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made me go ZOMFG!
Careless about the data you provide on your profile without the proper safeguards in place? Meet Take This Lollipop - a site that preys (in good fun) on people that underestimate the power of social networks and the information that can be obtained from them.
Meet MarkUp.io It lets you draw on any webpage with a variety of tools to express your thoughts, make a point or just simply edit. Just grab and drop the bookmarklet from the site to your bookmarks bar to use any time. Yes, no downloading needed! When you want to make notes on a webpage, click your bookmarklet to load the MarkUp toolbar. Publish when you’re ready to share your thoughts.
Seriously rad. Lucky you for knowing me. :)
Psst! I Tweeted about this one today, but loved it so much I thought it was worth a post. So here y’aar. :)
Assuming you haven’t been tweeting under a rock recently you’re prolly aware of Google’s aggressive run at the local business market. (Its Places offering and Interior store view endeavor for example). And as geolocation departs from trend to basic need and digital desire many a digerati have found themselves hunting for more out of the geo-apps they rely on. (Personally, I’ve been using Foursquare by proxy through Instagram because of its robust photo sharing feature, for example).
Well get ready peeps! Local is heating up fast and Google isn’t the only one looking to give a simple, smart and social kick in the arse to the run of the mill location model. Meet What Spot Now. It’s bound to be on the tip of your tongue a few times this year. (And lets face it, I’m right about these things. :) )
Unlike any other location-based app on the market, What Spot Now? combines software and hardware to help patrons both save money and discover new places to hang out – discovery not based on hearsay, but reality — through its trademarked “SpotCams” mounted inside neighborhood venues. (How flippin’ awesome would it be to get a quick stream (or photo set, even!) of a potential spot on your hit-list?) You can! If you live in Portland. :)
WSN currently has 11 Portland locations you can view from your phone before leaving your home. Portland residents will recognize such names as Saucebox Café & Bar, Bridgeport Brewing Company: Brewpub, 23 Hoyt Restaurant & Bar, The Someday Lounge, Schmizza Pub & Grub, Backspace, On Deck Sports Bar & Grill, Bo Restobar, Bailey’s Taproom, La Costita on Barbur, and the Crown Room.
Im big on this one, Portland. You’re privy to exciting technology that might very well change the way patrons and venues think about the age-old concept of “happy hour”.
Kudos to Spotlight Mobile. WSN is a slick way to discover nearby venues and a practical alternative to the location-sharing services offered by Foursquare or Facebook. Its a sure hit if you can keep that WiFi network in place. Keep it comin’.
1. Turntube
Cross fade YouTube videos and create playlists. ‘nuff said.
2. KickAss
Bored? How about turning any webpage into an awesome time-killing totally nostalgic asteroids game. In seconds. Thought so. Try it on my site, here. Just click this: Kick Ass!
Rad, right? Want to blow up any webpage? Drag those same words to your toolbar. Head to your favorite site. Hit the button. Bam. Yer Welcome.
<3,
me
(thanks @neonarcade for the tip on Kick Ass.)
Alrighty. I was browsin’ the interwebs looking for a few new ways to discover music because welp, my collection sucks. And after a pile of usual (and not so usual suspects) I found a few that are pure awesome. Longer post on the lot of them coming, but for now meet my new favorite way of discovering music - Shuffler. Internet-radio made by music blogs. (Think Blip.fm but (you do know what Blip is, right?) but across the internet instead of locked in one site.
Huh? Think of it this way. You’re channel surfing the music web. The web is your player, bloggers are your dj’s. It’s rad. I wish I thought of it. It leverages the Mesh. It’s Simple Smart and Social. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve have some new music to go listen to.
Singing Fingers from jay silver on Vimeo.
OK, bold headline. But holy shit balls this is awesome. Meet “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009) - Caleb Larsen”.
What is it you ask? A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter by Caleb Larsen is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Here is the ebay auction, the current bid is $4,250. Yep.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
Rad, right? If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
I’m seriously going to be thinking about how awesome this is all day. And now you are too.
It’s called The Soundracer. Plug it into your car stereo, and it makes your boring family car sound - and even somehow feel - like a roaring V8. I can’t wait to turn our wagon into a lambo.
(Be sure to let it load fully before you play!)
I got a bit tired of my Apple TV last year and decided to hack the Boxee Beta onto it (among other things). The promise of a Boxee set-top box was amazing. I had played with the app on my computer for some time, and it worked fairly well when I installed it on my laptop. I figured the jump to Apple TV would be just as good an experience. Nope. Well, maybe that’s too harsh. It worked pretty well at first. But over time it became sluggish, unresponsive, and would crash more than actually do what it was supposed to. Par for the course for Beta stuff, I suppose.
All in all, though it was a great conversation piece in the home, and really demonstrated for me how close we really are to completely transitioning from clips on your ‘puter to clips wherever you want them. Then YESTERDAY I got fed up enough with it crashing, etc I decided to reset my Apple TV and updated it to the latest Apple firmware. I gotta say - I love it all over again. It’s not quite Boxee, but I seriously love my Apple TV. Good news!
Holy shit balls, look at this little gift from our friends at Boxee. A clever, handsome, useful piece of hardware that promises to work just like the Boxee app (and then some).
Getting the awesome web-to-TV software, set up in your living room used to be a headache if not disfunctional. Not anymore thanks to the Boxee Box (around $200; Q1 2010). This angled wonder lets you consume all the free movies, TV shows and music from the internet, all from your couch — and hooks it up to your system with just a single HDMI cable. Like the standard Boxee software, it also sucks in your own videos, music and photos, playing just about any media format that still resides on your broken down laptop. I’m in. Santa, you listening?
This made me feel like I was in Kindergarten all over again. It’s simply incredible how a familiar sight, sound, or even smell can throw you back to a place you haven’t been for 30 years.
The infamous original PBS logo (circa October 1971 - June 1984) could be one of the scariest logo/bumpers in the history of television. This was one of the major symbols of my childhood. I remember its startlingly primitive animation and frightening moog synthesizer tones slightly unnerving me whenever I saw it. I can recall wanting to “hang on” and force myslef to last all of 5-10 seconds longer because something great like 3-2-1 Contact / “The Bloodhound Gang” or “The Great Space Coaster” was just around the corner. Even now I still have a visceral reaction to it. Those sounds stimulate brain cells that have been dormant for many years. Amazing.
(For those of you guys who ran to the closet whenever this logo came on as a child, please watch at your own risk.) Enjoi. :D
This guy has FREE, FREE stickers for anyone interested in taking part in an upcoming exhibition, Printeresting: One Every Day, at the EFA Project Space in New York City next week.
Instructions are simple…. email your mailing address to stickers[at]evan-roth.com When the stickers arrive in the mail put them up in a location that you find appropriate, take a picture and email him back the photo to the same email address. All photos will be added to a loop on display in the gallery for the length of the exhibition. If you are in NYC you can pick up free stickers at the gallery after Nov. 5th (location listed below), or you can make your own with any of the the following files ( .pdf | .png | .eps | .ai ).
email - stickers[at]evan-roth.com
The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
323 West 39th St., 2nd Floor
NY, New York 10018
November 5 - December 19
Opening Reception:
Saturday, November 7
6-9 PM
Hats off to the smartest nerd writer creative director dude I know: Peter Knierim.
Peter recently got shafted by “the man”. In a classic reversal (and armed with a sharpie) he equally flipped “the man” the bird AND made an awesome self promotion in the process. Go Pete!
Enjoi.
The latest Did You Know video will blow your mind with interesting facts and figures about the social web and how it’s changed your world. Here’s a uber-post of all of them, starting with the latest (version 4). (Also, see below for some screen grabs if you don’t have the time to watch).
Version 3:
According to Digital Inspiration, This video is part of the popular “Did You Know” series that originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation [Shift Happens} and, once people caught on, the presentation was converted into a video by xplane. You can watch all the previous versions of the “Did You Know” series here or download source presentations and high-res videos from the Shift Happens wiki.
Version 2:
And finally, Version 1:
Screen grabs:
The hands on the screen belong to James Paterson. He is using “Rhonda”, a 3D drawing tool developed by Amit Pitaru circa 2003.
The first half of the video shows James doing a drawing start to finish. In the second part James is cycling through various previous drawings, created between 2004 and 2005. For the last several years Rhonda has been shown in galleries, museums, festivals and conferences. We are excited to finally release this video online (about time!).
Freakin’ awesome. Sign up for the beta here.
360° video isn’t new, necessarily (there are a lot of programmers who have done created similar executions). But this is the first time I’ve really seen making video like this get so accessible, so quickly.
Meet Yellowbird. BTW, their URL is “yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperiencea3dreality.com” (which is awesome in it’s own right).
By using a Google Streetview-like camera, a system with six lenses, not as a photo but as a video camera, an all-encompassing picture is captured. From the point where the images were recorded, the viewer can look in any direction, let his eyes wander through the crowd, or stare at the ground or the air, which makes viewing a video an experience without boundaries.
Oh, and as soon you figure out how to strap your 6 iPhones together with Duct Tape, you’ll even be able to embed and share all your 360 videos with your nerdy, jealous friends.
You’re welcome. :)
This dude is making music with computers err trees errr both. Whatever. It’s awesome. And nerdy. But not too nerdy. It’s kinda tree-huggy too. And that’s awesomer. Enjoi.
In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs. It looks odd and nice at the same time.One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.
To tune the tree I picked a fundamental note and tuned the twigs by trimming them with a pencil sharpener. I used two Røde NT6 and a NTG-2 as microphones, combined with a customized stethoscope.
I recorded the tracks live on a Pro Tools LE system. I didn’t use any synthesizer or sampler to create or modify the sounds. All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on.
Below you can see the video and some pictures with more detailed descriptions from his posting on Behance.
Diego Stocco - Music From A Tree from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.
I modified a stethoscope by using some hose accessories.The connection between the plastic pipe and the microphone needed to be sealed in order to transmit the sound well.
Here I was recording the low frequencies coming from a big piece of cortex. I used this sound as a kick drum.
The two Røde NT6 attached to my fingers with rubber bands. I came up with this idea because mike stands are not very practical for certain locations and also because in this way I can move the microphones dynamically around the object I’m recording.
Tuning the twig by trimming it with a pencil sharpener.
This is the twig that I was using to play the bass note.
A little twig I used for high-pitched sounds.
The track is also available as an high-quality download on my Bandcamp page:
http://diegostocco.bandcamp.com/track/music-from-a-tree
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