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Today I Found Out:

This tradition is mostly thanks to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadian Band. While their work is largely unknown to those born in the last few decades, the band has sold over 300 million records to date. Guy Lombardo himself has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he was once the “Dick Clark” of New Years before Clark and his “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” attempting to appeal to younger audiences, started supplanting “Mr. New Year’s Eve,” Guy Lombardo.

“Auld Lang Syne” is another one of those songs most of us don’t know the words to – like the Canadian National Anthem.

Death and Taxes:

A Reddit sleuth posted this list of movies and TV shows that will be purged from Netflix in January, 2014. If you have time off from work between now and January 1, it might not be a bad use of your time to binge-watch some blockbusters (“Braveheart,” “Top Gun,” “Platoon”), art house flicks (“Being John Malkovich”) and the entire series run of “The Kids in the Hall.”

I wonder if it’s less a “purge” as is being reported (it really doesn’t make any sense for Netflix to remove movies) or rather, Netflix’s contracts/agreements for those films are expiring.

Regardless, some of you may have some Netflix binge-watching to do New Year’s Day!

Ever since I was a kid, I was always fascinated with people celebrating New Years while I was still patiently waiting my turn. Here’s video from Sydney, Australia, counting down to 2014. New Year’s Eve in Sydney is definitely on my bucket list. Enjoy!

Pew Research Center shares some trends revealed by US public opinion surveys.

Focus is a beautiful and easy to use pomodoro timer. Built exclusively for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Focus is the best way to focus on a single task for a period of time.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.

The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically. You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.

Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.

After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.

Focus lets you enter and manage your task, work with customizable session length, see you completed tasks and incorporates the latest technologies. It helps you to focus on your tasks and stay productive all the time.

Focus is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with iOS 7 and also for OS X Mavericks.

This is so awesome!

Hidden among the racks of servers and disks in the CERN Computing Centre, you’ll find Hawaiian dancers, space aliens, gorillas… all LEGO® figurines! These characters were placed about the Centre for the arrival of Google’s Street View team for the world to discover.

Wow.

Robert W. Wilson, a retired New York hedge-fund founder who committed his life to giving the fortune he made from investing to charities, has died. He was 87.

Bored Panda:

When the weather forecast announced unexpected cold from -9°C to -12°C last week, photographer Angela Kelly decided to take an advantage of it in one truly creative way. Together with her 7-year-old son, Kelly combined the home-based remedies – dish soap, karo syrup, and water – and went out to blow bubbles and take pictures as they freeze and melt.

-9°C is 15+°F. Or as we Canadians call it, “The month of May”.

BuzzFeed:

Like many casual fans, we assumed we could immediately pick it up and dominate. We were very wrong.

Check the article out if for no other reason that the GIFs.

And the “tip” at the end? Not gonna happen!

Bored Panda:

Nina and Gramps have been married for 61 years, however, all they’ve got from their wedding day is a single photograph. On one of the most important days of their life, the couple got stood up by their photographer. In order to fix this, their caring granddaughter, an event designer Lauren Wells, organized a beautiful anniversary photo session, inspired by the famous Pixar animation movie “Up“.

61 years of marriage. Most of us haven’t even been on the planet that long, let alone married. Congratulations to them!

TIME:

King Wenceslas didn’t start Boxing Day, but the Church of England might have.

During Advent, Anglican parishes displayed a box into which churchgoers put their monetary donations. On the day after Christmas, the boxes were broken open and their contents distributed among the poor, thus giving rise to the term Boxing Day.

Maybe.

Even though TIME doesn’t answer its own headline question, the article still might be instructive to our American friends who have heard about “this weird Canadian Holiday”.

This is cool. What a lot of work though.

BuzzFeed:

My advice to TV shoppers has evolved: Consider the off-brands. Are you building the ultimate home entertainment system to show off to your friends? Then sure, shell out for the Samsung. But if you’re not…perhaps it’s time to take a look at one of those sub-$350, 40-plus-inch TVs.

Purists will scoff but he’s not wrong. And with “good enough” TVs coming down in price, it makes it less and less likely Apple will be interested in trying to sell their own high margin sets.

BBC News:

Erwin Perzy III knows a thing or two about making it snow – it’s the family business.

The 57-year-old Austrian is the grandson of the man widely acknowledged as the inventor of the snow globe. His grandfather, the first Erwin Perzy, came up with the idea by accident in 1900.

Mass production started in Vienna in 1905, and 108 years later, the company – Original Vienna Snow Globes – is still going strong.

There’s something a little bit magical about a well done, well made snow globe.

Every year, thousands of people resolve to get organized in the new year. If you’re one of them, let Benjamin help. Benjamin is a task manager for iOS based on the FranklinCovey system of time management. Built specifically for those who love the Franklin Planner, Benjamin stores all your tasks, projects, and notes so they’re always at your fingertips. Best of all, Benjamin lets you sync your information between iPhone and iPad so that it’s conveniently available whether you’re at your desk or on the go.

Give yourself the tools you need to succeed in 2014. Give yourself Benjamin on the iPhone and iPad.

It’s been an incredible year for The Loop—we launched The Loop Magazine this year and the Web site is doing better than ever. I really couldn’t ask for anything more. […]

NBC World News:

Elf advocates have joined forces with environmentalists to urge the Icelandic Road and Coastal Commission and local authorities to abandon a highway project building a direct route from the Alftanes peninsula, where the president has a home, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer. They fear disturbing elf habitat and claim the area is particularly important because it contains an elf church.

It’s easy for some of us to dismiss this as silly but the story has a great quote in it from an Icelander. He says, “I got married in a church with a god just as invisible as the elves, so what might seem irrational is actually quite common.” So who are we to say Icelandic Elves don’t deserve protections?

Nasa:

In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth.

It can be argued the picture, “Earthrise”, was the one photo that changed the earth the most. It expanded our understanding and concern for the planet we live on.

Take that Van Damme.

Yamaha Corporation and Line 6, Inc. today announced a definitive agreement for Yamaha to acquire Line 6, a leading manufacturer of innovative solutions for musicians. The acquisition expands Yamaha’s portfolio of modeling guitar processing products as well as pro-audio equipment, and offers new and exciting opportunities for accelerated growth for both companies.

Holy shit, that’s big news.

Great idea for a magazine on the iPhone. We are all photographers in some ways these days.

Nice little collection of apps at a discount.

Lessonator is a tool for creating beautiful music slideshow presentations on your Mac. It’s like a mashup between Apple’s Keynote and Garageband, where each slide is an animated music score. Lessonator creates and plays interactive slideshows containing 3d instruments, audio, video, notation (standard & tabs), images, diagrams and text. These slideshows are interactive because they can animate, ask questions, receive answers and track your musical progress.

Very cool looking app and a great idea.

In this issue Jim Dalrymple looks at how Apple is able to capture the essence of our lives and touch us with its TV ads; Darren Murph argues that it’s time for the phone number to die; Alex Vollmer tells us all about tube amps, including a wonderful video; Kirk McElhearn looks at collecting music and how it has changed; and Nathan Snelgrove explains how a $600 guitar means so much.

Jim and Dan talk about the new Mac Pro’s, the Universal Audio Apollo, Nokia’s latest commercial, how to get better at guitar without practicing, and more.

Sponsored by Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME1213 for 25% off), Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME12 for 10% off).

If you’re going to get a lens for your iPhone 5c, it might as well be a cool color. I’ve been meaning to try these lenses out.

Photos+ can replace the built-in Photos app for viewing, organizing, and sharing your pictures. It looks prettier, it has more sharing options, and it shows you more info about where, when, and how each photo was taken.

Nice looking app.

Clearly they post production did a great job replacing the igloo with a real house.

Kids, this is why you don’t do drugs while making a TV ad.

Lyve Minds’ answer to the problem is to recreate the cloud in your living room. The company’s apps will let phones, tablets and computers talk to each other and access personal media on each of them. Lyve supports iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS at launch, with plans to add more platforms down the road. The company’s apps will back up photos from a mobile device to other devices in the network, free up and reallocate space and always keep multiple copies of each file.

It will be interesting to see how Tim Bucher pulls this off.