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Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman demonstrate the difference between CPU and GPU by painting the Mona Lisa in 275 milliseconds using a 1100 barrel paint ball gun earlier this week at NVIDIA’s NVISION 08 show.
via TG Daily & CrunchGear
Proof that every vote makes a difference, red won by just two votes in our poll for the next Laughing Squid sticker color. We will be printing these soon through Sticker Giant, adding it to existing our line-up of stickers.
Robbie shot 3038 photos with his Canon 5D over a period of 3 days of his life in and around Boston. He then created a video of all of the photos played at hi-speed in the order they were shot, set to the song “Dry Lips” by Lightspeed Champion.
via Cartoon Brew
guest post by Simone Davalos
Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee, wanted to make his marriage proposal to his girlfriend Leslie really, really memorable, so he did what an self-respecting Googleplex geek would so, he put his proposal up on Google Street View.
My name is Michael Weiss-Malik, and I work for Google. I don’t work on the Street View team, but I interact with them pretty regularly. They decided to coordinate a pre-announced Street View run outside Google’s Mountain View offices, with the idea that Googlers could line up along the street and appear in the imagery. So I put together my “Proposal 2.0″ billboard and showed up, hoping that it’d be readily visible. And it was![snip]
But my original proposal was quiet and low-key. It was just some simple heart-felt words exchanged during a quiet night at home. And while Proposal 1.0 had plenty of sentiment, it was lacking in pizazz. So I did what any Silicon Valley geek would do: I decided to upgrade to “Proposal 2.0,” a new improved online version. I proposed to Leslie from inside a Google Street View panorama. I dare say that it’s the first time anyone in the history of mankind has proposed marriage in quite this way, and it went live on Google Maps on August 5, 2008.
Visit Marry Me Leslie to see some history, learn how he did it, and tell Leslie whether or not to say “yes”.
via TechDigest
Nikon has announced their new D90 camera, a 12.3-megapixel DSLR that retails for $999.95 and includes the ability to shoot 24fps 720p HD video.
Commercial photographer Chase Jarvis had a chance to try out the camera in advance, making a video as he and his crew tested out several D90’s.
In related news, Canon announced their new 50D DSLR.
Check out the D90 write-ups by Thomas Hawk and David Pouge (New York Times).
UPDATE: DP Review has a hands-on preview of the D90.
The UnConvention and ad agency Campbell Mithun have joined forces on the campaign “Make an Effort” to help residents of Minneapolis-Saint Paul to find unconventional ways to welcome their visitors as they arrive next week for the Republican National Convention.
See Previously: My Yard Our Message, Non-Partisan Political Yard Signs
via AdFreak
Backtype is a new web service that just launched that helps you track and search your friends comments from multiple sources. You can also claim accounts associated with your domains. TechCrunch is referring to it as the “Twitter For Comments”.
BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they’ve written on the Internet.
Here’s the Laughing Squid account on Backtype.
guest post by Doctor Popular
“In a year of firsts for presidential candidates, a phenomenon that’s taking even seasoned analysts by surprise. A growing grassroots movement, born on the internet, to elect a virtual unknown to the highest office in the country.”
The brilliant folks at Paltalk have created an awesome viral video campaign that allows anyone to insert their own name into a newsreel about America’s next hot presidential candidate, for instance “Frank Chu”.
The video is slickly produced and the customizable graphics fool most folks upon first watch. To create your own campaign news footage, go to news3online.com and follow the steps to either email a video to your friends or create an embeddable flash file. Note: To embed the file in WordPress, you may need to turn off your WYSIWYG editor in your WP options before posting.
Despite titling their page “Viral marketing interface”, the advertising is actually minimal and non-obtrusive, they don’t even require a sign up or email. Kudos on the cool prank.
Here’s the Finnish rock band Leningrad Cowboys joined by the Red Army Choir doing a cover of the southern fried rock classic “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
via Rob La Gesse
Mozilla Labs recently introduced Ubiquity, an amazing experimental Firefox extension that allows users to control their browser with language-based instructions and create on-demand mashups. Check out the User Tutorial to get a better idea how it works.
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
- Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
- Extend the browser functionality easily.
Chop Shop just came out with another great t-shirt, “Rock Star” (men’s version & women’s version) featuring 28 classic rockers from 1965-1975.
See Previously:
- weGo T-Shirt By Chop Shop Featuring 55 Famous Vehicles
- Internet Meme T-Shirt by Chop Shop
- weRobot, 51 Robots on a T-Shirt
illustration by Chop Shop
Magnum Opus Productions out of Van Nuys, CA made a really cool skateboarding video shot at 120 fps on a Red One Camera, a new high-resolution digital video camera that features high quality and performance at lower cost than traditional professional cameras. The music used in the video is “It’s Alright” by Bang Gang.
Google Reader is my main feed reader and an indispensable tool in the arsenal of web services I use daily. It helps me keep up with all of the blogs I follow and I also use it to share items on our Link Blog, so it’s great to see that our friends at Common Craft were commissioned to make the video “Google Reader in Plain English”.
Laughing Squid is headed to New York for Web 2.0 Expo (9/16-9/19) and while there we are organizing a NYC Drinkup on Saturday, September 13th at M1-5 in Tribeca.
photo by Scott Beale
O’Reilly and TechWeb are organizing the first ever Web 2.0 Expo in New York which is taking place September 16-19 at The Javits Center. The conference features a full schedule of keynotes, speakers and workshops, as well as Web2Open which is free with an Expo Hall pass. They are offering Laughing Squid readers a $100 discount off for the conference, just enter the code “webny08bd28″ when you register.
Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next generation web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists, people who have experiences to share and a passion for learning - the hot new thing, lessons from failures, innovations and inspirations, and the practical applications of all of the above.
I’ll be in NYC for Web 2.0 Expo and I’m organizing a Drinkup for the Saturday before the conference on September 13th. If you are in town early, please join us.
The Cat House on the Kings, is no-cage, no-kill, lifetime cat sanctuary and adoption center run by Lynea Lattanzia in Parlier, California. There are currently over 700 cats living on the 12 acre sanctuary and all of them are up for adoption. Here’s more info on how you help out by making a donation, sponsoring a cat or volunteering.
Our mission is to place rescued cats and kittens into loving, permanent homes; to provide a safe, happy and healthy home for unwanted cats and kittens in a unique, no-cage facility; to prevent pet overpopulation through spaying and neutering; and to educate the public about responsible pet ownership.
Jack Perez made a really great mini-documentary about The Cat House on the Kings.
via Neatorama
For those of you not making the trek out to Burning Man this year, Camp Riverton is organizing Balsa Man this Saturday, August 30th at Baker Beach (the location of the original Burning Man events) where they will be burning a tiny man made out of, yes you guessed it, balsa wood. Here’s more information on Balsa Man.
Balsa Man is a 3’ tall replica of Burning Man. Here are some photos of it being built.
See Also: How To Experience Burning Man 2008 Remotely
photo by Colin Fahrion
Legendary Sci-Fi author Ray Bradbury shows us his vision of 2001 in a commercial for Sunsweet Prunes.
via Boing Boing
Can’t make it to Burning Man 2008 this year? Here are a few ways you can experience the event remotely through the wonders of the Interweb.
John Curley has been doing a fantastic job writing updates and posting photos to The Burning Blog, documenting the construction of Black Rock City this year and on through the start of the event.
Throughout the week people will be uploading photos from the Playa. Here are all the photos tagged “burningman2008” on Flickr sorted by interestingness.
Danger Ranger has been uploading some wonderful photos of Black Rock City.
Make sure to check out the great DPW Mug Shots series by Serra.
Current will be covering Burning Man again for the third straight year with TV Free Burning Man, uploading videos from the playa and streaming the burn live on Saturday, August 30th at 9pm EST/PST. This year they are encouraging Burning Man participants to come to the Current camp and make their own videos as part of their “Postcards From The Playa” program.
With the combination of the wi-fi cloud and proliferation of iPhones, there many updates on Twitter from Burning Man this year. Twitter Search will bring up all of the mentions of “burningman” and we recommend following our Burning Man friends @danger_ranger, @sfslim, @actiongrl, @josephpred, @tomprice, @spanktar and of course @theburningman.
HyperJohnGraham is running his live video stream of Burning Man from center camp and Burning Man has also mounted a live webcam on the top of the Burning Man office in Gerlach, where you can watch as people come and go from the event.
You can listen to a live audio stream of Burning Man Information Radio (BMIR).
The Burning Man IRC channel is located at #burningman on irc.freenode.net.
An OpenStreetMap has been created of Black Rock City using geotagged photos.
See Previously:
MetaFliter has a great round-up of US Presidential campaign ads starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson in 1952 all the way through the 1996 election.
