For some strange reason neither Google or Samsung has provided me with a demo version, so I’ll leave you with the Samsung Galaxy S III review from The Verge.

Alex Kenjeev Paid His Student Loan In Cash - Business Insider

“I just plopped the bag down (on the counter),” he said. “They also didn’t know how to handle it. At first the manager didn’t want to accept the money.” 

Via this reddit post.

SpaceX Takes Flight:

After experiencing its fair share of setbacks, SpaceX has finally done it. At 3:44 a.m. EDT, the company successfully launched its Dragon capsule into low Earth orbit atop its towering Falcon 9 rocket. In doing so, it has become the first private company in history to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.

Via my buddy Jim.

Very exciting.

You now can hear in his own words what happened to the show.

Via this update where Brooks Review broke the non-story story.

The Talk Show has moved! One of my favorite podcasts from 5by5 has moved (without explanation so far from either @gruber or @danbenjamin) to Mule Radio and have the premier episode What If the Dolphins Had Thumbs posted.

If you’re looking for the old episodes, head over to the Talk Show on 5by5 to catch up. One enterprising user picked out (what might have been) the awkward goodbye from Gruber on the last show.

Really wish there was some explanation about this, Gruber was a staple of the 5by5 network and the “new” Talk Show sounds (from the first few minutes anyway) similar to the old show. I’d expect at least a note about what happened from one of them, even if the parting was bad.

Sigh

Dropbox announced some details of Dropquest II: The Future is Now:

Many of you were around for last year’s Dropquest, where we sent y’all on a magical journey through Dropbox and the interwebs. Wordokus were solved, music puzzles were deciphered, origami cranes were folded, and dragons were slain. All in all, nearly half a million Dropquesters were rewarded for their craftiness, skill, and effort. That was well over a year ago, and since then we’ve been holding our cards and toiling away to craft a Dropquest successor worthy of the first.

The awesome site Ars Technica reveals version 7.0. Great look, kudos to the team.

Make Your Car Sound Like A Race Car, via iPhone in Canada.

Ever wish you owned an exotic supercar? Now you can with XLR8! Pronounced as “accelerate”, XLR8 is a super cool iOS app from 2XL Games that makes your car sound like an exotic supercar as you drive (via FSM). The universal app for iPhone / iPod touch and iPad uses your device’s GPS and accelerometer to track your speed, braking, and cornering and convert that data into the sounds of a gas-guzzling V-8 through the speakers of your car (requires audio connection). The app even lets you unlock engine sounds produced by Ferrari, Lamborghini, a NASCAR vehicle, and a Ford GT40 via in-app purchases.

I know it’s completely useless, but I’m so tempted to spend the $0.99 on this.

Interesting post on ZDNet on how little adoption the new .xxx TLD has gotten. You’d think that these would be now a hotbed of porn, but it seems that only about 133,000 adult domains were registered under .xx, and of those only 27,555 are actually developed. I know that 28k is a lot, but compared to the rest of the domain world, that’s nothing. Expected for something like a .bob or .arcterex domain, but .xxx?

Remember that cardboard camera from IKEA that was floating around not that long ago? Well, someone wrote up a Review of it.

Wow, RIM has got themselves in the news a bunch this week. First claiming responsibility for the “Wake up” stunt, then releasing news about BlackBerry OS 10 (impressions here), and now they have said To Developers: We’ll Make Sure Your App Earns At Least $10K In Its First Year. Techcrunch says it like it is:

Translation: the apps can’t completely suck. Sorry fart app devs, that means you.

It’s a good proposition for a company desperate to get high quality apps like those on iOS and Android, because I think that good apps do matter (just look at the flack that Microsoft has gotten over the crappy Metro apps included with Windows 8 Dev and Consumer previews). However the question really is, who is going to hitch their wagon to that sinking ship?

5 signs that you should hire a programmer on the spot over at the More Than Coding blog.

Good stuff there, both for prospective employees and employers.

JWZ found the most amazing glass bottomed bathroom you’ll see today.

James over at RainGeek has the FanExpo Vancouver Gallery Part 2 gallery online. You can find part 1 here.

Virtual Apollo Guidence Computer, a collection of scans, documents, etc from the NASA space program.

Here you’ll find a collection of all the AGC, AGS, LVDC, and Gemini spacecraft computer documentation and software that I’ve managed to find whilst working on Virtual AGC.

Amazing resource. Via this reddit thread. Debugging something like this would have been a bitch.

Great “making of” video from Miss Aniela of one of her projects: From Pixels to Vogue: Making of Surreal Fashion by Miss Aniela. Great stuff if you’re into photography and skills in Photoshop work.

Great time lapse of video every week from Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45. Not a new concept, but a cool implementation.

Awesome article by Jeff onBooks: Bits vs. Atoms, all about how eBooks are better (and worse) than physical books.

More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways[….]

One thing missed in the ‘how much do they cost’ section is the reason my… uhm… “frugal” parents gave for buying physical books. You can get them for a quarter at a garage sale, which pretty much nukes even the best (legal) price for an ebook out of the water by about 2000x.

Geek Legend writer and directory Joss Whedon posted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit today: I am Joss Whedon - AMA. Awesome.

Great post by Mr. Fry called Four and Half Years On about his time with the iPhone, and some reflections of smartphones in general, not all with kind words.

In mid to late 2007 the Redmond Behemoth had just come up with Windows Mobile 6 for Pocket PCs, as they charmingly called their absolutely fucking dog of an operating system. Pardon the language, but nothing else will do. CEO Steve Ballmer and others at MS were the first to admit it when they launched Windows Phone 7 a year and a half ago […]

Awesome article on Coding Horror on Preserving The Internet… and Everything Else, all about the Internet Archive and what it does and how gargantuan the task is.

The cool site 1000memories has updated their site. See the blog post with more detail.

If you’re not familiar with 1km (as I like to call them), it’s a “shoeboxing” site where the idea is you are over at Aunt Martha’s and see some old family photos in an album. You don’t have time to do a full proper scan of them, but you have the shoebox app on your phone and whip it out, take pictures of the images (and if you have a decently new phone and good lighting conditions, these probably will be adequate, and the app helps with nice intuitive cropping and filtering). Images are stored forever through a partnership with the Internet Archive. More info on the 1000 memories.com about page.

Wind Map. Via Daring Fireball.

Very sad set of images of the Decommissioning of the Space Shuttles.

End of an era :(

The Tricorder project. Presented without comment. You know you want this. NOW.

50 Creative MacBook Decals and Stickers via @moo.com.

I’ll take the portal one please!

I have to admit I was sceptical of this Student-created “Bing Automatic” app concept (which essentially uses data you’ve already written or the context of your browser or document or selection to auto-search for you)… then about halfway through I thought “wow, that is pretty cool”.

First and foremost, “Bing Automatic” is a completely conceptual idea envisioned by what appears to be a team of marketing students for a college coursework assignment, so apply a generous coating of salt. I’m not even sure if Microsoft’s Bing team has seen this.

Of course, as described in the concept video, it’s a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, and frankly I think that Google should take this idea and run with it, as they have been pushing the “we’re a decision engine too” idea.

Still, ignoring the multitude of privacy problems with this, if it were to work and be created as shown, it’d be a pretty cool program (and frankly the search engine behind it is completely irrelevant, so it could be Bing, Google, Ask, Wolfram Alpha, etc.).

The Most extensive full face transplant to date has been completed after a marathon 36 hour surgery.

The face transplant recipient, 37-year-old Richard Lee Norris of Hillsville, Virginia, was injured in 1997 in a gun accident. Since that time, he has undergone multiple life-saving and reconstructive surgeries. Due to the accident, Mr. Norris lost his lips and nose and had limited movement of his mouth. Mr. Norris first came to the University of Maryland Medical Center in 2005 to discuss reconstructive options with Dr. Rodriguez.

Wow, looking at the before and after images (slightly disturbing) show what an amazing age of medicine we live in today.

Via this reddit thread.

Shared out by my buddy James of RainGeek fame, here’s 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women. Not sure I agree with them all, but it’s a compelling argument, especially #4, concerning the comments made about fucking supreme court justice Elena Kagan, the fourth female Justice1 (I presume by other women, but that’s just how I read it).

Trailer For Hammond’s New BBC America Show “Crash Course” from Finalgear.com.

If you haven’t heard, Richard Hammond is hosting a new show on BBC America called Crash Course. It’ll premiere Monday, April 16th at 10/9c immediately following the US premiere of Top Gear season 18.

Oh hell yes. Thanks Aryk!

Cool video about what things would look like if the earth had rings like saturn.

So there’s a kickstarter project out there to build full motion Real-life Battlestar Galactica Viper simulator.

OMG I want this so much. Amazing that this is being built by juniors in high school. When I was that age I wasn’t even thinking about girls, I think I was probably still more concerned with riding my bike or something like that. Really glad to see these guys have almost doubled their required $2,500 goal.

Via Raingeek.

What it’s like to be a jump rope. Very cool video.

You can now watch the World’s First Flying File-Sharing Drones in Action. These are similar to The Pirate Bay’s LOSS (Low Orbit Server Stations).

I’m still not convinced this isn’t an April Fool’s Joke.

Twitter Advertising: Promoted Tweets on mobile: more options, starting today.

We recently began testing Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts on iOS and Android devices to make it easier for brands to reach consumers anytime, even when they are on the go. As with the launch of Promoted Tweets in user timelines on Twitter.com, we started by showing them in the timeline only for those users already following the advertiser. Since we began testing three weeks ago, reactions have been positive. Starting today, we are expanding this test, enabling brands to target Promoted Tweets to mobile users that share similar interests with their existing followers. 

Read: “we’re gonna start spamming you”.

Oh great.

I try not to pimp my own stuff here a lot, but I did write up an article on Managing Photography using Evernote over the weekend. Have a read and let me know what you think, and even if you’re not a photographer, model, or creative in anyway, Evernote is an awesome product and everyone should use it!

Amazing shot of a Red Bull dude about to skydive from really high up.

Pilot Felix Baumgartner of Austria seen before his jump at the first manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos in Roswell, New Mexico, USA on March 15 2012. In this test he reach the altitude 21800 meters (71500 ft) and landed safely near Roswell.

Badass is right.

Scientific Proof That Women Hate Beards from Gizmodo.

The results were conclusive. Women—both Europeans and Polynesians—said that the men looked significantly more attractive when clean-shaven. They also reported that bearded men looked older and of higher social status. When men were asked to look at the same photographs, they reported that bearded men looked more aggressive.

Sadly without mine I look like a chubby 12 year old boy.

Battlestar Galactica Roller Coaster at Universal Studios Singapore. I need say no more (other than I’m not sure exactly what makes this awesome roller coaster a “BSG” roller coaster and not just an awesome roller coaster…).

Via RainGeek.

So say we all.

Macgasm reports that Oink is dead. Oink is a social network / recommendation app for the iPhone that was the first product from Kevin Rose’s startup incubator Milk.

Kevin Rose told All Things D, “We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts.” Clearly that’s PR speak for “no one was using our application, and it’s not profitable.” Had Oink been profitable, there’s no way they would be closing down the application and service so quickly. It just wouldn’t happen. Don’t let the PR speak fool you, Oink was a major disappointment.

I used Oink a tiny bit and while it was an interesting take on checkin/social networking, it just didn’t do it for me, and it sounds like it was a similar story for the rest of the users. Hopefully we’ll still see good stuff come from Kevin and his gang.

Fascinating set of images of Undressing a Sony NEX Camera and revealing the innards of a modern digital camera.

George Takei has a nice fireside chat with Tennessee Lawmakers on some of the ridiculous stances on homosexuality that are going on.

Personally I’m offended that this sort of thing is still being discussed.

As the tech people know, as a fundraiser for the new studio, TWiT sold bricks with your choice of inscription on them. Now we get our first look at the The TWiT Brick Wall Of Honor via some pretty cool Gigapan images.

Waldo The Movie. I’d watch the hell out of this.

Via Laughing Squid.

Check out this snazzy Portal decal for your iPad from MacGasm.

If you want to cry for the sake of humanity check the comments on Justin Bieber’s Instagram account.

Shooting Time Lapses In Pennsylvania? Have A Reason Or Get Busted apparently. Great video showing both unreasonable cops (hopefully the exception not the rule) and a reasonable photographer (again, hopefully the rule not the exception). Sadly it turns out even if you’re in the right and know the law it still doesn’t mean anything when you’re up against the ones who can arrest you and have the guns. Related to the recent strobist post.

Not sure if it’s too little too late, but today the Flickr From your Contacts page has a “justified” setting. More details on the flickr blog.

Ze Frank has hit his goal of $50,000 on kickstarter to bring back The Show. If you don’t remember the most awesome The Show, you can hit the archives and catch up.

Congrats to Ze and don’t forget if you want some of his…. “unique” rewards, there’s 9 days to go still in the kickstarter campaign.

Nice little Behind The Scenes video of The Lies Behind the Lens looking at photographers shooting those before and after images for things like diet pills etc.

Check out this clip from, “Bigger Faster Stronger”, where photographer Rich Schaff explains how some companies hire him to take before and after photos on the same day, for misleading supplement advertisements. Is this why some photographers get into photography? Is this even legal? I mean, how far are you willing to go to make a buck? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to disparage shooters who make a living doing this type of work but is this the kind of thing shooters actually aspire towards? Why did you get into photography? Is there anything you won’t shoot? What would it take for you to hang up your lens? I’d really like to hear answers to some of these questions from our readers. So please leave your comments, thoughts and rants below.

Short story (and you, my audience, are smart people so you know this already) - the camera lies not only through “legal” means (lighting, posing, etc) but also through good old photoshop. Some of the before and after images were even taken on the same day. So yea, don’t be stupid and believe advertising :)

Fox Business News Accuses ‘Arriety’ and ‘The Lorax’ of Brainwashing Children.

Joining Dobbs to discuss the insidious liberal plot to use popular forms of entertainment to educate and enlighten the leaders of tomorrow are three right-wing radio show hosts. Wow, what a shining panel of “experts.” After Dobbs and his sniveling yes men finished laughing and shaking their heads at the latest antics of liberal Hollywood they all went over to Lou’s house for a sleepover with Rick Santorum.

Seriously America, it’s this sort of bullshit that makes the rest of the world laugh at you.

Ok, so this is an old link, but at the end I called over my coworkers to watch the video of a Pilot losing a wing at an airshow.

Details of the new features over at Techcrunch: 500px Rolls Out New Browsing And Sharing Features - Plus A Market

» Time in the 10,000-Year Clock

Keeping time for 10,000 years isn’t tricky just because its hard to build a really durable clock. It also forces us to recognize and account for changes in things we normally think of as immutable, like the length of a day.

Via JWZ.

Everything is a Remix Part 4 has been released. If you haven’t watched the previous 3 episodes, you should, right now. It’s a fascinating look at how ideas and things are created and transformed, from music to lightbulbs.

Canada Kiss Map, powered by google maps.

Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers is the story of the day.

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result - my address book was in Path’s hands.

The reasoning behind it is obvious, those notes you might get saying something like “your friend blah blah has joined Path, would you like to friend them?” is only possible if they know who your friends are. Even so, not cool without disclosure. Course, I’m sure that there are a ton of other apps that do this exact same thing, just we don’t know about it.

The bigger question is do they do anything other than this…

Note that the CEO of path has replied with their reasons.

All requests to btjunkie.org now to go a “goodbye.html” page.

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

TorrentFreak has more details, basically the legal actions against other sites prompted them to shut down, even though they were never directly involved in any sort of legal action. This is too bad, they were my go-to site for any sort of file sharing for years now, and it’s sad that all the BS lately has prompted their shutdown.

The Pirate Bay blog explains why they have moved from .org to thepiratebay.se. Hint: blame the US.

I know it’s a bit intense for first thing on a Friday morning, but wow, holy crap. Title of the story is: I broke my neck skydiving. This is the video I was taking when it happened.

Note: Probably best not to watch this if you’re planning on going skydiving for the first time :) …. very intense at the end.

The second Adobe Photoshop CS6 Sneak Peek shows off background saving and new performance improvements with the liquefy filter. The first sneak peek we brought you was back in january (I know, soooo long ago :)

Pretty amazing: Using Hipstamatic on iPhone, Talented Filmmaker Vitùc Creates Stunningly Mesmerizing Stop Motion Film.

This film reaffirms why I believe the iPhone is the single most amazing tool ever - in the palm of your hand you have a digital darkroom with an astonishing array of inspiring post-production tools. In one device you have a camera, post-production editing suite, and music production studio. If you hit a creative mental roadblock, you can relax with a game of Angry Birds.

Via The Digital Convergence Podcast where even someone not interested in video can get pretty enthralled :)

I think I’d try one just to say I did.

Doesn’t that look like a disgusting thing? It’s so disgusting it becomes good! And actually, if you think about it, the Alien Brain Hemorrhage Cocktail seems rather complicated to make. That is, if you base it on the looks of the drink. (Then again, I am no bartender, so I really have no idea.)

Simple story about How Reddit Saved an Orphanage in Kenya. I am proud to be part of this, giving $50 I didn’t have. The results and seeing the pictures of the results made it all worth it though.

While the initial goal was $2,000, TheLake posted an update: “Over $9,000 and I’m in a state of shock.” The next update showed Reddit users contributing a total of $11,000. Donations continued to pour in through the organization’s website, Longonot Education Initiative, was upgraded to a Pro account for two years from its host, Weebly. The company also donated $10,000.

$65,000 in two days. Amazing.

Wow is right: Yosemite Time Lapse. If you don’t have a huge monitor to see this on you’re missing out.

The New Vimeo looks damn sexy.

Interesting timing that MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds and the Founder Arrested the day after the internet protested about governments getting too much power to do things like, say, take down websites in other countries.

Just sayin'.

Apocalypse Later, Surf Now, An Apocalyptic Surf Music Video. Not much to say, other than needs to be watched full screen and in high def :)

Super trippy to watch: The Mind-Boggling Upside-Down World Beneath the Surface of a Frozen Lake

Making Love to WebKit via Daring Fireball. Pretty amazing use of CSS magic.

Wow.

Thanks to JWZ for linking to the I believe I can fly video, embedded below. Best watched in high def and on a huge monitor.

Those guys be crazy!

JWZ points to Wipeout Quantum!, using the cool (literally) quantum levitation from a while back in it's completely natural application: slot cars.

Photoshop CS5 simulator built with HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript. I'm honestly blown away by what can be done with modern code. I admit I'm by no means a Photoshop expert, but this pretty much matches what I see when I use it!

Color me there! Now I just need a 3D Printer. And to play Minecraft. Looks awesome though :)

Articles like Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time make up for 10 of the "tweet choir".

[...] 4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that's mysterious -- clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the "now." Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

According to mashable the spnKiX motorized shoes are now a reality, thanks to their kickstarter campaign. The fact they raised $71k astounds me, if only because I find it hard to believe that that many people are potentially going to be actually using these things in real life. I can't wait.

Also I hope the flying cars are coming soon.

Have the "new new" Facebook timeline but don't have the photo chops to put up a super-awesome cover image? DB is giving away a few Free Facebook Cover Images to get you started with an epic cover image for your facebook timeline.

Tasty story my friend @curtismchale sent over to me: Former Employee Sued for $340K for Taking 17,000 Twitter Followers With Him

A man in California is being sued for $340,000 by his former employer. What did he do? This isn't a case of bringing home the stapler from his cubicle. After resigning from the company, he took his Twitter followers with him--all 17,000 of them.

Scary stuff.

Nice pointer from Forever Geek on how to Geek Up Your Twitter Profile with an online app called InstaBG, which will pull in images from your Instagram feed and dynamically update your twitter background image.

You can pull down your own images, by category, by tag, or anything from your feed. A very cool setup and a neat app in need of further investigation.

So to kick off 2012, and in an apology for it being so quiet around here over the holidays, check out the video below of Rollerman, a French Daredevil With a 31 Wheel Roller Suit.

Or as I'd call him, a crazy mother....

Nice article from Vanity Fair on Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer?.

Bruce Schneier's exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. "The only useful airport security measures since 9/11," he says, "were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can't break in, positive baggage matching"--ensuring that people can't put luggage on planes, and then not board them --"and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater."

The Icon Handbook is a great site with all sorts of information about the new book from Jon Hicks. Also of note is the awesome scalable website (try resizing the browser window down to smartphone width and watch how everything resizes and rearranges appropriately).

A great Doctor Who Timeline / Infographic over on Forever Geek.

Wowza, the Lego Production Factory in Billund, Denmark looks a lot like nirvana to me.

Nice collection from Best Article Every Day. Some are a bit lame, but some (such as the Art of Flight one embedded below) are epic, and require 1080p and large monitor playback.

7 Awesome Bits of Tech That Just Freakin' Disappeared.

It got me thinking about awesome technology that we somehow ditched. The airship? Awesome. Slide rules? Awesome awesome. Mir Space Station? Boss-level awesome. And now just thinking about wristwatches with calculators makes me suffer a sense of short-term nostalgia (as in Douglas Coupland's Generation X).

Here are some of the coolest features and products that we've lost along the way to 2012.

Nice article.... Unsurprisingly a lot of the cool tech was killed by larger industries such as the RIAA and MPAA as it would make people happier and give them less money. As usual.

Cool, Shaw is launching WiFi Trials in Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton. Course, you have to have an @shaw.ca email account (and who uses those?). Still, free wifi is nice, and better than all the "free" wifi that pops up unprotected and then gets you to pay for it when you join. Here's a list of more info and hotspot locations.

Thanks Aryk - Eight Ferraris in $4M pile-up.

Eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini -- plus a Toyota Prius -- were among the vehicles involved in the crash, which witnesses said happened when a speeding car slid across a wet road surface.

All I can say is "oh my".

Called: It's time.

Via Daring Fireball.

But Wait...There's More is a great article over on the Farnam Street blog (great design btw, check out what happens when you resize your browser thinner to smartphone width). You'll never look at infomercials the same, or advertising in general.

Must be I do everything with credit cards (or just don't get an opportunity to see $100 bills that often), but looks like Canada's new plastic $100 bill is all tricked out.

Watch out counterfeiters: Canada is planning to abandon paper money.

Looks sexy, someone want to send me a stack of these... for journalistic purposes only of course ;)

I honestly have no idea what DC SHOES: KEN BLOCK'S GYMKHANA FOUR; THE HOLLYWOOD MEGAMERCIA is, but holy crap it looks awesome. Like someone sprayed a special effects department all over a video. Or something.

Wow.

Take The 2011 InfoWorld geek IQ test, see how geeky you actually are.

Some pretty awesome Back to the Future photos (ie: re-creating a photo from years ago) by Irina Werning.

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, by a UI guy on the Microsoft Office vision of the future video from a few weeks ago.

Great article from Jeff Atwood on Bias Lighting over on Coding Horror.

The one thing that we can't abide is direct overhead lighting. Every time the overhead light gets turned on in this room, I feel like a Gremlin shrieking Bright light! Bright light! Oh, how it burns!

Next time you think you or anyone else has too much time on their hands, check out Project Ratway and think again.

First look at Oink, Kevin Rose's app for rating stuff.

Found the Sick Trailer for the New GoPro HD Hero2 over on F-Stoppers. Makes me realize just how boring a life I lead, and I'm hoping that if I were to get one of these little helmet mounted cams I'd spend my day base jumping, flying in a plane, swimming with sexy girls, and travelling to exotic locations.

That said this video needs to be played at 1080p and full screen on the biggest monitor you have.

Brazilian police car rams smugglers' airplane, via jwz.

Your moment of "OMG that looks like it was out of a movie" for the day.

The Twitter Blog has the scoop on Twitter Stories, a way for people to tell a story behind a single tweet. Similar to Storify it looks like. Has potential though, looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Via Daring Fireball again, the BlackBerry Future Visions 2 leaked video (apparently) is embedded below:

My god, could they make the future look any less boring? Setting up role based authentication?! Hazzaa! That's exciting! OMG you can use your own (blackberry) device?! The future is here now! Facetime Video communication between smartphones and desktop!? What brave and unbelievable future is this now!!

Seriously, a "future vision" video that has a large chunk dedicated to what happens if your phone is stolen and the smiling IT guy doing a remote wipe of it? Where's the excitement, where's the coolness? I know that it's probably more like the future than a lot of other of these "future vision" videos, but yea gods, give it a bit of life!

Course, those who manage large infrastructures full of people in suits carrying blackberries are going to be very excited about this :)

Great infographic via Forever Geek: Star Trek Is Just Around the Corner.

Just wanted to say that I just became a backer of the MobileMount a Suction Cup Mount & Kickstand for Phones/Tablets on Kickstarter. They are within $200 of their goal of $20,000 and I'm more than happy to say that based on what I've seen, it's a nice little project that will fix the "man I wish I had a way to have my phone GPS work while I'm driving" thing. It's just a mount (not power/audio), but for a mere $25 pledge, there's no way to lose. Grab one yourself!

Update: And 20 minutes later they hit the $20,000 goal, though I doubt somehow I was a huge amount of help :) Looking forward to getting my MobileMount though :)

The Wunderkit show is about to start from 6Wunderkinder, the company that produces the excellent cross platform task list application Wunderlist. Wunderkit is to help organize as and it appears that the task list is the first step towards this. Information on the page is a little light, but looking at the screen shots it looks likes a fully formed task / calendar / collaboration and note taking system (probably).

When you sign up for the beta you get a special code (ie: www.wunderkit.com/9JYWOq) which when others sign up with (please and thankyou) will bump you up in the waiting list a bit.

Michael Winslow gets the Led out.

The first 28 seconds are like, oh, I've heard this before yawn zzzzzzzzzz WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!

Uhm.. Wow.

From the Huffington Post: 'Rome Sweet Rome': Reddit Thread Gets A Movie Deal. Here's the original thread that spawned the movie (someone started writing a story in the comments in response to the question of "could a team of modern day marines destroy the Roman empire?").

If you're a child of the 80s you'll definitely want to check out The Ultimate 80's Tribute video. Amazingly awesome.

Via a coworker a story on slashdot about Searching For Mark Pilgrim as the notable author of the "dive into mark" and "dive into html5" sites has apparently committed infosuicide and deleted all his online presence, sites, twitter, etc, in a move similar to what Why the lucky stiff did in 2009.

Nice lesson in typography for those who don't know their kerning from their serifs. Like me.

A look at Whatever Happened to the iPad Rivals of 2010?

Spoiler: If you like happy endings, you should stop reading now.

Very impressive video of Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs shared by my friend James over on his google+ stream.

Sounds like Google Analytics has added Real-Time Traffic Data, similar to Woopra.

Real-Time reports are available in the new version of Google Analytics, and administrators with Analytics accounts will get Real-Time reports. Google turned the new feature on Thursday for "a number of you," John Jersin, product manager at Google Analytics wrote on the Google Analytics blog.

It hasn't shown up on my analytics dashboard yet, has it for anyone else?

Flickr has introduced a shared photo viewing system called Flickr Photo Session as well as an Android App.

Update: Thomas Hawk has his own take, probably more realistic than the story told by the Flickr video.

Awesome gentleman builds homemade flying contraption powered by eight motorcycle engines. Not much more to say than this. Thanks to my coworker JS for passing it on.

512 Pixels points to the 'Kindle Fire' story over at TechCrunch.

Fully customized Android, $250-300, shipping second week of November, Amazon app store, etc, etc. Could be cool for sure, definitely interesting.

A coworker pointed me to the Pixel Qi display technology and lamented Amazon not utilizing this in their tablet. Pixel Qi allows switching from "normal" LCD mode to a low power, sunlight readable setup (sort of like e-ink, but not). Unfortunately while they did get an investment from 3M recently, I haven't heard of them. The tech looks awesome though, hopefully we'll see it utilized in some e-reader/tablet hybrids soon.

The Macromates blog has been updated with the first (I think) news about the next version of the much loved Mac text editor Textmate. What's Next says there will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas (for registered users).

I really wonder how much of this is in response to the (apparent) slew of users dropping textmate for BBEdit and Vim as it has appeared that work on the much anticipated 2.0 (talked about as far back as 2006) was never coming and people were jumping ship to an editor that is being developed and doesn't have the danger of a) not supporting newer OSs and b) muscle memory being "wasted" on software that is EOL.

Via Shawn Blanc.

Great set of images of Skydivers over on the Flickr Blog this week. I particularly love the last one and the user of what I assume is a flash attached to his foot :)

Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of netflix, posted a letter on the netflix blog called An Explanation and Some Reflections regarding the whole streaming / DVD split mess that they've been dealing with over the last few months.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. I'll try to explain how this happened. [...]

Hit the link for the full story.

Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of great videos of slow-mo base jumping. Hard to describe more, other than "awesome".

I Want This Fountain In My House. I can't disagree Forever Geek, I can't disagree.

Unsurprisingly there's differences in what people believe in terms who believes about climate change.

Holy cow. This is a straightforward factual question, and the correct answer is something in the neighborhood of 98%.1 But even among Democrats, only 42% think that most climate scientists believe global warming is happening. It's even worse among the other groups.

It wouldn't be so bad if America wasn't so polarized politically, and so influential in the world.

Kudos again to Gruber.

Kudos to Shawn Blanc for pointing out ifttt (if this then that), a pretty cool website service that simplifies some pretty complex interactions. It's hard to explain so hit the previous link, or check out their blog for more information about the beginnings as well.

Credit this morning goes to my boss, John, for pointing me to NiceKicks.com with a story about some shoes that Nike is apparently going to be announcing today. Normally I'd say "you realize I don't care about shoes right? Mine have holes in them [sadly this is a literal and not figurative statement] and you can tell by the rest of my appearance day to day that I can't care less about fashion."

However he then pointed me to the link.

"Welcome to Los Angeles. If my calculations are correct, over the next 24 hours you are about to see some SERIOUS SH*T!"

The images and contents of the box that the reporter got indicate that Nike may be announcing a "back to the future" shoe of some sort, either in throwback style or (pleasepleaseplease) the self-tying shoes from the movie.

Other resources is the gizmodo story.

Discovered RWPike's Photo Manipulation and Caricatures through Google+ and Rodney Pike. Fantastic work turning images into caricatures.

Awesome essay on The Straight Dope about What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet?

The Biggest History Mindf**ks. Collected from an ask reddit question.

Stocking Is the New Planking. Duplicating stock photography images.

Fantastic.

Laughing Squid links to a great video on The History of Copyright Law.

Very sweet Minimalist Business Card Design with URL, twitter and email all in one. Nice!

Evernote's developer conference is over and they have a nice list of their Developer Competition Winners, some of which are pretty awesome.

It took me entirely too long to realize that this article was from The Onion.

Sure, of the 40 Unhealthiest Coffees there are a ton of >1000 calorie drinks, but I call it looking delicious!

So it's been a slow monday, just something about Motorola being bought by Google. Way more important though is a series of super-cute images of an elephant who befriended a sheep.

Cool social experiment with a starbucks card online for you to use. It started off with $30 and more than $3000 has been charged to it, with people filling up the card as it gets low. There's even a twitter feed to show the current balance.

Nice find by Aryk - World War II: The American Home Front in Color, with some amazing shots in full color.

I'm pretty sure this is just part of the "demand media" generation we live in, but articles like How to Love the Taste of Water: 8 steps (with video) over at wikiHow just baffle me. What's next, "how to breath in 14 easy steps" or "walk or drive, a handy decision tree infographic for your iphone for those though decision making times."

Awesome: Achieve Ultimate Butter Distribution in Your Movie Theater Popcorn with a Straw.

So doing this when I can afford to go to a movie again....

Well, an artists rendering anyway of the Largest Water Reservoir In The Universe.

Astronomers have discovered a reservoir containing 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth's oceans, making it the largest mass of water ever detected in the universe.

Great cartoon on Why Your Newspaper is Dying.

Via Aryk - Top Gear: the motoring show in quotes (by the producer).

All I can say is Oh. My. God..

Via this reddit thread. I think the only caveat is that the builder didn't build it "by hand" (or at least didn't mine all the materials).

When Forever Geek says that this Robot Mouth is the Freakiest Thing You'll See Today he's not kidding. Cool to see how your throat works, but geez, some things are supposed to be a mystery.

The bigger question is how long till someone uses this for.... "other" purposes....

I'm not a big Lady Gaga fan, but I'm a huge Howard Stern fan, and her ‪solo piano performance of "The Edge Of Glory" on yesterday's show was fantastic.

Time has a gallery of Babes of the '80s: Then and Now. Interesting to see who has and hasn't aged since they were the hot babes of the movies of my youth.

Super cool VR view of the Space Shuttle Discovery cockpit.

Thomas Hawk does a cool Google+ vs. Flickr vs. Facebook vs. 500px vs. Twitter comparison.

I will try to compare, the best I can, the attention that the same photograph received from each of these sites over the course of 24 hours. If as a photographer you are looking at photo sharing sites, in part, as a way to promote your work to a wider audience, the engagement your photographs receive online may be of interest. This case is very specific and of course everyone's circumstances will differ, but this is my experience.

A compelling argument on How the Duke Boys ripped off George Lucas.

Fantastic photo-essay on The History of the Space Shuttle by Alan Taylor at The Big Picture. Via Shawn Blanc.

Saw a great pic on reddit of this great Millenium Falcon guitar. Epic.

BTW, happy Fourth of July to all my American readers! Make sure you celebrate by blowing lots of stuff up ok? :)

Turns out that numbers make beautiful music. Someone used some simple rules to turn the numbers of Tau into music.

Pretty cool use of timing and video in a nifty little video called A Guy, a Girl, and 3 iPhones.

Great gallery on Flickr: Cats Unimpressed by Bathing. Via Forgetfoo.

Windows Phone Tattletale is a nice site for WP7 users to point out retailers that are either ignoring or downplaying WP as a viable alternative and directing people to Android or iPhones. Via DF.

Another great video in the series, Everything is a Remix Part 3 is out. The next time that someone complains that Apple copied the Android notification system, or that Windows copied the Linux virtual desktops, or that Ubuntu is trying to be both Apple and Microsoft (I've done all of these things BTW), watch this, and realize that pretty much everything is a copy of something, and it's more about how you put these copies together that makes things interesting.

My buddy Nigel has a nice post up on the Wall of Forgiveness in Vancouver in the post-riot days. Lots of messages from people asking forgiveness, etc.

Also here's good info from Darren on the story behind the kissing couple. Lastly a collage of the people helping clean up (FB album here for those FB-inclined).

Watching this 1950′s Instructional Film on How To Dial a Telephone it reminds me a bit of the "your TV will now be all digital" commercials of not that long ago. Cool to see how similar old and new tech problems can be.

Fans of the TWiT podcasts will have been hearing about the new TWiT studios for a while, and Leo today posted a walkthrough video and images for you to admire. Looks good!

A comparison of Apple iCloud vs Google vs Amazon Cloud Drive vs Dropbox vs Microsoft SkyDrive from Pocket-lint.

awesome people hanging out together - Great tumbler to follow.

Awesome photography by Angus R Shamal.

Minimal Mac introduces Hopefully Sunny, a simple site that will mail you a weather forecast every day. Only zip codes though, so once again Canadians get left out. Eh.

Very cool idea though.

A bit off topic for normal fare, but both Vancouverites and Bostonians (Bostonions?) know that tonight game one of the Stanley Cup Playoff starts. Some great pics of Canucks Pride Around BC were collected on the Vancouver Blog Miss 604.

Go Canucks Go!

Shared by my buddy Rob is this Very Large Telescope HD Timelapse Footage.

Tell me you wouldn't kill to have one of these 6 Killer Star Wars Beds. Thanks ForeverGeek.

After the kerfuffle a while back about flickr accounts being deleted without warning or chance of retrieval, the flickr blog has responded with their new policies and procedures.

Very cool set of 6 Unusual City Maps. Locals vs Tourists based on flickr. Red is a tourist area, blue are the locals.

My boss at work passed on this Top Gear interview with Ranulph Fiennes. Amazing stories and this guy makes tough guys and superstars go "whoah, this guy is tough". Just a few notes:

• Thrown out of the british SAS (tough buggers to start with) for blowing up a movie set
  
• Circumnavigated the globe a few times
  
• Climbed Everest to get rid of his vertigo
  
• When he realized that Everest was just walking slowly uphill he figured that the north face of the Eiger was a better match
  
• Did 7 marathons in 7 days a few weeks after triple bypass surgery
  
• Cut off the frostbitten tips of his own fingers in the garden shed
  
• Considered for the role of James Bond
  

Not sure what else you can do to be defined as "all around tough ass adventurer".

Ironic that a site with an article 20 Reasons Why Your Website Design Sucks is the same site that pops up one of the "web 2.0 popups" (overlay asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter or some crap). Factor that in when you read the article. Via Forgetfoo.

When they say that this is possibly the most useful video you'll ever watch in terms of saving you time in your life, they're not kidding. The shirt removal video alone is worth the price of admission.

The 'bonus' video of the greatest proposal ever though, don't let your girlfriend, wife or fiance watch that lest they be very jealous and ask "why didn't you do something like that for me? Don't you love me as much as he does her?" (might be just me projecting though).

I've always been fascinated by people who are skilled in art, and this "how I drew it" video over on myextralife.com is pretty awesome (though the video quality for the first half or so isn't the best resolution). Well worth the 7 minutes for sure.

That's one of the videos that was posted on Vincent Laforet's Blog related to how small and easy high quality video is getting. Completely recommend watch that first video in high quality on a big screen. Not for the faint of heart though!

Uhm.... wow.

Amazing animated gifs via Shawn Blanc.

From the horses mouth, the Amazon team goes into just what led to the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption not that long ago.

Just heard about TeeFury where they sell one geeky themed t-shirt for $10 every day until they sell out. Check out the archive for some of their previous designs. Via Forever Geek.

I'm not a big car person, but this video was pretty awesome.

For the love of all that is good and kind in this world please tell me that this is a spoof.

Please.

please....

TomTom user data sold to Dutch police, used to determine ideal locations for speed traps. More or less evil than the Apple "Locationgate" debacle?

Friend of mine on Facebook pointed me to the Expo 86 anniversary party at Science World. If you're a 30-something Vancouverite you definitely remember Expo 86 and should get in on this. Live 80s music, Expo 86 Films, etc.

Great video from Adobe: It Gets Better. Beautiful and true all at once.

My personal note to people who have nothing better to do than make fun of / insult / torture / oppress people because of their sexual orientation: "Grow the fuck up, this world has way more screwed up things to freak out about than man on man or woman on woman love".

That is all. Merry Friday.

Video shows young girl receiving full pat-down, drug test from TSA.

Dear USA, you disgust me sometimes.

Many thanks to loyal UFies reader Zacsek for passing on this note:

I recently received these links, and I thought of sharing them with you, maybe they are interesting enough that you will post them: different sorting algorithms illustrated with traditional folk dances from Transylvania.
I think it's an awesome display of culture and worst case performance of the algorithms :))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPA7zE8mx0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZQPjUT5B4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROalU379l3U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns4TPTC8whw

Definitely worth the link! Thanks for compiling the selection for me!

Now this is an inspirational project I can get behind! AT-AT for America via Forever Geek.

Yay! I'm back and ready to post up a storm... well, at least a minor drizzle, but it's starting up again! Lets start up with Dear Coffee, I Love You, a blog all (all) about coffee and coffee related things. Via Shawn Blanc.

I'm not all that good at organizing things, but if you want to help support Japan in the crisis that I'm pretty sure you've heard about, check out the Vancouver Japan Relief Walk of Hope:

We encourage all participant to wear their red and whites, to show off the colors of both countries flags. Having a huge network of photographers, Christopher and his team will be covering this event from many angles and perspectives, capturing the true spirit of giving in action. Opportunities for direct donations can be made along the walk and also at the final destination where a team of volunteers will be meeting the arrivals. This Campaign will continue even after the Walk of Hope has completed.

This will be a great photo walk for Vancouver photographers looking to help out and have fun day, and you'll help a good cause. I'm looking forward to this big time! I know there are at least a few of UFies.org readers in Japan and while I don't know you I hope you and your families are safe, and I hope that I can support in this small way.

I'll repost this again as time gets closer, but again, please do sign up and donate!

7 ways the cable company's trying to screw you. My response.... "only 7?"

Given the speed with which companies shift names, it's not unlikely that the new Quebecor arena will be renamed something else within a few years. And, once again, we'll all feel like idiots when we can't remember what to call that big ugly building thingy where the dudes on the skates hit that rubber thingamajig.

Sadly because of the monopolies these companies have, and the gobs of cash, there's not really a lot you can do about it, because even if you (eg) cut your cable, you still need an internet connection to download your TV shows (assuming you don't just quit cold turkey of course) and guess who you give money to for that.... the cable company, and with caps and net neutrality coming down, you'll be ending up giving them even more money.

Cool news that Microsoft shut down the spam behemoth Rustock, reducing worldwide spam by 39%. Can't say that I've noticed it, but it's good to know. Sadly I'm sure another network will pop up to take it's place, however it does feel lately that spam is moving off of email and onto IM/Mobile more.

Pretty awesome YouTube - Chatroulette Love Song. Best line in it is the "I'm so glad you're not a naked guy".

Via Best Article Every Day.

Thanks for wiebedj for reminding me that today (3/14) is Pi Day! May your radii be merry and your circumferences be bright. Or something like that.

Pretty cool video of how some Found Lost Pictures of New York Blizzard found their way home. Via this reddit story.

For a good cause and everything, and pretty damn funny. James Bond Dresses as a Woman for International Woman's Day. Sorry but Daniel Craig just doesn't pull that dress off. :)

I wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked on the Daring Fireball link entitled Evocative Photos of Star Wars Toys, but after looking at Avanaut's Photostream, that's exactly how I'd describe them too. Fantastically executed shots.

More proof that with a bit of ingenuity and imagination you are never in the "nothing to take pictures of" zone.

Update: An article on his setup and how he creates the images in Gizmodo.

Very awesome Traditionally Animated Superman Film, complete with a pretty cool explanation of the how and why at the end.

Pretty great visual of the BSG Timeline. Found via Laughing Squid.

Seen on There, I Fixed It.com, possibly the most awesome bookshelf design ever. Want!

OK little boys and little boys who have grown up, you will want to look at the 2012 Lamborghini Aventador. Truly a pinup I'd put on my wall. Check out this shot to see just how sleek it is. Thanks to H at work for passing it on to me this morning.

I linked to part 1 in September of last year, and finally a couple of weeks ago, I see that Vincent Laforet found Everything Is a Remix: Part 2.

Very awesome independently created mini-movie about the Ford Mustang. Embedded below, but make sure you view HD and full size :)

Thanks to H for passing it on.

Thanks to H for passing on this video entitled Pixels Old School. Pretty awesome.

My buddy H sent me to codereddit, and while I would never advocate redditing while at work (it's like stealing from the company), but if you enjoy a quick reddit break, reading this page will look, from a distance, a lot more like work than the normal "skin" on it.

Now they just need multiple language options, and perhaps a text to speech version as well...

Google for Weddings is a site set up to show you how to use the various google tools for wedding planning. Not sure if this is more about using the existing tools, or a new set of tools using picasa/blogger/etc under the hood. Still, it'll help keep engaged nerds happy :)

3quarksdaily has a nice long look at software "chrome" (not the browser as they point out several times) and why obsession on making digital analogs to physical objects really really sucks.

This is the iBooks app. Notice how lovingly the designers have made it look like you are in the middle of reading a physical book by drawing a little pseudo-3D evocation, down each vertical side, of the pages you have read and the pages you have still to read. What do you think this looks like when you are on page 2 of a book, or 2 pages from the end? I'll tell you what it looks like: exactly the same.

No Ad: New York, a cool crowdsourcing idea to remove the visual clutter from Times Square.

Here's a video two-fer for you, via Gruber at DaringFireball this time, check out Growing is Forever. Makes me want to get into film making to be honest.

Interesting look at Google saying Bing Is Cheating, Copying their Search Results. Not so interesting from the fact that search engines use each other for results, but more from how Google did their "sting" to determine it.

In a cool diversion from the standard "you can do it, follow your dreams!" type articles, UnicornFree says instead Don't Follow Your Passion:

It's an age-old story: Boy meets passion, boy follows passion, passion turns out to be a mirage and/or actually a big pain in the ass, despite how rosy it may have seemed from a safe distance.

Now, it's not so cut and dried, or depressing, but it's a different take on things that anyone with entrepreneurial endeavors should take a look at.

A Continued Commitment to Security is the Facebook blog post on how they are enabling HTTPS security on their system.

Starting today we'll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools. The option will exist as part of our advanced security features, which you can find in the "Account Security" section of the Account Settings page.

If you're concerned about security, things like Firesheep, and not allowing people to get into your facebook account fairly trivially, then this is a good thing. Head to the settings page on your facebook account and enable this now.

If you wanted to see what life would be like if you moved somewhere, check outifitweremyhome.com. You could see, for example, that Comparing Canada to The United States you'd have more babies if you lived in the US, but pay more for health care. Very cool site! Thanks to @milesforrest for the link!

Great video of Ben Goldacre at Nerdstock talking about placebos, studies, quackery, and all things involved. Hard to describe, great to watch.

Dropbox has a nice little contest going - Dropquest 2011 which will let you have lots of prizes and some free extra space. If you don't have dropbox yet, get on it! Thanks to @hawkeye @halkeye for pointing me to it.

Cool stuff sent over from a buddy at work... The audience is listening to this Kinect hack which lets you control that "the audience is listening" THX intro thing. Looks very fun!

Bloody hell mate.... this Video of an Australian flood sweeping away a parking lot full of cars is pretty brutal. The commentary from the people taking the video is the best. "Glad I parked at the front today" and "think we should move the cars?".

The craziest thing is the degree to which the flood was at before they started to get worried. It wasn't until the cars were starting to be swept away before they started to get worried, but up until then it was more like "wow, what a quaint little river we have running through our parking lot." Course, in an insane a place as Australia with their man eating birds and 8,000 types of things that can kill you, this is probably normal. Bonus points to the guy who went into the flood to drive his Range Rover away.

The title of Bet You Can't Do That Twice pretty accurately describes the bandsaw skill shown in this demo.

Someone started a kickstarter fund to have a mission to put a monolith on the moon. Agree with Gruber, best idea ever, especially when you think about how it worked and why in 2001.

Some might say that the James Van Der Memes site is just a rip off of the classic Eric Conveys an Emotion, but as a fan of Dawson's Creek from back in the day (and of course Katie Holmes before she went insane and married someone other than me), I gotta pimp his site a bit. Cool stuff and a great idea.

Via Twitter comes some Incredible Space Pics from the ISS by NASA astronaut Wheelock. Amazing stuff, love the one of the astronaut working outside.

Gotta say that the new (old) DOS UI on stopwilson.com is pretty nice.

Fantastic video of Boardwalk Empire VFX Breakdowns, showing what you can do these days with computer technology and a green screen or 7.

If you've wondered if the new Chrome OS is enough to do "real work", you'll be happy to know that Lifehacker spent Six Days Working Entirely from Chrome OS to answer that exact question.

Definitely some cool new looks you can give your facebook profile page with this Facebook Profile Picture Hack Tutorial. From The Best Article Every day.

Very cool blog article on learning vi and vim - This is Your Brain on Vim.

Awesome find from Geeks of Doom - a Doctor Who T-Shirt 'Count the Shadows'. In case you were wondering, yes, this would make an excellent Christmas gift for your friendly neighborhood Arcterex! :)

Great mashup of two of the best sci-fi movies ever :)

Great video from google of 2010: Year in Review.

Great stuff, brings a tear to the eye...

Ever surf around at work and see a link that's marked as "NSFW" but really want to check it out? Enter VariablySFW, which lets you put in a link and check it safely. Kudos to heyhermano on reddit.

It's been all around the net, so I figure I'll link to it as well. Ben the Bodyguard.com is the website for a new iPhone app that will protect your sensitive iPhone data. There's not much else there in terms of details, but when you hit the site just scroll down and be amazed at what you can do with HTML/Javascript (HTML5?) and other nifty (non-Flash) web technologies.

Seriously, most of the iPhone apps I'll buy on a whim are from well designed and informative websites. I think if this was a $2.99 app I'd probably buy it sight unseen just from the site. Kudos to the designer. Make sure you run through it a couple of times as well there's a lot of small subtle (and gorgeously done) detail in there that I missed the first time through.

Proof that there's a niche for everyone.

A bit old, and yes, it's an ad for booze, but this short movie called Walking with Johnnie is pretty awesome. Thanks to Robert for emailing this to me.

And in case you don't notice it, it's a single friggin take.

Great video find over at the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs - In case you are traveling this week.

Related is this article in case you were thinking that the body scanners weren't all that bad. Glad I live in Canada and right now can't afford to fly anywhere, much less in or out of the US.

Awesome Buying advice from Andy I.

Thanks to my buddy Cat5 for passing on this Scale of Universe interactive site, very sexy smooth flash app.

Seems this whole "go on a trip get groped at the airport" backlash is gaining some momentum. The latest has been from Penn of Penn & Teller and his story of calling the real cops on the screener for grabbing his crotch.

I say, "I can take an early morning flight or a private jet. " The cop says, "If I have a citizen who is saying he was assaulted, you can't just send me away."

Good stuff. Interesting to hear if this goes anywhere, or if the "but we're doing it to prevent [insert horrible images from 9/11] this from happening" will get all the sheeple back in line.

A great article on what Facebook did recently with their big messaging announcement, and how they could take it in a different direction. Honestly I don't totally understand what FB messaging will be until I see it, but this article gives a pretty good idea what it's not.

The morning is starting out interesting, with a Live From Facebook's Massive Messaging Announcement blog, where Facebook is redoing their messaging system to what looks like a unified sms/mail/messaging system.

The latest In pictures feature has some pretty great shots.

Coo viral video from T-Mobile called The T-Mobile Welcome Back.

It's another one of those "people start singing / dancing in a public place" things, still cool though. Thanks @danaepp for pointing to it.

Pretty awesome video of a Rescued Baby Hummingbird and it's interactions with a person after hand raising it.

Gets a 9.5 on the cute-o-meter.

Some cool brain hacks if you wanna give yourself hallucinations, get rid of pain, or otherwise mess with your head.

Nice find on /Film, a video of how to Build an Optimus Prime Costume For $5 Out of Used Cardboard Boxes. Looks pretty good too.

Just found out today that as of Nov 1, Amazon web services are going to have a Free Usage Tier.

Below are the highlights of AWS's new free usage tiers. All are available for one year (except Amazon SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS which are free indefinitely).[...]

Cool stuff! Interesting to see if they pull in new users with this model.

Bridge Eaters on Vimeo is another video in the vein of the ones posted the other day. This one demonstrates a couple of key points that you need for good TS video (I took some random iPhone video footage and played with a TS Video app yesterday)... View from above and a view of big things far away, both of which enhance the "view of tiny toys" feeling. Embedded below, full screen and HD recommended.

Hat tip Daily Dose of Imagery.

If you are in a pumpkin carving contest, sad to say you already lost to that guy. Wow.

Video that is a great example of a tilt-shift effect. Pretty commonly seen in images, not so often in video, but it seems to be more popular now, I think there's even an iPhone app to do it :)

Two more great examples here and here.

Amazing photoset of Project Intrepid, which will put even the strongest Lego Maniac's heart to shame. Wow.

Awesome music video from the Dollhouse Season 2 DVD, both sad and creepy all at once, great music though. Good to see Topher up and around again :)

Cool video to Help Kids Understand Food Ads. Of course, if you think this is some sort of grand scheme by fast food places to make sure the pictures of their burgers look 100x more awesome than in real life, you're right, course, this is no different than pretty much every other industry and every other commercial image or video. If you look at any product of any sort in any sort of ad and think they're not manipulated in some way or other, think again. Every screen image is simulated, lash inserts are added, and every bit of food has some gross and disgusting goop applied to make it look succulent, and I'm pretty sure half the time cars in ads are all computer generated.

Reddit story source.

The Daily What has a video of an amazing video Photoshopping tool called MovieReshape, allowing you to reshape actors in essentially realtime. Hard to describe, hit the site to view the video.

Amazing and Death-defying wingsuit video shows what it's like to be a real-life superhero. The part where he skims by the statue of Christ The Redeemer in Brazil is possibly the most awesome thing I've seen.

That said I have no idea how they manage to find areas where land is sloped just right so that they skim above it while falling (with style).

Watch This Man on Fire Leap Out of a Skyscraper.

Uhm. Wow.

Two questions:

1. How does he walk around normally? I mean, it's gotta be hard with balls made of steel and the size of basketballs!
   
2. I can see myself as a stuntman and I can see doing a long jump. I can see being lit on fire. I can see jumping through a glass window. I cannot see myself doing all three.
   

Kudos to my buddy Jim for sharing this on facebook.

Addoula on OSNews talks about his Six Months with Opera 10.5.

Since the launch of Opera 10.5 in March 2010, I've been using it as my primary browser, whether at work or at home. Using Ubuntu at work, and a Windows netbook at home, I wanted a fast browser for my netbook and a coherent browsing experience on both operating systems. And this is where Opera 10.5 (and newer) fits perfectly.

Vizeddit is a very cool javascripty magic thing that lets you see reddit votes and comments in realtime. Works on chrome and FF (possibly others). Note: If it's just falling reddit aliens, give it a bit more time, soon it will show up properly (unless the server's crashed again of course). Very cool stuff!

Reddit discussion here.

Awesome video of a home project to send an HD video recorder into spaaaaaace. Seriously though, it's pretty amazing what a couple of guys with some consumer grade equipment and a tiny bit of knowhow can do these days. Video embedded below.

All I have to say is "wow". Check out this from Paris 2010, the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento Concept car in detail.

Wow.

There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly. That title doesn't instill confidence, and the article does a good job of going into the why.

http://erkie.github.com is hard to describe, but I thank @dkubb for pointing me to it. Basically it's a bookmarklet that lets you destroy ads on a webpage by playing asteroids. I didn't get it at first either, but now that I do, I'm using it on every page :)

Check out this amazing Blizzard-meets-300 Demo Reel from 2008 by Nareg Kalenderian.

Image of the day has a great set of images of sculptures created from old car parts.

Pretty cool Lego diorama of Logan's Run.

Very simple concept, and awesome for the nostalgics out there. Pick a year, click refresh, and TRAVEL THROUGH TIME. Great for re-living the news for the year you graduated high school for example.

Cool light painting technique using the iPad. Not what you expect.

Darren sent me DarkPatterns.org, a nifty list of design patterns to get people to do things they wouldn't normally do.

The Flash guys at Adobe have given us A Sneak Peek into Flash Player "Square" which:

This preview includes support for two new areas, namely enhanced support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Beta and native 64-bit support for all major desktop operating systems including Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Assuming it doesn't completely explode, woo!

Very cool video of how a watch works, laid out in intricate detail.

Darren pointed me to Biolab Disaster, a cool little sidescroller game, it's difference being it's done in HTML5 and Javascript, not flash, which is the standard for this fare of browser game.

Some interesting mythbusting on the (now completely boring and who-cares) Mac vs. PC debate.

The most awesome stop action lego movie you'll see this morning.

In case you were looking for an excuse to buy a second DSLR that does video, you can check out this HDR video accomplished using dual 5D Mark IIs. I'm not a fan of overdone HDR, and overdone HDR in video is just as bad. This isn't overdone per-se, but it could be easily abused. That said, if trends go as trends go, I see this being a built in feature to DSLRs in 5 years....

Great video on the making of the Blade Runner Hades Landscape, from Douglas Trumbull's Immersive Media and Visual Effects site. Via Daring Fireball.

Pretty amazing when you consider they did this in the days before you could just throw it to your 12 year old neighbor with the fast computer to whip up in a couple of hours in Maya or whatever is the go-to app for 3D modelling these days. Still, doing it the old way with miniatures has more "soul" than these new fangled CG effects...

Wow, I didn't hear this... I knew that The Stig (from the awesome BBC car show Top Gear) revealed his identity in a tell-all book, but I hadn't heard that he had been sacked. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to read the book, and think that Stig's story would be awesome, but I don't like how he went about it.

Interesting tactic that they're taking in my home town of Vancouver... using 3D optical illusion to scare motorists into safer driving. I wonder if this is one of those cool 3D paintings or if it's some high tech hologram. Are we living in the world of tomorrow?

Cool little thread over at reddit got someone to create a Calvin and Hobbes + NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day script that combines an image of Calvin and Hobbes looking at the sky with the APOTD. Very neat stuff. Check out the rest of the reddit thread for other images and scripts to do similar things.

Nice gallery at IO9 of Websites for scifi's most famous evil corporations, based on real-life corporate websites.

FAQ), so it's not really that cheap, but still, a $4 iPhone case where they normally go for the $20-30 range? Hard to beat. Cases don't seem too bad either.

No shipping to Canada sadly, would love to get a review unit up here to see what they're like (hint hint) :)

From Aryk - Unboxing and First Impressions With the Parrot AR.Drone.

WANT!

Save The Words is a cool concept to help un-dumb-down the airwaves (as it were). You can pledge to adopt a forgotten or unloved word in the English language and pledge to use it and spread it. The "pick me" and "oh me me!" are cute too.

You don't have to be Star Wars nerd to see from the massive number of pictures that these lightsabers are built and crafted to be just gorgeous.

Not sure if I'll use it, but it's nice to see via the Official Google Reader Blog that Google Reader now has a fullscreen mode, via 'f'.

A buddy of mine, brianpwins pointed me over to Mike Tyson's Push-up workout from the early 90s. A taste:

3pm: more ring work and 60 mins on the exercise bike (again working those huge legs for endurance) 5pm: 2000 sit-ups; 500-800 dips; 500 press-ups; 500 shrugs with a 30kg barbell and 10 mins of neck exercises 7pm: steak and pasta meal again with fruit juice (orange i think it was)

This guy must have been in insane good shape, I don't think I can do 800 dips in a week. Course, when your job is to be in shape, I guess doing nothing but eating and working out 7 days a week is the way to go :)

The Wilderness Downtown is a very cool HTML5 (ie: Chrome/FF/Safari only) experiment that has a neat setup that's a bit hard to describe. Just check it out.

Congrats to Kevin and the gang as Digg.com has launched with the new version 4 codebase. Check out Kevin's post with some more details. Some interesting stuff from the war room at launch time.

Cool to hear that Imgur, the image posting service used a lot by the reddit.com crowd is supplying the New Image Upload Support over at Stack Overflow. Great stuff!

If you love your Mac enough that you'd do anything to feel like you're using it while at work or on a windows machine, you will be interested in this transformation pack that turns your windows system into something that looks (a bit) like OS/X. Sadly as I've found in the year or two I've had a mac it's really not the "bling" that makes the mac nice to work on, but the underlying framework, interface guidelines, and apps. But if you have a jones for a dock and menu bar along the top, this might be for you.

After watching this video why would you ever go anywhere near the water again!?!?

Another great Daring Fireball Linked List link to a Statistical Analysis of the Attractiveness of User Profile Pictures, asserting, among other things, that iPhone users have more sex (presumably with other people that is).

As an iPhone user, I must agree with this.

</troll>

Some other interesting stuff as well, including analysis of sexiness by camera make, class, flash or no flash, etc.

Great looking and informative site called My Cooking Diary. Super simple and a gorgeous design.

Blogging a bit too much of a commitment for you? Check out OhLife, described as:

Every night we'll email you the question "How did your day go?" Just reply with your entry and it's saved here instantly.

Via Shawn Blanc.

Cool and useful list of 64 Things Every Geek Should Know. Via someone on twitter.

Fantastic shot and description over on flickr called View From a Car Carrier. Read the description to see what it's like steering one of those huge cargo ships. I also encourage you to go through the rest of the My Office Window set of images showing the varied life of a cargo ship driver who does nothing but ferry these boats in and out of the harbor. This was featured on the flickr blog today.

If this is even remotely real, this bike is the most awesome thing ever!

Cool list from Odee on 10 Movie Characters That Turned Out To Be Real People.

Great shots over at io9 of the comic-con "God Hates Fags" counterprotest with awesome geek oriented signs. Seriously, can't we pack these Westboro Baptist Church assholes off to a mining colony somewhere where there isn't enough air? Just sayin....

Physicists reveal how the universe guarantees paradox-free time travel. Yay!

Time travel isn't just science fiction: Albert Einstein's general relativity suggests it could exist. And now we might have solved the tricky matter of time paradoxes. It's all just a question of adjusting probabilities.

Get a Free Year of Amazon Prime with an .EDU Address via Lifehacker.

Very cool look at the design process as someone redesigns the HTC 1.

Not sure if this is the next big scandal, but I've seen a couple of stories on how Skype has blocked Fring. Fring is an iPhone app that's been around for a few years now and connects to a bunch of different messenger services, including skype. With the iPhone 4 they've recently shown off how they too can do video calling over skype (which, I believe, skype doesn't do yet).

From the Fring blog:

Needless to say, we are very disappointed that Skype, who once championed the cause of openness is now trying to muzzle competition, even at the expense of its own users.

We're sorry for the inconvenience Skype has caused you.

Another story on this is here. Not sure if this is maybe some "oops" and it'll turn out to be a non issue, but I can see a lot of Fring users, and general internet rage about this.

Power Laces- the Auto lacing shoe and full how to build instructions. Need I say more?

Story from a true food buying ninja: Eating Well On $1 A Day.

Another amazing New Wall-Painted Animation by BLU. You've seen the other one I'm sure, this one is just as good or better.

A nice take on iOS vs. Android vs. webOS, at least, if you ignore that webOS and Palm are all but DOA of course....

The "I'm on a horse" guy Reveals Secrets Behind Old Spice Commercial.

Very cool Hybrid Disk, thanks Laughing Squid.

Great, though long, talk on YA Day in the Life of Facebook Operations by Tom Cook.

Great to know that medical science is helping our four legged friends as well. We can hope that the tech created for cat paws will move to people hands soon too.

I've only recently become aware of the happenings on the interwebs with Zach Anner and the Oprah Contest. From the article:

There's a lot of anger and snark on the internet (I should know, I write some of it), so it was great news that this weekend gave us an internet story that just makes you smile. That story is the tale of Zach Anner, a young man with cerebral palsy, who became the internet's latest celebrity when he entered Oprah Winfrey's contest to give a regular person their own TV show. Anner's audition video was hilarious and his overall good nature won over the internet and soon a few well-placed links had landed him more than two and a half million votes!

Farewell to the notification area.... what Ubuntu is doing to make this happen and why.

The Flickr Blog writes about their New Photo Experience. Looks good!

Remember Batman's Tumbler BatMobile from the latest Batman movies? Well, now there's a Tumbler Golf Cart.

Thanks to Curtis for pointing me to this article on Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0. This is something I've been looking for to possibly combine all my various personal sites into one management system, should I decide to leave Movable Type that is.

For some people, this Kittens Bookmarklet will simply be the best thing ever. Via http://teabass.com/.

Adobe updates Flash against security flaw - but watch out for the extras. Seriously? A company as big as Adobe has to do this crap?

Sneaky, that - trying to get you to install McAfee Security Scan Plus when all you actually want is an update of Flash.

I can understand if you're a small company trying to get a bit of extra revenue from installing crapware like the Ask toolbar, etc, but Adobe seems a bit big to do this sort of thing. The only justification I can see is that they are truly concerned about user's security and feel they aren't going to listen to a "hey, you know you should have an AV program installed" type message, and figure it's better to just shove AV software down their throats. I pity the IT workers that are going to have to deal with uninstalling this or dealing with conflicts or other really bad things resulting from users randomly installing things on their computers.

List of 5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies) at Cracked.com. Everything from silencers to bullets exploding everything they hit, with real life video examples :)

From Aryk: Lifehacker has some tips on how Picrap Offers No Hassle TV Show Streaming In and Outside of the US. I'm told it works well, haven't tried it yet myself.

Oddee.com has their list of the 10 Craziest Green Ideas, from brothels offering discounts for bike users to electricity generating dancefloors.

Great essay called My Problem With White Space over at the Echo Enduring Blog.

Now, I know that white space is an important element in layout and design. Yet, somehow, it seems that when that empty space is sitting there, staring back at me, I find myself struggling with the need to fill that space.

Holy crap. I'm not a fan of people owning high powered sniper rifles, but making your own lee enfield sniper rifle out of lego? Hell yes!

Thanks to Aryk for showing me this R/C Millennium Falcon Now Available For Pre-Order and draining both my wallet and my dignity as I scream out "OMG I MUST HAVE THIS" in the middle of the office.

Sort of like the Animator vs Animation videos a bit ago.... kinda. Check out CS vs Tetris, pretty damn good (and has a great ending, so don't miss it).

kotaku.com has a trailer for a new Mortal Combat re-imagining, featuring Jeri Ryan. They also have an update with some more details about what this is all about.

Very cool video of LA Without Cars showcased on slashfilm. The home site of the video has more info and a description and examples of how it was done.

Absolutely brilliant video of a talk on Aliens vs Human Intelligence related to DNA.

Great stuff.

Good post on the 37 Signals blog on Steve Ballmer at D8. I'm not an MS fan by any means, but based on the clips out of Ballmer when asked about the future of computing, tablets, etc, he did seem to be kinda talking out his ass and not making sense at all, especially compared to Jobs. Not that MS is in any danger of going out of business any time soon of course :)

Sad thing is that I think the chimp solved this faster and with a better solution than I would have come up with.

35 Lego Mega Constructions You (Probably) Haven't Seen Before over at hongkiat.com.

Awesome set of images: Early 1900s in Colour.

Based on the title of Fuck Flash In The Fucking Neck With Barbed Wire Coated In Arsenic, I'm guessing that Zed Shaw has some strong feelings about flash. Just sayin. Great read.

This Lego Printer is very cool.

If you read the FAQ for BankSimple, you'll probably be sold with the 'how do I deposit a check' question. No idea if anyone is going to buy into a "new" bank, but if they come to Canada I'd probably give them a chance, based purely on their attitude towards customers (well, at least on the webpage).

Via @milesforrest is this video of Aggressive Maneuvers for an Autonomous Quadrotor Flight. Bad description really, just watch the awesomeness:

Sad to hear that Gary Coleman has passed on.

Utah Valley Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Janet Frank said life support was terminated and Coleman died at 12:05 p.m. MDT.

More on CNN. Very sad to hear, I used to rush inside every afternoon at 4pm to make sure I could catch the new episode of Different Strokes. Bye bye Arnold, we'll miss you.

Hongkiat has a list of 50 Informative and Well-Designed Infographics. My favorite one is the space exploration one (of course).

I heard about FlashBake a while back on TWiG. Basically it will periodically commit all the "stuff" you're doing, along with context (music playing, that sort of thing) to a GIT repository. Basically a private "life backup" system. Something to play with for the geeks out there.

Photographers are probably the only people who will understand the awesomeness that is this Nikon 6mm fisheye that has shown up on ebay and is making it round the blogs lately.

Remember that awesome iPhone controlled flying drone from a few months back? Well, at E3 it will get a price and release date.

Reddit has their list of Real Life Cheat Codes. Everything from how to play a DVD and get straight to the movie to getting out of speeding tickets. Of course, your mileage may vary with some of these :)

If you have some free time and $4000, you too could build A Real Iron Man Suit. Thanks to Aryk for the link. My only comment? "OMGWTFWANT!"

Deep analysis on techcrunch as Kevin Rose Gives A Glimpse Of The New Digg.

In case it's gone when you read this, you can see bythis image that The Pirate Bay is back online and mocking the entertainment industry for trying to shut them down. Silly multi-bazillion-dollar industry can't even stop some guys in Sweden from running a server....

Cool story about some young inventors from the West Bank, A "life-changing" invention.

Haven't seen this one before: The Hacker's Code - from reddit.

Reminisce about the good ol' days when a men had real keyboards that went clack clack? You'll love the IBM Model M Keyboard Simulator which is pretty much exactly what you think it is. Just make sure your sound is turned up to "manly".

Joey the Accordian Guy posted a great list of The Geek Alphabet. In this link much awesomeness lies.

Found from some conversation on the Howard Stern show this morning, here's Jewel doing a live cover of The Needle And The Damage Done

That's just awesome.

Wow, you thought you had some skills? Check out these crazy gymnastics!

Another nice fozbaca find is this Photoshop tutorial: 6 techniques to extract anything from its background.

Eric Harrison has a great writeup on his attempt to replace Apache with Cherokee, and the challenges (and painful fail) he encountered.

When the "pay what you want" Humble Indie Bundle came out a while back, I noticed, but since the games weren't "big titles", I was kinda "meh". However, today when coming back to the site I noticed that the games are all cross-platform, and after watching the video, the games actually look pretty good. Hey, if you don't want to play them gift them to a friend or neighborhood kid who could use something nice. Remember that it goes to help the Child's Play and EFF charities.

In the mood for some awesome car porn? Check this this video where Motor Trend pitted Lexus LFA against Nissan GT-R in epic drag race from Autoblog.com. That's some sexy car right there. Recommended watching in the 720p version!

Simple Desktops is a collection of simple desktop images for people who like a more clean system to work on.

Seems like everyone is weighing in on Flash after Steve Jobs put up his open letter a few days ago. Today there comes Opera Software Offers Thoughts on Future of Flash where they basically say that they'll continue to support it, but sees it taking a backseat to HTML5 in the future.

Great video of a 19 foot spanning B-50 bomber model, flown by Tony Nijhuis and is one of the largest R/C Models in the world.

A video of some pretty Amazing Tricks done by someone who I would never let fly me in a real chopper (or car for that matter) :)

Inc. Live is doing a free video webcast in just under an hour:

Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals and Inc. columnist returns for a live video chat on business innovation. Join the conversation on Monday, May 3rd at Noon EST / 9 am PST.

Build It With Me is an interesting idea.... say if you are a designer or developer, put in an overview of your project, and what you're seeking, and.... uhmm... profit? It's a cool looking idea, and a sexy (but a bit slow) website. I'm not sure if it's really just a way to get free work on your project, or potentially a great way to connect people to work on projects. If you're looking for a project to help out on or something to do in your free time, this is the place to get it.

Star wars + car wash + lots of Princess Leias ==
Princess Leia Car wash. I think I'm in love.

I somehow managed to miss the announcement of Stack Exchange 2.0, even though I listen to the StackOverflow podcast every week.

Kyle Conroy asks Should I have bought that Apple Product? and compares what you'd have now if you had bought the same amount of Apple Stock instead of that first MacBook Pro. Of course, it's a pretty silly comparison, as you're comparing something that has a value that goes up (stock) compared to something that's value goes down (sometimes like a rock) (computer hardware).

Found on reddit is a great video with some of the crazy stuff going on inside the crater during eruptions.

The Big Picture has STUNNING images from Eyjafjallajokull. Wow.

Great post on twitter from someone on The scariest pricing idea ever. That works. The "pay me what you think it's worth" model is something you'd think is crazy, but apparently works. Case in point: Radio Head's "pay us what you think it's worth" album.

Cool look at What a Tweet Looks Like. Amazing amount of data crammed into there.

Another "holy crap" video on the new Photoshop CS5 with the video look at Selecting hair with Refine Edge in CS5.

Cool picture and explanation at io9.

The 7 Most Soul-Crushing Series Finales in TV History from cracked. Some gems in there.

Amazing Volcano in Iceland images and video on the Flickr Blog.

Sure it's an ad for 3D TVs, but this Mona Lisa & Leonardo Da Vinci: The 3D Truth in old Masters is epic. Thanks to grizzled for sending it over, and the suggestion of 720p and full screen.

Very cool to see some of the wild (and the coolest, the clear ones) Neat Hermit Crab Houses.

Kudos to @pennyminder for sending me KittehRoulette to give me an afternoon injection of cute.

The Music Industry & Online Piracy by the Numbers. Great infographic.

Some Mac specific of course, but some great looking wallpapers on the Appstorm post of 50 Hot Designer Mac Desktops.

Some pretty sweet AppStorm Reader Setups with all sorts of lustworthy hardware and desktop art. Wish I could get my office that clean!

Two cool articles:

• Twelve things to do with an old Apple computer
  
• Cool ways to reuse an old Mac
  

Great writeup on Gizmodo on The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird from a pilot who flew it and who did some pretty awesome stuff.

She likes the high Mach, as we penetrate deeper into Libyan airspace. Leaving the footprint of our sonic boom across Benghazi , I sit motionless, with stilled hands on throttles and the pitch control, my eyes glued to the gauges.

Buddy of mine or IRC posted a cool Web Design Time-lapse. I'm pretty sure if you freeze frame you can see me chatting to him on IRC :)

IO9 tells us how to Download 700+ Free Scifi Books Onto Your iPhone.

Jeff Atwood is advocating Three Monitors For Every User over at Coding Horror. Outside of the fact that I don't have enough video ports to make this work at home, I have to agree. The "center focus" issue for me is hardest, though the downside is the lack of desk space.

Today is normally a day to avoid the internet entirely, but I did venture out and find a couple of cool things. I'll try to catalog the good stuff as I find it.

• - Youtube now has a text mode to allow you to view videos in the normal mode, HD, and now text mode. Sadly only on some.
  
• The aforementioned XKCD text mode.
  
• Glen "The Raptor" talks about Windows 3.1.
  
• Slashdot Roulette has been introduced.
  
• The iPad Cabinet from thinkgeek.
  
• Google Street view in 3d.
  
• Kernel.org is upside down.
  
• LHC / Doctor Who tie in. (These last two from @milesforrest.
  
• Google's new measurements on search time.
  
• VimCasts has some cleanup.
  
• Not sure if it's an AFJ or not, but Shot of Jaq's Text Editor Showdown was 100% accurate.
  
• Battle.net matchmaking.
  
• More to come...
  

Why You Should Never Pay More Than $10 For HDMI Cables. Something to pass on to your Monster Cable loving friends and family.

Via @curtismchale (again) comes 50 Inspiring, Awesome & Stylish Mac Setups. Mac fanboy or not, these are some sweet setups. I particularly like the iPhone holder in this shot.

Pretty epic video about hanggliding: RUSH HOUR DREAM. Ah, I wish.

Great list of The 20 Greatest Shows Canceled By Fox Before Their Time. Some real classics in there, but some that I've never heard of (though the 'counting with Bruce Springsteen' sketch on the Ben Stiller show clip is great).

Sadly it looks like most of the video clips have been pulled by.... Fox. *sigh*. Tell me again how video clips of cancelled shows is going to threaten them?

Another great set of images of the 2010 Winter Paralympics at The Big Picture. Pro tip (thanks MacBreak Weekly) you can use the j and k keys to move up and down the pictures.

This chat roulette video from Casey is good and goes in and defines what this new phenomenon is all about.

GetHuman.com is a directory of numbers and tips to get a real person on the phone when calling those big companies.

The Color Fields Colr Pickr allows you to select a color, and it will show you images from Flickr with that color. Pretty simple, but really cool.

Nice video showing some great Rock Climbing Photography. Well, the videos are ads for Nikon, but the video and stills are awesome, and the scenics out at Yosemite are gorgeous.

I read this story about how the Energizer battery charger contains a backdoor and I have a few issues with it. First, agree with Reddit in this is why the world needs open source. Second though, is WTF do you need your battery charger to plug into the computer, or have it do anything but pull power from the USB. Seriously, am I an old fogey when I say that back in my day you plugged your battery charger into the wall socket...

The title this is under is: This is possibly the coolest thing I've seen one man and an iPhone do, and while I don't understand the french it's being done in, damn, that is pretty awesome.

IO9 has a gallery of pictures from 15-Year-Old Sven Junga who Creates Starships From LEGO. Wow, I miss being 15 :(

Great job Blockbuster, Bringing Back Late Fees after all the big "no more late fees" marketing campaign. Of course, they claim they aren't "late" fees, they are and "additional daily rate". Yea, I totally see the difference there.

The Big Picture from Boston.com has put up part 2/2 of their Vancouver 2010 series of excellent pictures. For me #3, #6, and #38 and #39 of course (sorry USA :)

Thanks again for the great shots boston.com.

To all my Indian friends, happy Holi (the festival of colours)!

Cool video of Tom Brokaw Explaining Canada to Americans. Apparently Canada kicks ass!

Hopefully we can have that "uncharacteristic act of patriotism" today as our Women go up against the US Women's team in the gold medal hockey game and kick their asses :)

Darren Barefoot has some interesting thoughts on Tim Hortons and the Immigrant Experience in regards to the following ad that's been airing here lately.

WWDN put up this great video of The Who's Baba O'Reily, played using only items from Think Geek. So maybe it's no Kirsten Dunst, but I find this one even more awesome :)

If You Want to Be Fit, Don't Buy New Running Shoes by Scott H Young (via @johnkoetsier is a nice look at how to get stuff done without being bogged down in the details (and therefor not getting things done).

When you get caught up in minutia, the really important stuff gets left undone. Often simply because in buying the low-carb salad dressing, you give yourself a mental checkmark in the "healthy eating" column and proceed to violate the truly important issues.

Labuat, passed on from a buddy of mine on IRC is a nifty mashup of music and art, essentially an interactive song. Or something. Hard to describe, just hit play :)

From The Best Article Every day comes 15 Things You Should Know About Breasts, presented without comment or crude remarks.

Got an olympic shot from the Vancouver 2010 games? Submit it onto the Flickr The Vancouver 2010 Olympic Photo Group Pool.

Lifehacker has a nice Phishing Flow Chart that none of the people reading this (all 3 of you) will need, but might be something to pass on to your parents or relatives.

An article on slashdot confirms something I've long suspected!

From the article: 'Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons.

Interesting look at some new(ish) thinking about productivity, with The top 5 new rules of productivity. Sometimes I wish the people around me grokked this stuff....

Male readers encouraged to not watch the following Sports Science: "World Record Kick to the Groin" video.

Seriously, just don't watch it.

SheldonShirts.com - now you too can dress in the same shirts as your favorite TV geeks.

Slashfilm has info and video of the Largest Lightsaber Fight EVER at a british FlashMob. Looks epicly awesome, I'd love to be there to see the expressions on the "normal" patrons faces when all of a sudden lightsabers appeared all around them!

Cool TED talk on the Sixth Sense, involving a webcam, finger markers, and a mini-projector that allows all sorts of great metadata/real world/gargoyle type data access.

Cool post on Oddee with 10 Facts you Didn't Know about Living in Outer Space. #6 was the most surprising to me.

Very sweet Aerial Photo Panorama of my town of Vancouver, centered on the Olympic Village.

Here are two other panoramas from Squamish, BC:

• From the top of first peak
  
• The Malamute.
  

Know when that snarky bastard says "protip, just [something something]"? Check out the list of reddit supplied protips at the What is your best PROTIP? discussion.

Contrast The Blog has a nice little look at The thickness of napkins and compares it to computer software and hardware.

Another great post from waxy.org on Pirating the 2010 Oscars.

Avast, ye scurvy dogs! The Oscar nominees were announced yesterday, which means it's time again to revisit the eternal war between the MPAA and Internet movie pirates.

Very cool Interview with a scammer over at Scam Detectives. Excerpt:

John: First you need to understand how the gangs work. At the bottom are the "foot soldiers", kids who spend all of their time online to find email addresses and send out the first emails to get people interested. When they receive a reply, the victim is passed up the chain, to someone who has better English to get copies of ID from them like copies of their passport and driving licenses and build up trust. Then when they are ready to ask for money, they are passed further up again to someone who will pretend to be a barrister or shipping agent who will tell the victim that they need to pay charges or even a bribe to get the big cash amount out of the country. When they pay up, the gang master will collect the money from the Western Union office, using fake ID that they have taken from other scam victims.

Fantastic video of Vancouver shared by a bunch of friends on Facebook. Completely recommend the HD version, but embedded here for your pleasure.

Another cool story about How to catch an iPhone thief, this with more detective work than the last one. Still cool use of technology.

Pretty damn awesome video of Bottlenose dolphins mud-ring feeding (from the new BBC series "Life").

Torrentfreak reports that Demonoid Is Open To All Without An Invite as part of their promise to come back bigger and better than before.

Really good article over at Engadget of 10 outdated elements of desktop operating systems. Especially when you think about how far technology has come (the iPhone, etc) since the whole "window mouse" paradigm came into the forground of conciousness in the 80's.

The puppy cam is back!

JWZ links to a TED Talk from Magician David Blaine on How I held my breath for 17 min. Very cool to see. TED Talks FTW.

Nice run through that may help the "normies" to tell scams on social networking sites. Similar rules that I send to people who (still!!) pass around the Microsoft will give you $100 if you forward this email scam. The new web 2.0 world has made some changes to confuse new users about what they're doing though. From the article:

Next thing, he asks you to invite all your friends (standard stuff, almost every group wants to be famous!). But here he asks you to paste what is called "JavaScript" (it doesn't start with HTTP://" so it's not a link). Now here all it does is select all of your friends, but it could just as much infect your computer with a virus, make you go to any site he wants, etc. Don't ever type in any JavaScript directly into your address bar.

101 Ways to Lose Your Gut over at Men's Fitness has a bunch of small tips that in theory, can do some help. Not sure if they can help you without some willpower and ambition (two things I'm sorely lacking right now) but they are at least a list of nice, concise tips.

Nice post on some things to do and not do on twitter, and Why Your 4,243,564 Twitter Followers Don't Mean Jack. Speaking of which, these people who follow thousands and thousands of people I don't understand, there's no way you can read or get any decent content from all those people, and quite frankly it's just annoying because I know you're not following my tweets (at @arcterex) because you care about me or what I have to say, you're just absorbing me into you mega-twitter feed for your SEO (or TEO?). Meh.

Ironically I got this link from looking at one of those people's feeds while trying to see if they were all SEO spam or random links or not :)

Hopefully not an offensive use of auto-tune is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Sings in Memphis mashup.

One of the (sad IMHO) realities these days is that if you have either a site that gets a non-trivial amount of traffic, or want to have the time available to you to run a site as more than a hobby, you need to run ads. Google ads are the most common, and are easily blocked with Adblock. Note: I both use adblock and also run google ads on this site. Anyway, the very cool site 1001 Noisy Cameras is going ad-free.

The site is a plethora of camera related news, with an amazing amount of content each day and while I had to put 'maybe' in the poll, I definitely wish them the best of luck and look forward to seeing how the endeavor goes.

As an aside, over here in UFies land, the income from having ads on the blog is somewhere between $0.07 - $3.50 a day on average (that's $0.008/h to $0.44/h) . Though I do appreciate everyone who goes to visit some sponsors :)

In the Revision 3 Blog, they have An Open Letter to Conan O'Brien, introducing him to the internet and working conditions at Revision 3. Personally I think it'd be interesting to see a "mainstream" celebrity go from TV to the internet, and see if the alteration in the payment model, which in theory would give more money to the personality instead of the studio for advertising, etc, would make a real difference and allow the celeb to make a real go of it.

Good luck to Rev 3 in their hopeful aquisition :)

In the article saying that Football Games Have 11 Minutes of Action this confirms what I've always suspected.... that there's a hugely disproportionate signal to noise ratio (or in this case, game to crap ratio) in football:

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

Who'd thunk who the winner would be?

Very cool story of My American Idol Experience by someone over on the "I Am A" section on Reddit. An excerpt:

I was immediately ushered into a room and forced to sign the second contract of the process, which gave away most of my body and most of my soul to Fox.

[...]the producers were shameless in reminding us that American Idol is a television show first, and a talent competition second. If we wanted to be on TV, we'd have to tell a compelling story and do and say crazy shit.

As this image illustrates.

Slashfilm has some more pictures of the Star Wars Burlesque that I mentioned a couple of days ago.

It's a slow morning so I give you a hot and sexy Boba Fett.

Web Urbanist has a great list of Creative Billboard Advertising Campaigns.

Anyone who has been following the WW1 blog, a timeshifted blog of letters from a soldier in The Great War posted in real time (well, 90 years later) will be sad (and happy) that Harry's Home. The last letter was posted today. The author, Bill Lamin, has done an excellent job of creating a unique blog that has given me (and others I'm sure) great joy to read. He updates the post with his plans and what's next. If you haven't read it, head over and read from the start, or skim, as it's a unique look at a life that seems like it's from another world, but in fact wasn't that long ago.

Boing Boing links to the gallery of science tattoos over at Discover Magazine.

Who knew a video of a drop of water filmed at 2000fps would be so freaky?

So looks like the infamous 4Chan has declared today (January 6, 2010) "Porn day". Seems YouTube is facing a 4chan porn attack after the removal of a kids account who, among other childish things, posted about how he was going after 4chan and had God on his side. Techmeme also has the story.

Great (though a bit long) slide presentation on The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Mac fanboy or Windows fanboy you have to admit he is a king of the presentation, and there are a few gems in there that I think anyone can take away to use in their professional life.

Anyone will be impressed by this video of the India Monkey King, with rock climbers being probably even more so, cause they know just how insane this guy is. This guy taught himself to rock climb to escape poverty in India, watching monkeys and Spider-man for inspiration. All I can say is "wow".

Via this reddit link.

Boston.com's "The Big Picture" has an excellent display of Welcoming 2010 with a great selection of images from NYE celebrations around the world.

The Windows Blog has a pointer on how you can Celebrate the Arrival of 2010 with a New Windows 7 Theme. Pretty nice!

Seems that Demi Moore's dogs are being set on Boing-Boing over several posts of photo analysis of the infamous "missing hip flesh" cover shot.

Speaking as a photographer, every single cover image on every single fashion magazine cover has been photoshopped and manipulated. Hell, every magazine cover has been photoshopped in some way or another. Seriously, anyone with half a brain can clearly see that fashion mags take liberties (sometimes more than others) with skin smoothing, enhancements, de-hancements, etc. Demi needs to just chill the f out and bring back the dogs, and say to the world "yea, my image was manipulated to make me look my best, same as every other cover girl out there, deal with it". I think this has gone down a road that will be hard to gracefully back out of though.

Great article though with lots of pics, info and links.

Related: Analysis of a photshopped image.

Basically Every ISP Is Trying to Scare You Into Paying for Internet You Don't Need. A shocking example of advertising at its worst from your favorite Internet service providers.

Ah, more deals... Backupify Cloud Backup is free until January 31. I've never heard of this service before, but it allows you to back up your cloud services (facebook, twitter, flickr, etc) to another cloud service. I'm not sure it totally makes sense, but backups are good right? The deal is free and unlimited backup after you're signed up, which is nice. Still cool (but remember that you need to trust any service you give over the keys to your online services to).

Great article and pictures on Model Makers of Young C. Park and his amazingly crafted model aircraft.

It's not often I go "oooh" when looking through these "top X of Y" lists on the net, but the 12 Fascinating Motorcycles over at Oddee.com is pretty good, especially the first one.

According to this tweet (and others if you search for rogers on twitter say that there's a data network outage on Fido/Rogers in BC and Alberta. So if you can't get your twitters or email on your smartphone, that's probably the reason.

Also this link has some more info (well, tweets from people experiencing the same thing anyway).

Update: Looks like it might have just come back. Fingers crossed that's it. To be fair this is the first issue I've had in over a year of Rogers data service.

Seth is pimping out his new ebook: What Matters Now available for free on his site. The book is on what to think and do to make a difference, gain friends/influence people, that sort of thing (from what I can see).

My coworker H threw me over to an Impact Lab Interview with Photoshop Genius Erik Johansson. If you don't recognize the name you may recognize the work, I've seen some of his amazing photoshop work around the net.

Cool video from 1955 of Tex Johnston doing a barrel roll in a 707 (!!!) a "perfectly safe, 1G maneuver" to show off the capabilities to the Boeing execs.

Awesome post from Andy Ihnatko on his Lust For Wallcovering. Great poster, if I had a bit of extra cash I'd probably dot he same thing :)

Great info-graphic of sushi etiquette. Good thing to know about the wasabi + soy sauce combination.

Oh man I so need this: How to Start Running - Without Feeling Like a Failure. I've been running weekly for a while now and still feel like a failure!

The Google Earth blog has a nice selection of a few spots in Vancouver to check out if you're interested in the city that will host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Do you have one of those annoying "apple" people in your life? You know, the macbook lugging, starbucks swilling, must have a clean aluminium and glass desk or he cries types? (Also known as a hipster) If you do you'll be happy to know that Shawn Blanc has a great list of presents for you. From iPhone holders to $40 notepads to coffee, it's a great list :)

I'm all for people having hobbies, but this guy, who face paints himself every day with a different face, seriously is either the coolest guy ever or someone who really needs to get out more. Ironically, the whole project started one day he was stuck at home.

io9 has a gallery of Geek Tattoos,The Good, The Bad, And The Just Plain Crazy. I don't know about some of them, but I'd totally get a 'Don't Panic' tattoo. Also I think that while I'm sure she's insane, I'd totally marry this girl (if my wife said it was OK of course).

Ever get tired and pissed off or the google analytics holding up a web page loading? Now that they have Launched Asynchronous Tracking this might be a thing of the past. Folks, go forth and update thy page templates!

Mininova, the bittorrent search engine which rose up and replaced suprnova.org Back In The Day, has limited its activities to Content Distribution service. IE: Gone legit.

In other news, mininova's traffic has disappeared and will be replaced by one of the other not-quite-so-legit bittorrent sites.

Filed under Random Awesomeness is The Matrix's Bullet-Dodging Scene, Faithfully Recreated in Lego.

The CERN Press Release has details of the first collisions at the LHC. Turns out it didn't create a black hole, destroy the world, galaxy, or universe, which is a good sign. Instead it did a bunch of.... uhm... sciency stuff that you should read the press release or the slashdot story for. Again, world not destroyed, no black holes either.

Cool wired article on how to Do Speedy Math in Your Head. Reminds me a bit of the Mathamagician at TED a couple of years back.

Not that I'm advocating useless use of technology, but the Scroll Clock is pretty damn cool!

Well, as predicted when The Pirate Bay was first "bought" by a gaming company a while back (and I only put that in "air quotes" because there seems to have been some dispute about stock fraud, etc in the deal) it's as good as dead. Slashdot notes that it's Tracker has shut down and switched To Distributed Hash Table.

Holy cool, check out this feat of hax0r ability in a video of a Palm Treo 650 with an Android brain . Thanks Aryk.

Cool video about Bill Dan Balancing Rocks. Pics in his flickr stream as well.

I don't normally put up stuff about contests here, but hey, Chase Jarvis is the man when it comes to great photography and he blogged about how you can get $100,000 in 140 Seconds through a Nikon sponsored contest showing your day, through your lens (literally and figuratively) in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Pretty cool idea. Sample videos from both him and Rainn Wilson (from The Office) on the link.

Slashdot story about how Researchers Take Down a Spam Botnet. Not saying it's related, but my rejected spam went from 22% in yesterday's report to 31% in today's report.

Definitely a sign of the world we live in, the twitter account @shitmydadsays has been picked up as a sitcom. I'm not sure if this is really that outside of the standard sitcom formula of "family with crank old man dad character", but the fact they attribute something to twitter is interesting.

Course, it could also be the whole thing is a scam and the twitter account was setup when the show was quietly created. The account has only been active since August 3rd, and somehow 73 tweets in three months isn't something that I could see a high powered TV exec picking up, but hey, stranger things have happened.

Some awesome videos and pictures of Kevin Richardson and his Lions. They really act with their human the same way my cats act with me, just that they are a weeeee bit bigger. Course, I still wouldn't be surprised if some day you hear that this guy mysteriously disappeared and only a toe was ever found. Still, immensely cute :)

Seriously, how does this guy walk with the huge brass clankers he must have to have punched his way out of shark attack? I love the reddit article title of Man escapes shark attack by being fucking awesome. Too true.

Great list of 100 Different Evernote Uses. I've been a user/lover of Evernote for a while now, and some of these are pretty awesome.

Big imagery releases for Google Earth and Bing Maps, with the ones hitting close to home being the Vancouver area in preparation no doubt for the Olympics here in under 100 days.

Sadly Google still hasn't got up to date imager or maps for the new Golden Ears Bridge, even though you can see in Street View that the street view car clearly drove over it (hit your up arrow twice and see how the street view jumps to the top of the bridge and then back down). Bing maps at least have half the bridge....

This picture of Bikini Leia and stunt double catch some rays just blew my freakin' mind. My love for Carrie Fisher still remains.

OMG this is the most awesome thing ever!

Seriously, anything that has "DIY" and "flame thrower" in the title, how can you resist!? Via forgetfoo.

Dive Into Mark has a great look at Why do we have an IMG element? and traces its origins back to the original proposal, manages to fit in the history of more than a couple of browsers, and ties it all up nicely with a look at the state of the HTTP/HTML/Browser world today.

Some of the operating systems from 1993 still exist, but none of them are relevant to the modern web. Most people today who "experience" the web do so on a PC running Windows 2000 or later, a Mac running Mac OS X, a PC running some flavor of Linux, or a handheld device like an iPhone. In 1993, Windows was at version 3.1 (and competing with OS/2), Macs were running System 7, and Linux was distributed via Usenet. (Want to have some fun? Find a graybeard and whisper "Trumpet Winsock" or "MacPPP.")

As a note, I shudder thinking about Trumpet Winsock..... not sure if those are shudders of reminiscing joy, or repressed fear. Definitely makes me glad things have moved on!

Great stuff Mark!

Coding Horror notes that Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome has launched. This is a free CV hosting system which builds on their peer reputation system. Very cool idea.

Cool lifehacker guide on How to Really Browse Without Leaving a Trace. Perfect for all your secret-gift-buying needs! ;)

John Koetsier over at Sparkplug9 points to a few tips from 3 eye tracking studies and their influence on web design. Some really simple stuff too, like making forms vertical, not horizontal.

Based on the site name, the purpose of the internet movie firearms database should be pretty obvious. Wish I'd thought of it.

Neat info-graphic of Costs Around The World for Internet Access.

Laughing Squid has a great video Juggler Michael Moschen Performing The Triangle. I remember seeing this on "Just For Laughs" years ago and being amazed at how simple and yet how awesome it was.

Daily Kos has a story about how Sequoia Voting Systems hacks self in foot by revealing source code stripped of what they thought was information vital to let others read the data. They were foiled by the magic of the UNIX "strings" command. Whether or not the data that was revealed shows logic for rigging elections though.... well, read the article.

Pretty amazing display of Cell Size and Scale comparing the size of a coffee bean to that of a carbon atom.

Hows this for cool and retro.... Laughing Squid points to Wonderful Film Footage of San Francisco in 1958.

Another great post about sexuality is the 10 Things You Didn't Know About Sexual Biology (Couples Edition), via the Don't Feed the Animals blog.

10 Things You Didn't Know About Sexual Biology (Male Edition). An excerpt:

The more promiscuous, the bigger the balls.

Definitely interesting reading :)

The Quantified Self has a great look at coffee and concentration, as the author weened himself off The Juice and saw his concentration improving. Interesting read.

*slurps coffee*

Remember I was joking the other day about the next steps for Google Maps / Earth being mapping the insides of buildings? Looks like they already have a Helicopter that Scans Indoor Environments autonomously,

The Mozy blog has a very cool visualization of Life In The Cloud that's cool for geeks as well as people explaining cloud computing to non-geeks :)

Great video as a 9 year old scores the greatest goal in Boston this season. Pretty amazing, not sure if you could use something like that in a real game though. Still, amazing stick handling.

There's a big ass fire in the downtown Vancouver area. Twitter hhas lots of people talking about it, looks like it's three boats down in coal harbor. I tweeted about this with pics from my office building. Not a bad win for real time news I think!

10/GUI has a new imagining for the desktop, not something uber-radical, but different enough and utilizing the new technology we have coming in such as multi-touch, etc. They seem to take a lot into consideration, and I'm interested to see if anyone adopts this. Personally I would see this coming into the GNOME desktop if there were the multi-touch devices that they use (and need) to make it work.

Very cool video pointed to by Darren Barefoot on Social Engineering and Taking the Stairs. For some reason the video makes me happy, and I'm not sure why :)

Peter Cooper, who wrote Beginning Ruby, tells What he's Earned (And Learned) From Writing "Beginning Ruby", including pretty frank talk about numbers, earnings, and his publisher.

io9 has Concept Art That Reimagines The Greatest Space Epics from Star Wars to Superman to Planet of the Apes.

World Famous Wil Wheaton put up an open letter to the guy who put just a geek the audiobook on his website for people to steal.

In a shocking and completely expected turn of events, the "get a PC with Vista and get a free upgrade to Windows 7" offers that have been trying to convince people not to wait till Windows 7 is released to buy a new PC, can come with some Hidden Fees. Some pretty hefty for a DVD being shipped out to you. As I understand it, it's a free upgrade from Microsoft as far as they are concerned, but if you get it from a PC manufacturer (ie: Dell, Lenovo, etc), they basically get to charge you what they want for it (in the form of "service fees").

So either wait till after all the super-cool Windows 7 launch parties are done before buying a PC, or be careful and find out exactly what you get for free or not for free. Or download a real free OS.

If you're some sort of sadist, you might enjoy some Tips for an Optimal Running Workout. You'll note a few things wrong with the list though, first is the wake-up at 5:30am... does that time of day really exist?

Pretty mindblowing technology to allow a user to hand sketch a scene, and the system almost-automatically creates the scene from an internet image search. It seems kinda simple unless you've ever tried to composite several images together and had to deal with lighting color, texture, and the raft of other things that tend to go completely wrong.

It's only a matter of time before all the user interaction is gone in selecting appropriate images and the system can automatically create dirty pictures of me and Megan Fox (stolen joke from Reddit).

Asgarda are apparently a tribe of lesbian ninjas. How cool/hot/awesome is that!?

Aryk send me a link to this gizmodo story on how This Insane Photo Destroyed a Camera Lens. I'm actually more surprised it didn't kill the whole camera! Well worth it though, it's an amazing picture.

This flash demo is simple and cool. Use your mouse, figure it out. Via reddit, under the title of What it must be like to be a kitten.

I though the Snails As Pets title was a bit of a joke, but holy crap, look at the size of those things!

Great article from Fozbaca on How to photograph a 300 ft tall tree without getting a splinter. Short but good video from the National Geographic.

Popular Science has a neat article on how they had an Algorithm Generate a Virtual Rome in 3D from 150,000 Flickr Users' Photos. Pretty amazing stuff.

COMBO is another amazing stop motion animation/video.

Nifty little DIY iPhone Paper Clip Stand.

John's Background Switcher was pimped out on Lifehacker as a very cool utility for giving you some more variety in your Windows wallpaper. My only request to it would be I want combined functionality of it and Display Fusion and it's great multi-monitor support. Maybe even an option to only download dual screen formatted images and automatically set both monitors. Still, noted here for coolness and freeness and usefulness.

BMW EfficientDynamics tells the tale of a new BMW concept car that does 90mpg and has BMW M3 performance. Now I don't truly know that much about cars, but I've watched a lot of Top Gear lately and know that a) M3's are good (though not cool anymore), and b) rarely do concept cars become real cars. With rare exceptions of course :) Warning, don't watch that last link after eating.

If you've ever wanted two memes smashed up on your t-shirt, check out the Keyboard Cat howling at the moon t-shirt.

I know it's shocking, but seems that "Idol" (in this case Australian Idol) screws over it's winners such that they somehow didn't make a cent on 300,000 CDs. Either all the CDs were comped out to industry execs and the winners' parents, or the deal you sign screws you over. Either way, interesting article.

Some really interesting stuff on how Photoshop does it's Software Detection of Currency with examples and various method used to try to defeat it (jpeg compression, histogram manipulation, etc).

Gigagalaxy Zoom is a gigapixel, zoomable / interactive image of the milky way.

Check out the First handmade subpixel type family, ever. Pretty amazing when you consider just how small it actually is, and how readable it is still!

Ars Technica has a nice Hands-on: Haiku, the open source re-implementation of BeOS.

Most of this Digital Photographers, Welcome Back to 1999 is about what's going on in the digital photography world, but at the bottom are a few good Youtube videos about how OLED and Harry Potter style newspapers are (almost) here.

Call me a commie, but the level of credibility of the folks at the DC Tea Party March is.... how do you say... "lacking". That said, I'm in Canada. Definitely an amusing look at the folks who go to this sort of thing. Cherry picked I'm sure for the more amusing/radical/crazy folks. The guy with the "Joe Wilson for President" sign saying "well, I don't support Joe Wilson for president" was particularly amusing.

The fine folks over at Lifehacker have gone to the trouble of collecting a bunch of good Google Reader with Send To Links for you.

Some very cool ideas on how to Use Dropbox for More Than Just File Syncing from LifeHacker.

Very cool video: Imagining the Tenth Dimension which is pretty much guaranteed to turn your brain to goo.

Wired has a great Mapping the 7 Deadly Sins . I find it funny where "Lust" is concentrated....

OMG, what an amazing Big Daddy costume (from BioShock). Complete with pics, plan and video.

Seriously, do not click on this link if you hate spiders, or specifically, nightmare inducing huge ass probably-from-space spiders...

Neat look Comparing Windows 7 & Snow Leopard Icons. A neat look at not only the beautiful icons in W7 and SL, but also to look the different philosophies of how to present the icons.

Seriously, who wouldn't want to make this Glowy retro tube clock. Assuming you don't electrocute yourself in the process of course. Warnings abound...

BoingBoing pointed to some pretty awesome Computer Repair Flowcharts.

IO9 has nicely collected the great clips where 30 Rock Salutes Science Fiction. Truly great stuff.

Green with envy describes me in terms of some of these Star Wars Action Figure Displays. I'm not an action figure collector by any means, but man, some of those just look awesome!

Some amazing shots and time lapse movies of the Station Fire, Los Angeles over at the Flickr blog.

Somehow I missed this article on ars technica on The Windows 7 Taskbar versus the OS X Dock. Nice article, goes into some of the UI issues with either method, as well as the design differences and similarities.

The Article Cash4Gold Doesn't Want You To Read is a good read, if you've been seduced at all by the companies high cost ads.

The actual offers, however, were miserly. Cash4Gold sent back checks ranging from $7.60 to $12.72 (or 11% to 18% of melt value), the lowest amounts of any firm. But others weren't far behind: GoldKit offered $7.81 to $20.59, and GoldPaq $8.22 to $13.11.

Digital Photography School has a nice set of 10 Astounding Astrophotos by Phil Hart, and Australian photographer. These aren't easy to get, if you check the details for this impressive image you'll see that a total of 13 hours was required to capture the image, along with a host of impressive sounding equipment.

Blogscoped reports that PingDom, a performance and uptime monitoring system is now free for one site (after the initial trial).

First of all, if you don't know who James May is, sequester yourself inside for a week and watch all of Top Gear. When you're done, check out the Lego House he's building. Why? No clue. It's pretty awesome though :)

In a thrilling video, @sockington celebrates his one millionth follower. A cat. Who posts things like "A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR WHAT OF YOURS I JUST BROKE ACCIDENTALLY what oh nothing". Has (as of 4pm thursday the 27th of August in the year of our lord 2009) 1,082,191 people and spam bots watching his posts. Holy crap.

That said, I'm intruiged by this cat and his tweets and videos, and pissed off (still) that I didn't think of it first.

Cool little video of 100 Years Of Movie Special Effects In 5:00. Neat to see how some things are done in the far ago days.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

AfterDawn.com reports that Mininova is dead, must filter torrents. A judge has ordered the site to either pay 5m Euro or delete copyrighted torrents:

Mininova notably removed links if copyright holders flagged them, but as with all trackers, when one went down, five would take its place, making the whole situation redundant.

It's not dead just yet, and lets be honest, once it is, one of the other sites on the net will rise up to take it's place, just as it once did to replace suprnova.org.

Codexon gives 6 Simple Tips to Get Stackoverflow Reputation Fast, and shows why Stackoverflow.com has some social-engineering errors in the way they present the information and some of their rules. Of course, reputation and karma on the site aside, it's a great site with good information, and hopefully this will show them a bit of information on how to avoid the social engineering bugs.

Anyone heard of Plex Media Center for OS X before? Looks pretty sexy... the only thing that these are all missing are support for decoder cards (a la MythTV) or something to auto-torrent download to give the impression of recording TV. MythTV is kinda old and busted looking and in terms of some of the features (especially compared to the new sexiness that these media center apps have), but it will record TV which none of the other systems do (for the most part).

I want it all dammit! In the form factor of a mac mini. And a pony!

Sent over by S is this Sweet Bumblebee Transformer Costume. Guarantee it's the best one you see today :)

Zed Shaw (famous for his anti-Rails rant a while back) has some great thoughts on The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff. "Why" or "_why" as you may or may not have heard basically suddenly and unexpectedly removed all his online "stuff" which in this day and age is fairly unusual. Zed has a good wrap up of what he did and some thoughts on why.

Star Wars West Coast Defense on Flickr via Laughing Squid.

Via BoingBoing is a list of John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design.

How The Pirate Bay Will Be Legalized from TorrentFreak.

To please the entertainment industry GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the 'illegal' torrent or have it removed from the site. If the copyright holder opts to choose the first option they will be compensated every time the file is downloaded. In addition, the board says that it will pay penalties if it has to.
[...]
One of the pitfalls of this new reactive system is of course that copyright holders might start to remove content en masse instead of authorizing it, so that there is nothing available for the (paying) users to download and share. Without content the users will walk away and The Pirate Bay will slowly die.

And by "slowly die" I think you mean "quickly die".

Somehow this doesn't seem like it'll be "business as usual" as TPB promised when they first announced the buyout.

I had not heard of Sockington, @sockington, the Sockington Army, the most popular cat on flickr, or anything related to a blog "by" a cat.

However I am impressed that someone managed to acquire over 1 million twitter followers and at the same time basically be a guy posting cat pictures to flickr. Guess you need a story to go with those cat pictures. Sadly this means it's too late for me to start the Corny and Rex blog (or the Corny and Rex and Zoon and Munchkin and Bump and Bear blog).

Anyone thinking IE is a better browser who ever reads YouTube comments is simply wrong. Check out the YouTube Comment Snob extension and have your experience be that much better. Or just don't go to YouTube....

Good news read today that the Siberian Tiger is no longer in as much trouble as it was a few decades ago. According to vertex (a blog) and their source (MoscowTopNews), there are more animals alive than 100 years ago. Good news, if you believe it. I say let the hunting begin! I'm going to make cat beds and throw rugs out of tiger hides!

(I kid of course)

Top 10 Tricks for Making Your Playlists Rock from lifehacker.

Lightsaber Chopsticks, something you didn't know you needed until you saw them :)

Available in three colors, the $10 sticks are the perfect utensils for devouring tauntaun and Ewok dishes.

Flickr Blog has some good stuff from the Perseid meteor showers.

Torrent Freak has news on some of the Pirate Bay site changes coming in the next few weeks.

Two weeks from now The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to exist. To gain access to the site users of the new Pirate Bay will be charged a monthly fee, and even then it remains to be seen what files they will have access to.

It'll be interesting to see what the changes are and for my own morbid curiosity, how soon TPB will die and be eclipsed by MiniNova, BTJunkie and friends, same as SuprNova before it.

Peejay send this over. From the World Science Festival is a video of Bobby McFerrin hacking your brain with the pentatonic scale. Looks a bit like the TED videos. Cool stuff.

Another link from Aryk is a DIY project of a recycled wine bottle torch. Looks like something neat to have on your deck to set the mood on a night of relaxing outside.

Inorganic flora is a very cool collection of computer generated images of plants and flowers. Looks potentially perfect for a iPhone or phone wallpaper.

Star Wars trash compactor bookends over at Boing Boing. Seriously, how cool is that!

Mr. Skin's knowledge of nude scenes and slips in movies is amazing and legendary (I'm listening to his appearance on Howard Stern right now), and he has his Top 100 Nude Scenes with some classic, uhm... watching material.

Remember how one of the promises of HTML5 is to allow video to play without having to use flash? Looks like YouTube, who you could say uses Flash video "a lot" is flirting with it. They have an HTML5 Demo page showing off their interface playing a video with no flash involved. Looks good, it's basically YouTube and the only reason you'd know it's not Flash is if you don't have the flash plugin installed or look at the source code.

Once again this is something you'll need a modern browser to see (IE users are left out again :( Hopefully an update sometime soon will include HTML5 in IE).

Just a random collection from someone of Beautiful and Attractive HDR Pictures that (for the most part) don't suck with that "hey look at me I'm an HDR picture!!!!" look.

PingWire defines itself as:

PingWire is an (almost) live feed of images being posted to twitter with Twitpic, yfrog, and Twitgoo. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to the full sized photo.

Cool and mesmerizing at the same time.

This is possibly the most awesome bedroom I've ever seen.

Found a Glenn Beck video on the government cars system over at ForgetFoo. Basically there's a 'I agree' page when you go into some US government car site that these guys interpret to mean that Uncle Sam has legal ownership of your computer while it's connected to the site, and has access to all your files on the computer and they can continue to monitor and track you and you after. First of all, not really technologically possible unless you're running some sort of app on the system and secondly, I'm pretty sure clicking an 'I agree' icon wouldn't hold up in court :)

Found this one at Image Of The Day.... a story from the Sarvey Wildlife Center about a guy and an eagle.

Information Is Beautiful does very cool information visualization. Kinda like a serious version of Graph Jam.

Pretty awesomely random, it's a mirror and stales arranged in such a way as to reate a city full of skyscrapers. Again, pretty rad to look at.

First of all, I don't read comics. As geeky as I am, comics have just never thrilled me, and other than borrowing a bunch from a friend years ago, I've basically ignored them. However, The Totally Rad Show mentioned Kick-Ass and it's associated movie at Comic-Con, and I grabbed the first 6 episodes.

Fucking Brilliant is my conclusion. Basically it's a "what if a nerdy kid wanted to become a superhero, in our universe". Issues of school, explaining fight-related injuries to your dad, that sort of thing. Absolutely fantastic and awesome, amazingly well drawn, violent, gory, and awesome.

About the closest I've found to any more information on the movie is over at slashfilm. Seriously - go get this comic, totally worth it.

Sounds like Yahoo Gives In to Microsoft, Gives Up on Search and the two are now in control of 30% of the search business (compared to the 60% that Google has). The ever-opinionated John C. Dvorak Random Linkage - Posted by Arcterex at 09:05 AM