Favorite things, first in a series

Seems like I have come across quite a few useful, fun, or otherwise notable things lately. Thought I’d share.

Dynamap – Currently only for Manhattan, the Dynamap is a map made of polarized lenses stacked on each other so that when you alter the angle of viewing you see different layers of information: street grid, subway system, neighborhoods. Innovative and totally useful.

Konfabulator – Clearly someone at Apple thinks this is the future of modularized, task-specific applets since they are building Konfabulator-like functionality into the next version of their OS. But Konfabulator one-upped Cupertino by becoming cross-platform. To get a quick sense of what Konfabulator does visit the widget gallery.

del.icio.us – Social bookmarks. Like Friendster, except with your links. See how many or how few people link like you do.

flickr – Superb online photo gallery. Impressive editing and organization tools. Great attitude.

Web Developer – Extension for Firefox that adds a slew of geeky web dev tools, but the best by far is a block level element outlining function. Indispensible for ferretting out nested <div> tags and such. (Example.)

Delicious Monster Library – An iLife-like app (Mac-only) that organizes your books, software, videos, and games. Cool part: it can use a webcam to simulate a UPC code scanner, directly grabbing the volume info from Amazon.

Moleskine notebook – Paper PDA. Proto-blog tool. (Even hackable.) Snapping the elastic band over the cover is strangely satisfying.

Smarty Pants – Movable Type blog plug-in that enables curly quotes, em-dashes, and real ellipses. “I’m … not — kidding.” Rejoice!

ISS-Soyuz bags – Satchels and backpacks made from used Soyuz re-entry parachutes. “Why, yes, this bag has been to space and back.”