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

Nintendo produced a great version of SimCity for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), but they also worked on a version for the older NES that was never released. Long thought lost or buried in a Nintendo office, an unfinished version of the game recently surfaced.

We had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to digitize the game for its owner at the show, and thanks to two very generous collectors, we were able to spend the last few months tearing the game apart for the following deep-dive analysis. Seen here for the first time in nearly twenty-seven years, this is SimCity for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

A great article with some fantastic images and video.

All versions of the Apple Watch (except the original Series 0) can monitor your heart and provide high and low heart rate alerts and irregular rhythm notifications, and the new Series 4 also provides an ECG app and fall detection.

These features have already saved lives, but some of them might not be enabled by default. This article walks you through setting everything up.

The Twist pendant light is a 3D printed shade that opens like a flower when twisted, allowing more light to escape when open. Very cool design.

If you’re bored with your current shoelace situation I have good news: You’ve got a plethora of options.

Whether you want to lace shoes, tie shoelaces, stop shoelaces from coming undone, calculate shoelace lengths or even repair aglets, Ian’s Shoelace Site has the answer!

Each lacing style comes with step-by-step instructions, detailed illustrations, pros, cons, commentary, and more. There’s regular lacing methods, bi-color methods, styles for shoes with lugs… it just keeps going, and that’s just lacing! There’s also entire sections that cover knots, lace lengths, tips, hints, and more.

Don’t miss the Ian Knot, the “World’s Fastest Shoelace Knot” that, if I may say so, is pure witchcraft.

Earlier this year, The Museum of English Rural Life (@TheMERL) achieved the kind of viral success that social media managers salivate over. All it took was a particularly imposing ram, and five words that stamped the museum in the minds of Twitter users. “Look at this absolute unit.”

This is a great little story, and includes some interesting stuff about bridging the gap between two different worlds.

For [Adam Koszary, the man behind the tweet], social media removes the one-way dialogue that people often experience in museums – going to shows, reading the label, and going back home again. Koszary says it’s a chance to have the kind of conversations museums can’t have at exhibitions, and a more effective way of engaging with the public.

Really nice selection for being free:

• The Time Machine, narrated by Kelsey Grammer
• Pride and Prejudice, narrated by Kate Beckinsale
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, narrated by Tituss Burgess
• Frankenstein, narrated by Aaron Mahnke
• The Secret Garden, narrated by Karen Gillan
• Winnie the Pooh, narrated by Disney Book Group

Here’s a direct link to the books on the iTunes/Apple Books store.

The New York Times created something surprisingly wonderful with this project.

Classic maps answer questions like: How do I get from Point A to Point B? These data images, instead, evoke questions — sometimes, simply: What’s that?

We found fascinating patterns in the arrangements of buildings. Traditional road maps highlight streets and highways; here they show up as a linear absence.

Where buildings are clustered together, in downtowns, the image is darker, dense. As suburbs stretch out with their larger lawns and malls, the map grows lighter. Your eye can follow the ways that development conforms to landscape features like water and slopes.

You can read history in the transition from curving, paved-over cow paths in old downtowns to suburban sprawl; you can detect signals of wealth and poverty, sometimes almost next door to each other. It all reveals what Andy Woodruff, a cartographer, calls “the sometimes aesthetically pleasing patterns of the built environment.”

These images don’t just reveal cityscapes; they reveal ourselves.

Explore.org has live webcams showing a variety of wildlife and other animals. You’ll find a little bit of everything here, including a kitten rescue, cattle pasture, owl nest, hummingbird fountain, a penguin beach, and many more.

It’s hard to beat a high-definition video stream of puppies dreaming when you want to put a smile on your face.

Julie:

Ama is a silent film. It tells a story everyone can interpret in their own way, based on their own experience. There is no imposition, only suggestions.

I wanted to share my biggest pain in this life with this film. For this is not too crude, I covered it with grace. To make it not too heavy, I plunged it into the water.

I dedicate this film to all the women of the world.

A really wonderful six-and-a-half minutes.

Mark Rober:

Summary: I got upset that my package was stolen so I made a glitter bomb revenge package.

This is why you don’t mess with former NASA engineers.

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!

Tiny Desk Concerts bills itself thusly:

Intimate video performances, recorded live at the desk of All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen.

Wondering where to start? Check out the Tiny Desk Concert with Half Waif. Here’s an excerpt Bob Boilen’s description of the performance:

I’ve always found a sense of solitude in Half Waif’s music and their lead-off performance of “Lavender Burning,” with its opening line, “Staring out into the shifting darkness / Tryin’ to give a name to the place where my heart is,” reinforces my love for their peaceful, almost backwoods calm.

This short thread is only five tweets long, so rather than quoting any of it here I urge you to go read all of it. It’ll only take a moment, and might have a significant impact on you.

Gerrard Gethings took some great photos of people and dogs with a similar look:

For the memory game Do You Look Like Your Dog? Gethings spent a year creating images that examine the classic trope of owners looking just like their canine friends.

Evan Puschak explains how some talented musicians forced the SNES to produce incredible music that, on the surface, seemed impossible to create.

Chris Perani takes extreme closeups of butterfly wings using macro photography. The results are stunning.

This 30-minute documentary from 1978 is absolutely captivating:

On July 2, 1978, the last hot lead edition of the New York Times rolled off the presses. Weiss, a proofreader for the Times, documented the phasing out of this historical process, and what impresses us now, beyond the Ludlow machine (which casts the lead at 535 degrees), the Linotype machine (operated for the last time by Carl Schlesinger, who also narrates the film), and the presses, is the incredible noise generated by all these people and devices.

Pizza is wonderful, and now you can have a slice that lasts forever.

Sometimes you just need huge, high-quality photos of dogs trying to snatch treats out of the air.

The Great British Bake-Off (or The Great British Baking Show in the United States, with our wacky trademarks and whatnot) is one of the most wonderful, wholesome, fun, and above all human shows ever made. They somehow figured out how to distill some of the best parts of humanity down into a television show.

Some of the more recent seasons have been available on Netflix for a while, but now now the earlier seasons (which is where this link goes) are showing up, too.

Even if you don’t bake (I don’t) or aren’t generally interested in cooking shows (I’m not) you should give this show a try.

This short article tells the origin story of the ubiquitous hue that has adorned pencils since 1889.