To celebrate their 20th anniversary, sandwich restaurant chain Erbert and Gerbert created a giant air-powered Candle Cannon to blow out the candles on their birthday cake.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the Candle Cannon was created.
straight stolen from Laughing Squid
This new video of “Big Dog,” the amazing quadrupedal robot from Boston Dynamics, shows of its latest tricks: the ability to walk through snow and even over ice, catching itself when it slips and falls. Its normal gait is unnatural, but when it starts to scramble to recover it looks eerily real.
straight stolen from Boing Boing Gadgets
Every year, Shell (yes, the giant evil oil company) puts on a little PR banquet in the name of vehicle efficiency called the Eco-Marathon. It’s part of the long-standing tradition of oil companies blaming car companies for the excesses of the fossil fuel economy while car companies just as joyfully blame oil companies.
Nonetheless, it’s a fun little event where teams get together and figure out how efficient vehicles really can be. And they can indeed be very efficient. By bringing the weight of the vehicles way down, putting them on high-pressure bike tires, and making the vehicles as obscenely aerodynamic as possible, these cars easily get thousands of miles per gallon.
The team from the French technical school St. Joseph La Joliverie went 7,148 miles on a single gallon of fuel…the Shell website is quick to point out that that's “almost ten miles per teaspoon”. Maybe the body isn't the most efficient vehicle after all.
In any case…it gives you a sense for just how much power is contained in a gallon of gasoline. It’s too bad we’ve been pretty much pouring it down the drain for the last few decades.
Via EcoModder
straight stolen from EcoGeek.org
Yes the web is awash with news of Internet Explorer 8. We’re like lemmings that way, it seems like every blog I read (116 says Google Reader) has some news of IE 8. Given the mad dash to the finish line for South by Southwest, I haven’t bothered to download or play yet, but I guess I’ll have to.
For me, the big news is that Internet Explorer 8 will have Firebug. Well, not technically firebug, but pretty much an exact clone. If you visit Microsoft Developer Tools and download their PDF, you’ll see that IE 8 will ship with a near exact clone of Firebug - which is great news if you’re trying to really push IE. I’m also happy that its being produced by the IE team, and not by a third party developer. The reason I’m happy is not because a third party dev couldn’t do an outstanding job (again, hat tip to Firebug), but because so much of the internals of IE is undocumented and secret, that I think the only people who could successfully implement this is the IE team.
If you look carefully, they actually got some really, really nice things in IE 8. For example, window.location.hash. This allows you to use javascript to redirect the user, but the page gets added to the cache and history. This allows the back button to work normally with “Ajax-ed” paged. Nice! There’s also a series of DOM-compliance bugs in there, and while it’ll mean little to me as jQuery shields me from the day to day trivia of that, it’ll mean a huge deal to jQuery itself (and other javascript libraries) and I bet we can expect a nice bump in speed due to native support for things that normally needed to be reconstructed (I’m looking at you CSS selectors and getAttribute/setAttribute).
The good folks over at Digital Web Magazine have more news in IE8 Beta 1 released!, including links to Jonathan Snook‘s smoketests. I’d like to extend my gratitude to the IE development team for its frank and open communication, particularly via the IE blog. While I’ve not dealt with them directly, all accounts are that they’re listening to the geeks.
straight stolen from DerekAllard.com
Mike Linksvayer, the CTO of Creative Commons, runs the numbers of Nine Inch Nails’s Creative Commons download experiment and discovers that it only took the band two days to exceed the typical net from a massive-selling traditional CD release. The band sold $750,000 worth of “limited edition deluxe sets,” plus an unknowable further sum from sales of the regular CDs and merch.
The $300 “ultra deluxe edition” of Nine Inch Nails‘ Ghosts I-IV, limited to 2500 copies, sold out in a couple days (I believe released Sunday, no longer available this morning). There are some manufacturing costs, but they don’t appear to be using any precious materials. So if an artist typically makes $1.60 on a $15.99 CD sale, profit from sales of the limited edition already matches profit from a CD selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
Then there are non-limited sales of a $75 merely “deluxe edition”, $10 CD, and $5 download, and whatever other products NIN comes up with around Ghosts.
(Thanks, Brian!)
See also:
HOWTO Earn an artist’s living in the 21st century: 1000 True Fans
Nine Inch Nails goes Creative Commons remix-friendly with new album
straight stolen from Boing Boing
“It should be pretty simple,” David M naïvely stated, “just look in the Agent_ProductLines table, right?”
“Uhhh,” David's coworker, James, replied in a slightly condescending tone, “no.” David was starting to get used to such responses. Nothing in his new job was “pretty simple” to simple to do.
“Okaaay… so how exactly can we tell if a particular Agent is allowed to a given Product Line”
James groaned. “Well as you know, the original database developer, wasn't really a fan of normalization, the relational model, or just plain simple common sense. In this case, he did not want to 'waste space' by creating a table just to store the Agent-Product Line relation.”
David sighed. He knew exactly what was coming up: some stupid comma, tilde, asterisk delimited string on the Agency table.
“Oh it gets worse,” James replied, “see, take a look at this column, the NVARCHAR(2000) one called strProductLines?”
David took a look. He was confronted with something far worse than a delimited string…
012-3100000100110000001000000103000001001100000-1011010101—0010011000000100000001000001001—00000500000010600010011000000100000001000001001100000010
“What the–”
“Here,” James said, cutting him off, “let me show you how it works.” He grabbed a pen and a pad of paper, and started to draw a little table …
ID 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 … Value 0 1 1 - 3 1 0 0 … “Wait,” David said, “you're telling me, the index of each character corresponds to the product line? And a one means that they can sell a product line?”
“Yes,” James replied, “but it's a bit more than that. '0' means they can't sell, '1' means they can, '-' means there is no such product with that ID, and '2', '3', '4' - all through '9', all mean different things. Like, '3' means that the agent has received training on the product line, but has not been approved to sell, and so on.”
David buried his face in his hands for a brief moment. “So how exactly can can I build this 'Find Agency by Product Line' feature?”
“Well,” James winked, “it should be pretty simple.”
straight stolen from The Daily WTF
Designer Stephane de Sousa’s produced a prototype “minimalist bedside table” with “a waterproof surface, bookshelf, and a simple way to remember where you left off on last night’s reading.” It’s the last one that really gets me here.
straight stolen from Boing Boing
YouTube has been testing higher bitrate encodings of it videos, which you can see if you add a &fmt=8 or &fmt=16 to the video url. Historically, all videos have been delivered to the lowest common denominator: sorenson encoded 320×240. By adding &fmt=6 to the URL, the video is served up in 448×336 resolution and I'm guessing it's using the VP6 codec (can anyone confirm?). &fmt=18 gives you the iPhone-style MP4 stream.
What videos will actually look better in the higher res format is completely dependent on the material that was uploaded to YouTube, obeying the rules of garbage in garbage out. I’ve looked at a number of videos where you can’t really tell the difference between the low and high-res versions, presumably because the uploaded video was already heavily compressed or pre-scaled to 320×240. There are a few, however, that are strikingly better, such as the skateboarding dog above.
A greasemonkey script is available which will cause Firefox to automatically load the fmt=18 version, if available. A quick install and you can be wasting time at twice the bitrate.
Watch High-Resolution YouTube Videos - [via] Link
YouTube HD Greasmonkey Script - Link
straight stolen from Hackszine.com
Amazon’s launched a Linux-based downloader for its DRM-free MP3 music store — fantastic news! Now if they’d only change the terms-of-service for the store to something sensible like “Don’t do anything illegal with this music.”
straight stolen from Boing Boing
A pilot tries to land this Airbus A320 in 150mph crosswind while the passengers puke and pray.
straight stolen from YesButNoButYes
straight stolen from reddit.com: what's new online
The Shrine of the Mall Ninja collects the posts of “Gecko45,” a poster to a gun-enthusiast message-board, who claimed to be a mall security guard trained in ninjitsu who had been given special dispensation to use machineguns after the saved the mayor’s newphew from being sodomized near the Gap store, bravely stepping in where the local SWAT team feared to tread. The guy’s claims are amazing, milk-nose-sortingly great, and halfway through he creates a sock-puppet who heralds the brave mall-cops of America, who fight the fights that the FBI are too chicken to intervene in.
I am the Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas…If you want to laugh at somebody, try laughing at the sheep out there who go to the mall unarmed trusting in me to stand guiard over their lives like a God…
I tell you that we are undervalued for our beneficial effect on society at large, for the urban and suburban shopping centers see %80 of the armed violence in this nation, and why don’t the cops take care of it, because they are a bunch of wusses, and they are not man enough to put up with the danger and stress. You all who are makeing fun of me have never been threatened by jailed drug dealers, serial killers, and shoplifters, or fired at by high powered rifles so excuse me if I decide to have good weapons to protect and defend myself without all of you makeing fun of my choice, and they way I do my job!
My “Black-Ops” history ensures that you will never know about the missions I accepted in my younger days, and Vietnam still shudders when it hears the name of a an assasin so skillful and deadly, he is remembered decades later.
(via Gibson)
straight stolen from Boing Boing
This black belt takes his time preparing to break ten bricks, but the payoff is worth it.
(via b3ta)
straight stolen from YesButNoButYes
