heh. eh...not sure if this is off-topic or not. I guess I'll categorize it that way. Really funny.
In this world of trivial photo and video manipulation, you can trust nothing you see on any screen or print to be true.
"...incedentally Super Dave has been outfitted with a special transistorized microphone so we can be in full contact with him at all times."
So if you are the Soviet Union back in 1971 and oh let's say you are out exploring for natural gas and umm...one of your exploration rigs happens to fall into a sinkhole...that'd be bad right? Now let's say that all of a sudden natural gas starts coming out of this hole, what do you do? - Devise some clever way of stopping the flow of natural gas and perchance capture it for using to create energy?
- Scramble and backfill the hole as best you can to "cap" the problem and then re-assess how you can access this seemingly rich natural gas deposit.
- Light it and watch it BUUURRRRRN!
You guessed it! Soviet ingenuity stretched as far as a match and the natural gas hole has been burning for 40 years... Awesome! Communism at work. Second world creation, third world sustained engineering. Update: This comment from techRivet's #1 fan. This must be a the cause of Global Warming! We can blame the ice [not] melting at the south pole on the Soviet Union! Where oh where is the Goreical to save us? Oh the Earthanity. [I may have changed her words up a bit in that last sentence.]
 Crazy but true.
This guy Peter Rakos, created an entire rendering engine/technique in Excel. I'm not sure it is quite up to the requirements of Halo 3, but it is still a nifty example of how versatile Excel can be. Check out the video. And you can download the excel files yourself and try it out.
I've been lethargically trying to purchase a Wii for months now, without success. Apparently you have to be quite serious about hunting one down because they're sell out everywhere that they crop up. Amazon.com reported that when they had them in stock, they were selling 17 of them a second! If the technology in this clip starts to make it mainstream, we're going to continue to be constrained on these puppies. The clarity of the description of the technology, as well as the demonstration itself, is first rate.
Make sure to check out Johnny Lee's other Wiimote projects.
Remarkable suit that is reminiscent of the forklift suit from "Aliens". 
Only smaller and quicker and cooler.
Man it's cool. Could we make fully functional mechanical beasts? I mean think about it. We just need to design a way for it to search for a power source to get energy. A way to syphon said electricity. The procreation thing is the hard part. Air Ray PDF Air_ray is a remote-controlled hybrid construction comprising
a helium-filled ballonett and a flapping-wing drive mechanism. The
ballonett is a gastight bladder of aluminium-vaporised “PET foil”
with a specific mass of 22 g/qm; it can be filled with up to 1.6 cbm
of helium. Since 1 cbm of helium generates approx.1 kg weight of
buoyant force, Air_ray’s overall mass must not exceed 1.6 kg. Air has a density of 0.0012 kg/m3 at 20° Celsius at sea level;
by comparison, the density of water is about 1 kg/dcm3. In the
design of Air_ray, the difference in density between these two
media necessitates an extremely light construction. This enables
Air_ray to almost hover in the air by means of the buoyant force
of the helium ballonet, floating through a sea of air just as the
Manta_ray does in water.
The propulsion is effected by a flapping-wing mechanism. The
wing module, which can be moved up and down by a servo drive
unit, has a structure like that of the tail fins of many fish. This
structure consists of two alternating pressure and tension flanks
flexibly connected by ribs.
Cool I'm not sure why they made it...except it's cool.
You know it. So I previously pointed to this: [The Best Rube Goldberg Machine] as the best Rube Goldberg machine. That may be...for amateurs, but this commercial by Guiness is awesome. Too bad it is not a TRUE Rube Goldberg machine. There were many sequences spliced together. The advert took a week to film, with some of the sequences having to be reshot up to 15 times. New Guiness Advert: Giant domino village Still it's a fun commercial.
Guinness World Records organization is calling this the world's largest artificial tornado. Not sure what the applications are, but "kewl" to look at none the less... Scooter GadgetGrid.com
Holy crap! I tried not to post this...I really did...but I just had to. This is interesting in retrospect as a lesson for the coming future in which everything that everyone does will be recorded (or virtually everything). This of course means that all the boring stuff will be forgotten but every little (or in this case big) stupid thing you ever do will be available for someone else (in this case a lot of someone elses) to view and therefore make fun of (or in this case skillfully ridicule within the video). Note to self, don't do stupid things in public.
 Remember "Total Recall", the sci-fi movie from 1990? Great movie, Arnie was at the peak of his action hero era, Sharon Stone was Hot, Michael Ironside was bad, lot's of gratuitous violence.
yeah...coool. Well the opening scene had Sharon and Arnie eating breakfast and the entire wall of their dining area was a television. They turned on and off parts of it. Now it's a television, now it's a tranquil screensaver (wallsaver?). Well Sony is just about to come out with an ultra thin TV. The next generation television has a screen with a thickness of just three millimeters (0.12 inches), which was made possible because the organic display is self-luminescent and does not require a backlighting. [linky] So...less than a quarter inch thick. You could tile your wall with these things and voila', life imitates art. Of course they're like $2000 per right now, but that price will come down. Oh...ok, only because you asked. CHICK FIGHT!
For those of you with a commute, this might allow you to get more done. Although up here in the Great Northwest you might want to waterproof you desk first.
Make a foxhole radio. I like how he tries a couple of easy ways to wind the wire but ends up doing it by hand anyways.
Flash tried for a long time to become the next paradigm in web User Interface design. Over the years there has been loud supporters of Flash technologies in support of this effort. But there has been a larger resistance. It has failed up to now largely because Flash adds only marginal benefit over HTML and it brakes standard navigation from within a browser. For any added snazziness that Flash provided you got little else along with it. The net was negative. It has always had a place as a online game platform or as an online rich "creative" [read advertisement] platform. But not as a replacement UI. But it did accomplish something. It got a high penetration rate: 97% plus. This has been a crucial factor in its adoption as the now defacto web-video standard. None of the other players whether they be quicktime or windows media player have that adoption rate. Flash allows near ubiquity in one format. This presents the only way currently for unifying a customer experience when viewing a video. The other benefit that I believe has not been written about as of yet is that with Flash you can design your own player. This is great for any site concerned about their brand, especially for video sharing sites like Revver and of course YouTube. For if someone puts a video from your site on their blog, you can deliver that video from within a branded Flash player. Even to the point of providing some unique navigation elements. Your brand is proliferated beyond the domain of your site...virally. Questions pop into my brain at this point. Will this be the flash legacy? Will we look back on Flash in 5 years and perceive it primarily as a video delivery technology and not as a game/creative/vector-graphic engine? I say yes. The benefits it provides to the online delivery of videos cannot be matched by any of the other technologies currently available.It provides ubiquity, customization, easy maintenance, easy share-ability...check, check, check, check. It is not the first mover in this space, in fact it is quite late to the party, but it has the above stated benefits that provide differentiation that are, in my humble opinion, not beatable by the current set of substitute products. Will it be able to leverage this capability into a broader control of the web UI space? Ahh, now this is an interesting question. Flash is in an interesting place. It is almost like it stumbled into this position. It is on the verge of LOCKING up this channel of content delivery. What happens then? Once people are comfortable with pasting an <embed> or an <object> tag on their page, what can flash leverage beyond that...? Maybe they'll achieve their goal of becoming the Web UI via this route instead of head on. We shall have to wait and see.
Advertising as content. Brilliant ad. It's entertaining. It stays on the companies message... Funny. Cute. Has a baby...check, check, check. And they did it all in cgi. This was obviously a requirement due to the baby being a ninja master. But it works. It has a certain Shrek-ness about it that imbues even a bit more humor into it. A+ effort. Update: Wilkinson has a website devoted to the campaign - www.ffk-wilkinsong.com. The trailer is there, it talks about the characters, goodies, and a game. A 96 megabyte downloadable game. So this is not an inexpensive proposition to create. It is merely exploiting a non-traditional channel. This falls into the subject my friend Todd Sawicki wrote about here: http://www.techrivet.com/2007/03/28/whyViralIsntFree.aspx. Although I could argue that the viral campaign has other goals in mind besides bottom line sales. Increasing awareness in the consumer to your brand is also a valid goal, just one much harder to measure. Update 2: The game is pretty lame...not worth the download time. Picture a slower, less fun, stupider, mortal combat. Anyways, here's a screenshot. 
"Now for the Double-Sideswipe-And-Return" heh.
..but then it isn't really off-topic, because I am using modern technology to put the movie on the rivet, it's trivial and totally cool.
So I've seen this out there and it just appeals to my inner geek. A binary counting machine made of wood.
So here a few other cool base two numbering system fun-ness!
Binary Finger Counting: [linky]
And what is up with that Hexidecimal (base 16) thing anyways.
How does binary relate to hexadecimal? Each digit of a hexadecimal number represents exactly four digits of a binary number. This property is due to the fact that 16 equals 24. Manual conversion between binary and hexadecimal is easy: all you have to do is substitute one hex digit for every four binary digits, or vice versa. See the figure below.
While binary is easy for computers, enormous strings of ones and zeros are a bit unwieldy for people to use. However, as we saw in the preceding section, hex numbers are significantly shorter than their binary equivalents. Because of the simple interchangeability of binary and hexadecimal, humans can read digital data in hex, which preserves the underlying binary format that computers use, while presenting the information in a more human-readable format.
 Read More about that here: [Hex Headquarters]
How about a Binary Clock. Spend more time decyphering the time of day than actually doing something productive. [linky]
What if Harry Potter had elements of "300", X-Men, the Matrix all stired up into a stew of lightning bolt badness.
"THIS IS...HOGWARTS!"
 This is great. The creativity involved with this is impressive. I especially like the bit at the end that displays this. Not that I fixated on the beer part expecially, but it just seemed to round out the video appropriately.
Hat Tip: tech herding
Iceland Lake Race between a suped up 4X4 and a snowmobile. These guys are crazy!
 To get a Joost invite please leave a comment that answers these five quick (and I hope fun) questions:
1. Without looking it up anywhere, describe Joost's business model to me.
2. What is your favorite blog?
3. What technology do you think is going to impact our lives the most
a. In the next 5 years?
b. In the next 10 years?
c. In the next 25 years?
4. If you can choose only one, which of the following would you like to have.
a. Time Travel
b. Space Travel - FTL (screw Einstein)
ok...why?
5. What's cooler?
a. Millenium Falcon
b. Bird of Prey
If you didn't answer Millenium Falcon then can you please explain to me your pathetic reasoning?
For those of you that answer my questions five, I'll send you a joost invite. (unless I start getting too many then I will arbitrarily stop doing it...just sayin, get your answers in soon.)
If I get some good responses I'll compile them.
cheers - g Update: I need the name you want to use for the Joost account. So if you want to be called Ed Edinator, like one of the previous commentors then just leave it up to me. If on the other hand you would prefer a first name and last name of your choosing then leave a first name and last name in the comments. Thanks - g
I saw this yesterday morning on CBS Sunday Morning news show. They were talking about the Youtube awards. The story was an amalgamation of a couple of posts I've done here: 21st Century Jobs and this post here: Viral Advertising As Content
In the story they interview the guys that created LonelyGirl15 and also "Dancing" Matt Harding and then they interview Tom Dixon from BlendTec.
Blendtec is a commercial blender company trying to sell their products into the consumer market. At the urging of a marketing (and I assume younger) employee they've been running a video series on youtube called "Will it Blend". It now has its own website WillItBlend.com.
The key question is what impact did the Youtube posting have on sales. The first piece of information that came out in the interview is that the video series has had in excess of 6 million views. Can you say wow.
The interviewer then asks how has it impacted Blendtec's bottom line. Tom Dickson, the inventor and CEO of BlendTec, says "Yes absolutely! ... thousands of percent more."
...and they did this essentially for FREE!
Well as compared to any old school media format, it's essentially Free. Extraordinary.
Here's the CBS report (on youtube...heh...how long it will stay there I don't know)
It's also over at the CBS Sunday Morning home page [bottom right] for now: CBS Sunday Morning
1. New blog discovered:
901am.com
 901am is a website covering new media news. and blogging.
Pretty cool blog dealing with the whole media thing. Pronto-like updating too.
2. Cool Gadget: Lego Chaingun
I know I did a lego thing last time too, but this is too bitchin' to pass up:
3. Big News: as in BIG.
Google's master Plan:
3. Cool Tool: Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer
eh...what?
Come on don't you know of the EMaVaHA?! If you absolutely need to find out how sucky your headline is and how crappy a copy writer you really are go here and find out.
The future of advertising is uncertain, you must connect with your consumers. But how do you do this?
Example #1: SneauxShoes.com - Human Skateboard - It's brilliant and works on so many levels.
First of all it's just dang entertaining. The whole concept is original. The craftmanship is just right.
But after getting over the entertainment value you have to admire the targeting here. This is an advertisment for shoes. For slacker shoes, (i.e. skateborder). Let's take a look at this in a check list format.
- Entertaining - check.
- leverages viral network (youtube) - check
- Let's consumers have an impact on the brand - check
- You get what they are trying to sell - and it ain't just the shoes ( it's also the image) - check
...and on top of that it is very cheap, and probably reaches its demographic better than a traditional media ad would be able to do. Anectdotally, just me showing it to a couple of friends here...they all sent it off to there friends, whom I would assume would send it off to theirs and so on and so on...
Lesson. You can save money AND have a more targetted reach by leveraging the "free" viral network available to you in Youtube and like minded video sharing sites. A pre-requisite is an ENTERTAINING piece of content. The value of the entertainment must be high to be viral
Example #2: Smirnoff's Tea Partay! - Keeping it Real in Cape Cod y'all!
Beautiful. This video actually contains commentary on two separate cultures within the U.S. There is a fairly deep thesis buried inside this comedic advertisment video. Concerning who has the power, who has cool, who REALLY has cool, and who REEALY REEAAAALLY has cool. I'll leave it for you to figure it out because this post is about how the ad-as-content works not about any societal commentary.
But back to the check list
- Entertaining - check.
- leverages viral network (youtube) - you bet
- Let's consumers have an impact on the brand - check
- You get what they are trying to sell - all the image - it is just a mid range vodka after all. - check
After looking at the Tea Partay website I would actually argue that Smirnoff devoted too much effort into the site. The value of viral advertising is the ability for people to take your video (or other piece of entertaining ad content) and send it around the net. Email it, put it on their myspace page, put it in their blog, send their friends to it, etc. Having a webpage where people can go is not the priority.
I believe that Smirnoff's money would have been better spent by making a $50k (me guessing) brochure type website instead of the $250k+ (me guessing again) pretty flash based website and invest the difference into a sequel video.
It isn't about the home base anymore. It's about the distributed ad. The distributed piece of content.
Reebok needs to bring back Terry Tate: sniff, sniff, I miss him
Hat tip: www.jaffejuice.com
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