is that people often think technology removes us from nature but actually the opposite can be true. It shows that technology can actually help you engage with nature. We want people to know we’re looking after our trees, we want the community to help us look after them, and if it also brings them some joy in a busy world, that’s great too.

If you replace the word “nature” with “people” in those first two sentences that comes pretty close to my motivation for creating What a Great Link!

Evan Puschak examines the sound design of magic in this eight minute Nerdwriter video. There’s some incredible insight and commentary in this one, with my favorite being the following:

[…] sound design is a deeply concequental part of movie making. People undertstand what they see, but they feel what they hear.

Taiwanese artist Han Hsu-Tung skillfully carves figures from blocks of wood, adding and eliminating cubed segments that make each bird, hand, and human look as if they are morphing into a monochromatic array of pixels. The works hint to our relationship with the screen, presenting the increasingly distracted way in which we view the world.

Instructions for creating your own custom records for a four-decade-old Fisher Price toy, using either a CNC router or 3D printer.

The toy is simple enough. A quick inspection reveals that the “head” of the record player’s arm is a tiny musical box with 22 metal gears. The record has 11 groves and pins on either side that operate one of the 22 notes. Each groove forms a circle so the tune repeats once per revolution - there’s no spiral track like we used to have on real vinyl records. It did take quite a while with some digital calipers to accurately measure the position of all the grooves and the holes that locate the disc on the turntable. All these measurements you’ll find either in the 3D models I used to create the record blanks or the code that generates the music information.

There’s a video of a couple custom records being played on the toy, including the Star Wars theme. Interesting stuff!

Just in time for the holidays, Kentucky Fried Chicken brings you the KFC 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog.

Imbued with the unmistakable, mouth-watering aroma of Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe, the KFC 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog finally puts to rest the age-old dilemma, “How can I make this fire a hundred bajillion times better?” This one-of-a-kind firelog from Enviro-Log, a leading manufacturer of firelogs made of 100 percent recycled materials, is the result of countless hours of research and development, all done over the last couple of months since we had this idea. Pick up a firelog today, and you’ll be wondering how you were ever able to enjoy a fire that didn’t smell like fried chicken.

As I write this the KFC 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog is, unfortunately, sold out. But who knows when (if?) they’ll make more!