February 28, 2010
Unsatisfied with the dissimilarity between Guitar Hero and actual guitaring? Here's the solution for you! Mapping the buttons to chords is clever, though it would probably sound horrible to be playing chords that don't map to the game. Still, playing guitar hero on a real guitar sounds fun.
July 01, 2009
There, I Fixed It - Welcome to TowtruckJohnny's world
June 09, 2009
Toys! We did another video contest, Toybox Physics and the finalists are posted on our site. You can vote for your favorite. I like the 14 sec skateboarding one personally! They are all super fun to watch.
June 02, 2009
LaserMonks! - the economics of running a modern monastery are very different than I'd have thought.
May 08, 2009
Baseball card collecting is a hobby that is on the wrong side of their demand peak these days. Most collectors are adults who have collected since they were kids (not least because packs cost $5-20 and up to hundreds of dollars!). The iNTERNETS CELEBRITIES checked in on how a local card shop is doing and the result is quite nostalgic if you ever collected cards or comic books. Or, just experience the excitement vicariously on youtube.
[more inside]
April 21, 2009
Ultimate hot rod - there's two schools of thought on building a supersonic land speed record vehicle. One is to assemble a bunch of big-wallet sponsors and design the kind of carbon-and-titanium dream that makes 5th graders buy extra paper for their school notebooks.
The other is to buy a junkheap supersonic fighter, strap some wheels on and watch it go.
April 17, 2009
Muji USA - Now we can all have Muji. [more inside]
February 04, 2009
Dumpster Diving with the Jacque Cousteau of corporate discards. [via kottke]
January 14, 2009
Fry's Executive's Casino Demands - we've talked about the wonderful land of the concert rider (y'know, the legal document specifying exactly what colors of M&Ms are to be present in the dressing room lounge): from the original to the TMI-worthy to the humorously self-aware. Apparently this Fry's executive (a graduate of the Charles Barkley school of Gambling in Moderation) reading those thought, "A nice start. Some good ideas in there. But on the whole, far too little pettiness and selfish narcissism. I shall show those pikers what a list of outrageously specific demands should read like!
I mean, I know how furious flimsy coat hangers make *me*, but some of the rest of that stuff is just outrageous. [via DF]
December 12, 2008
RIP Boyd Coddington - following on the news that Bettie Page and Ithaca Legend Hot Truck Bob just passed, I also just found out that Boyd Coddington, a pioneer of the modern hot rod, passed away this year.
He started his career amid the spiraling kandy-kolored tangerine-flake rococo excess of the Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth days and reined it back to earth, with an aesthetic of clean elegance, marrying modern automotive design to the classic forms of 1930s - 1950s American Iron. (His first client? Some guy named 'Bono' from an obscure Irish rock band.)
None better shows this than his masterwork, Billy Gibbons' "CadZZilla". It turns up to "11" everything that is great about the early post-war Cadillacs, and it set the aesthetic theme for the next decade of hot rods. (Incidentally Billy Gibbons also commissioned Eliminator, another of the greatest hot rods ever created. Please enjoy this ZZ-Top video starring CadZZilla alongside Doc Brown, Alex P Keaton, 3 leggy blondes, and Sergio Leone.) Seeing CadZZilla in a magazine is what first got me into hotrodding, and I'd name it one of the most beautiful cars ever created. [more inside]
October 26, 2008
Regarding that $150k - I was somewhat chastened by this Campbell Brown segment defending Palin's $150k shopping spree. Women's clothes cost much more than men's, they need more of them, and like it or not a woman in the public eye is judged on her appearance.
Then I decided to look a little closer. Here's what a window-shopping spree at Saks Fifth Avenue got me (details and methodology after the jump):
- 115 suits, $560 average. Many of these were on sale -- with deals like a $1,295 St. John Santana Knit Jacket on sale for $777, how can you afford to not get a hundred of them? ($64,400 total)
- 57 pairs of shoes, averaging $610, primarily Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Ferragamo ($34,770 total).
- 15 dresses averaging $675 -- Versace, Diane von Furstenburg, Dior, more ($10,125 total)
- 11 Jackets averaging $970 from Armani, Akris, Burberry, etc. ($10,670 total)
- 32 Hats (at $240 each) and 5 Earmuffs ($290). This includes an adorable Emilio Pucci Rabbit Fur Earmuffs for $435; an Eric Javits Capuchon II Hood for $350.00 and bargain-priced Burberry Check Hat for $150. ($9,130 total)
- 37 Scarves (hey -- Alaska gets cold) at $400 on average. Selections include a $795.00 Chloé Patchwork Knit Scarf, and a $175 feel-young-again! Juicy Couture Cashmere Bow and Ruffles Scarf. ($14,800 total)
- 37 Gloves and Mittens. They were $165 on average, but I was able to afford an elegant set of Portolano Long Leather Gloves for $290 by also choosing an affordable pair of $88 Marc by Marc Jacobs Painted Intarsia Gloves. ($6,105 total)
September 25, 2008
For all you bikers out there: Need a new frame for you bike? Grow your own.
July 01, 2008
Drive Your Bike to Work Day - missed it this year, but enjoy the pix. [thx dennis] [more inside]
June 06, 2008
Awful License Plates - if you enjoyed hearing from the complainants against this scourge on our streets, or the couple of sightings by alkalineearthlings, you'll get a kick out of these first and second hand pix of awful license plates put together by SA. [link is fully safe for work, stay within the well-marked path]. Time to go browse through the TXDOT collection for your own "EATTHE" masterpiece?
May 31, 2008
KnickerPicker - I have nothing more to add.
May 07, 2008
Human Brain Cloud - like a free-form crowdsourced visual thesaurus.
Also in the category of "Building huge datasets though fooling people into thinking they're doing something else (playing games, looking up info)" like CoverBrowser's tagger and the Google411.
March 24, 2008
Eye-clops - Rob Cockerham has been having great fun with the Eye-clops, a childrens toy that blows an image up 200x and displays it on a TV screen. Since there's no way I would have already posted and then forgotten about it, I'm clearly linking again to point out the expanding gallery of zip-loc bags, yarn, secret big-brother monitoring schemes and bedsheets writ large that have gone up since.
February 23, 2008
January 30, 2008
$1 Image Stabilizer for any Camera - awesome. My trick has always been to frame the shot, hold it against my face (even when not using the viewfinder) and look at a distant object, but this looks even better, and highly portable. [thx df]
January 06, 2008
Fun game If you're allowed to play computer games, that is. [more inside]
December 28, 2007
December 20, 2007
Studillac - Thanks to the AV Club, I've found out I live in a world that has a car called the "Studillac": "Combining the graceful continental styling of the new Studebaker Starliner with the power and performance of the new 210 HP Cadillac engine". Now you know what to get me for Ludachristmas.
December 12, 2007
Cracked's most baffling toys list. "Surprisingly, not all of these are from Japan."