The quirky music video for the song Zeroes & Ones by California-based indie rock band Baby Seal Club is full of chickens pecking at beet-filled human figures in a tiny faux Apple store. The song (which I think is pretty great) is from their upcoming album titled Default World, due out in summer 2012. The video was conceived & produced by Fudo, Wizzbang, Olava & Uncle Stabby.

Wizz Bang, the band’s Chief-Chicken Wrangler, described the video’s shoot in detail at the Baby Seal Club website:

I have raised many birds from egg to adulthood and one thing I’ve discovered along the way is that the baby chicks really enjoy eating the shredded vegetable fiber that shoots out the back of our big juicer. Being a somewhat macabre chicken-wrangler and verified horror flick fan, I noticed that the beet fibers looked a lot like viscera and guts – the amazing reddish color, the stringy consistency, and the hard-to-identify-on-film quality of the stuff thus sparked an idea. I began feeding them the stuff everyday as a “treat,” so they would become good and hungry for it when it was time to be on the set.

An advance copy of the CD is available now:

photo by Makenai

photo by Blake Maloof

Jeri Ellsworth created this awesome Commodore 64 bass guitar for last weekend’s Maker Faire Bay Area. Ellsworth explains how she made the guitar and how it works in this MAKE:Live video recorded at Maker Faire. (skip ahead about 40 seconds to the start of the interview).

via Waxy.org

Leap is a motion sensitive controller that lets a user interact with a computer using hand and finger gestures (video). The device is about the size of an iPod and is so sensitive it can distinguish individual fingers or detect a pencil in a hand. Leap is available for pre-order and is expected to ship around December 2012. Leap is being developed by Leap Motion in San Francisco.

Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements. The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter

via CNET

Bio Computer by tech enthusiast Mike Schropp is a homebuilt computer that doubles as a planter for wheatgrass. The heat from the CPU warms the soil above, which aids in the germination and growth of the wheatgrass. Schropp built Bio Computer for his five year old son.

Thanks to Mike Schropp for the tip.

Etsy shop Atomic Attic makes adorable pet beds from used Apple computer bodies and vintage televisions. Each one comes with a cushion that features a washable slipcover.

via Earth Techling

“An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!”

Raspberry Pi is a low cost mini-PC created to get kids interested in programming. This unencased credit card-sized device is made by UK Charity, Raspberry Pi Foundation and costs between $25-$35 each. Later versions of Raspberry Pi will offer a case, documentation and educational software. According to the FAQs, Model A has 256Mb RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet while Model B has 256Mb RAM, 2 USB ports and an Ethernet port. The Foundation has announced that they have over 350,000 pre-orders worldwide. The Raspberry Pi can be purchased through Premier Farnell/Element 14 and RS Components.

We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children. We think that 2012 is going to be a very exciting year.

Thanks to Danielle Engelman for the tip!

The Magic Cube by Celluon projects an operational full-sized laser keyboard with motion detection and it’s compatible with a variety of devices. According to Celluon, this smart little gadget also works as a multi-touch mouse and a handwriting recognition device.

The Celluon Virtual Keyboard uses a light projection of a full-sized QWERTY computer keyboard on almost any surface. Used with MAC Laptop, PDA’s and Smart Phones, the Virtual Keyboard provides a practical way to send e-mails, word documents processing and spreadsheet tasks, enabling users to leave laptops and computers at home. VKB’s adaptable technology studies the user’s finger movements to interpret and record keystrokes.

via Harvest and Jennifer Baum

The Poodle USB Hub is a smartly designed device that uses its four “legs” as four 2.0 hi-speed USB ports and its eye as the indication light. It is available to purchase at Fred Flare.

via Technabob and Geek Alerts

Sci-fi author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted in this 1974 TV interview that in 2001, regular people would have personal computers that communicate and retrieve information using a system that sounds rather like the Internet.

He will have in his own house…a console through which he can talk to his friendly local computer and get all the information he needs for his everyday life, like his bank statements, theatre reservations—all the information you need in the course of living in a complex modern society. This will be in a compact form in his own house. You”ll have a television screen…and a keyboard and he’ll talk to the computer and get information from it. And he’ll take it as much for granted as we take the telephone.

The interview is from the archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

via Explore & Open Culture

The 2012 Blip Festival, an event showcasing music and art that is created with vintage computers and game consoles, takes place May 25-27 at the Gramercy Theatre in New York City. The Blip Festival is presented by 8bitpeoples, The Tank, and Live Nation.

Floppy disk enthusiast Dweller has been grappling for some time with how to archive his personal collection of 5000 3.5″ floppies. So he built a Floppy Autoloader that automatically copies and photographs a floppy disk in about three minutes (video).

via Hack A Day

Screenshots of Despair is a hilarious Tumblr of discouraging messages from apps, sites, and devices. Screenshots of Despair is by Josh Kimball.

via Waxy.org

Anonymous has just released Anonymous-OS, their own Ubuntu-based operating system that uses the MATE desktop environment. It was created to help check the security of web pages for educational purposes and is available for download through SouceForge, at your own risk of course.

Created for educational purposes,
to checking the security of web pages.
Please don’t use any tool to destroy any web page :)
If you attack to any web page,
might end up in jail because is a crime in most countries!
*** The user has total responsibility for any illegal act. ***

via The Next Web & The Hacker News

“Computer Security: You Make The Difference” is a 1990 internal AT&T video about computer security issues and in particular, the dreaded hacker.

With effective computer security measures, this hacker will only waste his time and ruin his evening—not our corporate future.

video via AT&T Tech Channel

Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing created a montage featuring almost Every Apple Design Ever in 30 Seconds.

Rob also created a complementary montage of Every Next Product Ever in 30 Seconds.

“Still Life” by artist Scott Garner is an interactive picture that can be tilted by the viewer, causing the objects in the picture to be tossed about the frame (video). Garner created the effect with a framed TV, swivel mount, spatial sensor, and 3D software.

via MAKE

“Algorithmic search for love” by Austrian artist Julian Palacz is an art installation featuring a search engine that can sift through films for a spoken word or phrase (video). After the viewer enters a search term, a supercut-style montage of relevant clips is displayed by a projector.

In a time in which digital cultural assets far outweigh analog, the ease with which we can now amass and exchange material has resulted in large personal collections of media data (music, films, series etc.). Julian Palacz has devised and developed a search engine that is able to enter text to search personal film and video archives for spoken language. An individual collection of films thus becomes a database of keywords and every spoken word or phrase in the archives can be searched. By entering a sentence like “i love her”, all film or video clips with this phrase will be shown in sequence.

via The Creators Project

The Samsung Transparent Window is a 46 inch transparent LCD display that is a combination touchscreen computer and window (video via MobileNations). The display can perform a variety of functions familiar to tablet users. There’s even a “blinds” app that blots out unwanted natural light. The display is entering production later this year.

via The Next Web

This 1960 IBM ad touts the capabilities of SAGE, a massive Cold War-era automated system for tracking and destroying incoming enemy bombers. The heart of the system was the IBM AN/FSQ-7 computer, which at 275 tons is still the world’s largest computer. Each computer had 55,000 vacuum tubes, required a half acre of floor space, and operated on punch cards. There were 52 AN/FSQ-7 computers around the country. SAGE was retired in the early 1980s.

Here are photos Scott Beale shot in 2006 of the SAGE on display at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

via Retronaut

video via chiklit, photo via MITRE

Steve Jobs, microprocessor pioneer Ted Hoff, and other Silicon Valley luminaries discuss the arrival, in the 1970s, of the microprocessor. The video is part of the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A One Hundred Year Renaissance by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

via Brain Pickings

The Restart Page simulates the rebooting process of a variety of operating systems from computer history. It was created and designed by Soon in Tokyo and built by rehabstudio.

via Daring Fireball

Techno-Dunce is a 1980s film short that shows a frustrated student trying to grasp technology in a school computer lab. She gets teased and then the whole thing turns into a hilarious ‘quasi-rap’ music video which apparently aired on MTV. It is from a longer (never-completed) film called siliconia made by Lange, Celia, Calbert and Cedric Lai of LVL Productions.

Thanks to my brother Andrew for the tip!

Artist Chris DeLorenzo created this adorable set of Picture Alphabet Keyboard Stickers in 2009 to “transform your typing experience into something playful”.

We used to learn our alphabets by reading those classroom banners that associated each letter with an animal or object. These days as kids become increasingly computer dependent at an early age I thought it was about time to adapt an old method to a new medium.

via Curiosity Counts

CPU Wars is a simple trump card game in which computer processors (and their specifications) are pitted against one another. The game’s creator, Harry Mylonadis, collected 30 processors spanning the past 40 years of computer development in order to create the game’s cards. He’s raising funds for the game on Kickstarter.

The MirrorBook Air is a compact mirror designed to look like a tiny Apple MacBook Air laptop.

Here is a little gadget that will appeal to fans of Cupertino. The MirrorBook Air is a small pocket mirror design which incorporates the famous MacBook Air from Apple. Practical, beautiful and incredibly fun!

via The Next Web