Unable to afford food, poor people in Haiti resorted to eating mud cookies made from dried yellow dirt:
Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and
clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.
A Nottinghamshire postman’s taking an hour and a half longer to deliver his letters than his colleagues because of his big head!
Jason Clay from Sutton-in-Ashfield can’t find a bike helmet to fit him so he has to walk his round – his head is about seven inches bigger than average.
Jason’s used to getting some stick but said that he doesn’t mind.
“I had name-calling when I was a child such as ‘big head Eddie’. In the Post Office they take the micky out of me and say I should wear a dustbin lid or a box! We went to the menswear shop and I tried several hats on and one of the people says ‘If it’s any consolation, you’ve got the biggest head that’s ever been in my shop’.”
How does Russian police deal with a dangerous pit bull? They shoot it. If that doesn’t work, they run it over with a car. But what if that doesn’t work either? Warning: pretty shocking images. This video is not very funny…
Both Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3 had incredible percussion and drum tracks for 8-bit NES games. If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you were surprised and impressed when you heard the hand percussion in SMB2 or the timpani work in SMB3. Prepare to be even more impressed when you hear the score of Super Mario Bros. 2 set ablaze with a full trap set.
Drummer Andrea Vadrucci tears up Koji Kondo’s score with some insane drum action in the above video. I’ve heard many a drum track to many a videogame tune, but this video still wows me. Sure, the double bass is excessive, but it’s excessive in the best way — the way that kicks your ass. My subwoofer just took a 15-minute coffee break after watching this.
Props to Destructoid community blogger AngelsDontBurn for the link.
The “I Am Not a Paper Cup…” is a double-walled porcelain mug with a silicone lid, giving you the feel of those disposable paper coffee cups without all the waste. It’s not on sale until February, but should cost about $20.
So I finally got around to setting up a mythtv box. I’ve wanted to do it for years but I had a hard time finding good information about hardware. I could never really find many pages where people would actually list all the hardware they were using and whether or not it worked. So that’s what I’m going to do here. This is not the end all be all system or anything like that. Just an example of some hardware that works. I ordered everything new and it all seems to be working good so far. so anyway here we go…
Boing Boing Gadgets's Joel Johnson has just posted unedited footage of his appearance on AT&T's The Hugh Thompson Show, where he asked Thompson and his audience how they felt about AT&T's plan to spy on all its customers to find copyright infringers.
Joel Johnson, you are my hero:
Yesterday, I was invited to talk about gadgets onThe Hugh Thompson Show, a television-style talk show sponsored exclusively by AT&T for distribution on the online AT&T Tech Channel. I eventually did talk about gadgets, but in light of AT&T's shocking and baffling announcement of their plans to filter the internet, I thought that a much more interesting and important topic.
So that’s what I talked about.
As you can see from the video, the crew ended up scrubbing the interview about half-way through. Figuring that might happen, I asked my steely-nerved friend Richard Blakeley to tape the first take. I wanted to make sure that we had a record of the event, primarily to ensure that AT&T would have no reason to try to bury the interview entirely—the same reason I am running this clip now, while discussion about what to do with my segment in post-production is surely underway.
This video gives a fascinating look at what a huge ant colony look like underground. 10 ton of cement was poured into the colony and after solidification, the soil was excavated. Digging starts at around 4:10 min.
The structure covers over 538 square feet and travels 26 feet into the earth. In its construction, the colony moved 40 tons of soil. Billions of ant loads of soil were brought to the surface. Each load weighed four times as much as the worker ant, and in human terms, was carried over 1/2 mile to the surface.
A while ago we wrote about removing the DRM from Netflix “Watch Now” movies. At the time, it involved wading through a bit of HTML source to find the target video URL. Since then, a couple of important things have happened: a Greasemonkey script was written that makes it a bit easier to download and process the DRMed WVM file, and more importantly, Netflix is now allowing unlimited downloads.
What can you do with this? Well, you can download a number of videos ahead of time and then watch them at your leisure, especially if you travel a lot and are offline for extended periods of time. It also means you can convert the files to mp4 format for playing on your mac, iPod or Apple TV device. Or maybe you were hoping to finish that documentary you were making about the strange facial expressions of Sylvester Stallone and needed a few more clips to splice into your film…
Unable to afford food, poor people in Haiti resorted to eating mud cookies made from dried yellow dirt:
