… Essentially, this advertisement packs a few internal fans and a bucketful of faux snow; whenever it starts snowing up at the ski resort, someone sends a text to the billboard and the flurries start to fly…
Norwegian ski billboard gets snowy when texted originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Web site Academic Earth is like Hulu for academic lectures, pulling free lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale into one attractive, easy to navigate site. It’s incredible.
The site clearly takes its cues from Hulu and iTunes on its design, but it’s ten times better than either, because it’s open. The videos can be embedded anywhere or downloaded and enjoyed wherever you want to take them. It’s easy to use, has tons of great content, and it doesn’t cost a dime.
We’ve highlighted these free courses before individually, like MIT’s OpenCourseWare or Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere, and we rounded up even more of them when we showed you how to get a free college education online, but Academic Earth takes the idea to an even better place. We love it.
Quoted from Academic Earth Aggregates Lectures from MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Others [Education]
Do you want to be sure that your final messages and missives are heard? Death Switch is a service which sends out emails upon your unfortunate demise.
Photo by hansvandenberg30.
Why would you want to do such a thing? The company’s web site points out a variety of potential reasons, like not leaving your coworkers and family high and dry without important passwords or information and getting a secret off your chest now that you’re gone. Over at the CNET news blog Technically Incorrect they highlight another potential use of the service: The ability to contact people you don’t have real life contact with after your death. You could set up the service to send out emails to members of mailing lists, gaming guilds, discussion boards, and other virtual communities you participate in.
The basic service is free and includes a single email. The pay service, a year, allows you to compose up to 30 emails with 10 recipients each. Only the pay service allows you to include attachments. Death Switch determines when to send out the messages by sending out messages to you on a regular basis. If you fail to respond to enough of those messages in a row, the emails are mailed out. What say you dear readers? A novel way to wrap up your virtual life after death or a bit too creepy?
Quoted from Death Switch Sends Out Emails Upon Your Demise [Deathhacker]
A microcredit co-op bank has sprung up in Northern California, using money pooled from hardware hackers to fund other open source hardware hacking projects. They’ve found 70 lenders,
Two open source hardware enthusiasts, Justin Huynh and Matt Stack, have started the Open Source Hardware Bank to fund hardware projects such as the microcontroller board pictured above.The fledgling bank is funding only open source hardware projects using capital raised from other hardware geeks. It’s like a community of Facebook friends borrowing and lending among themselves — a peer-to-peer bank.
“This speaks to the rise of the do-it-yourselfer, someone who is not just a consumer but also a producer, inventor and investor,” says Huynh. “But someone also ought to be thinking about the money problem when it comes to open source hardware and we are doing just that.”
So, this is a major plot element of my science fiction novel Makers, coming from Tor next October: microcredit-funded open source hardware hackers laboring in dead malls (the first third of the book was syndicated on Salon as “Themepunks”). It’s always a little weird when sf starts to leak into reality.
Quoted from Open source hardware bank: P2P lending for hardware hackers
With Boxed Water Is Better, the only thing you’re really consuming is the water itself. A new brand—and concept—Boxed Water has successfully taken the bottled water phenomenon to eco-friendly heights.
They’ve lowered the carbon footprint by shipping their unfilled recyclable containers flat to the water source, keeping the cargo pollution to a minimum while maximizing the capabilities of the carton, which can be broken down again post-consumption.
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their website.
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Designer : Uros Vitas
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via http://community.livejournal.com/laceandflora/1260112.html?style=mine#cutid1
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According to Cool Tools, the best source for Neodymium Iron Boron (NIB) super magnets is “Mr. George the SuperMagnetMan.” He’s a charming fellow, wont to saying things like, “These magnets have caused more blood blisters than any other magnet I have.”
His prices are the best on the net. His selection is vast: no one else has the stock he has or the variations in size of commonly available shapes. This is no exaggeration or hype. He’s got stuff you can’t get anywhere else and is constantly adding new items, like axially- and diametrically-magnetized NIB wedding rings and radially-magnetized ring magnets. He has magnets so large they are dangerous (fortunately he has put videos on YouTube that show you how to safely handle these monsters — with large leather welding gloves and a special wooden wedge and a 2×4!). He also sells magnetic hooks, pyramid shaped magnets, magnetic jewelry, teflon coated magnets, heart, star, and triangle magnets. You can even get powdered magnets that act like iron filings on steroids! You name it he’s got it. Most magnets are N45-N50 grade, the highest strength you can buy.
Don’t miss Mr. George’s video of supermagnet crashes, where he smashes limes and grapes.
Quoted from Mr. George the SuperMagnetMan
So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?
That’s my pal, Jonathan Coulton, remarking on the disruptively talented Kutiman, who has made an astounding series of YouTube video remixes that’s lighting up the web and (one imagines) generating a lot of wood amongst our nation’s libidinous entertainment litigators.
Here’s Kutiman’s “The Mother of All Funk Chords” (link includes credits for each video):
Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.
Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.
Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary files. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.
In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman (or, for that matter, Jonathan), really need the mixed basket of theoretical benefits that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and flexibility? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Because, even in the face of bullying, obfuscating, and throat-clearing from corporations with a homemade timetable for evolution, more and more folks like Kutiman will just keep making and releasing stuff. Cool stuff, “illegal” stuff, niche stuff, and stuff that doesn’t require the benediction of a middle-aged executive in order to reach its precise audience with almost zero friction or overhead.
And, that prospect should buoy and energize anybody with a scintilla of artistic entrepreneurship or the drive to just try making and offering their own stuff in their own way.
Man. What an exciting time this is. Seriously. We may not each have Kutiman-level talent and vision, but there’s absolutely never been a better time to at least give it a throw.
Remember: the only person who can sit on your ass is you.
”Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 11, 2009. Except as noted, it’s ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. “Why a footer?“
Quoted from Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship
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