Me and my step brothers, David and James, were all at a public park for the day. While the adults were playing some basketball, we ventured around and whatnot, and eventually found a construction site where they were laying in new underground plumbing and drainage.

Us, being boys, decided it would be a good idea to investigate it. Eventually, we found a part where the fence didn’t connect, which let us into the site. Man, there was some awesome stuff in there too, haha.

What was probably the coolest thing was the 6-foot diameter concrete pipe laying on the asphalt. It was about 15 feet long, so sure, we would walk through it and stuff… but that’s not what interested us. What was fun was the fact that we could roll it

All three of us were on top ‘walking’ it across the pavement. Quite entertaining to kids… but not even this can stop an ADHD kid from losing interest after 45 seconds. So I quickly come up with another idea. I told David to stay on top of the pipe, while me and James both got off and got IN the pipe.

After a second or two of David getting his bearings, he finally gets the hang of walking it again with us both in the pipe on our backs hanging on for dear life.

Me, being the genius that I am, I was on the side closest to the edge of the pipe (James was more near the inside). Well, when the pip eventually rolls around, I start to lose my stance in the pipe and decide it would be a good idea to grab the edge of it to keep from getting hurt.

Not a second later, I feel a quick motion that didn’t feel unlike somebody slapping my hand. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t hurt. I also heard it. It didn’t sound like a slap, but more like the sound it would make if you took 3 celery stalks and snapped them in half at the same time.

While I was wondering what the heck just happened, I tried to pull my hand back so I could get out of the pipe to figure it out. And that’s when I noticed that it didn’t work. I was stuck. That’s when it hit me. The pip had rolled over my fingers. It had rolled almost all the way over, but for the next few seconds it stopped, right before going backwards and off of my hand. Those couple seconds felt like ages.

By this point, I didn’t think anything bad had happened, since it wasn’t hurting all that bad… but I was rather freaked out that my hand was stuck and I didn’t know what was going on.

When the pipe finally rolled off, I saw the pavement first. It could only be described as the same stain you would get if you took a cherry, laid it on the sidewalk, then hit it with a hammer.

That’s when I started to get scared.

Then I decided that it would be a great idea to look at my hand, so I tried to pull it back again. Yet I was still finding resistance. Upon further movements, I found out that my fingers were… well… lets put it this way. Take some Playdough, put it between 2 books, and press them together. That Playdough is gonna be stuck to at least one.

After I lifted my hand from an angle that allowed my fingers to basically ‘peel’ off of the pipe, I brought back my hand with horror in my face.

That’s when the pain started at a hot sensation.

Its safe to say at this point, I was screaming. Screaming like hell.

My two step-brothers had no idea that this had happened, but when they saw the blood, they ran and got some help. I was too busy trying to think of what to do to actually do anything useful. After a few seconds, I’m being picked up, thrown over a shoulder, and put in the back seat of a car and on the way to the hospital.

Still screaming.

…I’ll spare the boring details of the hospital, the stitches, and the cast, but I do think it important to mention that while it didn’t do much damage to the entire finger, the pipe had actually splintered and shattered the tips of the bone in my pinky and ring finger. Literally… shattered. I really wish I still had the X-rays. It looked like a very tiny bomb was put in the middle of the bone in my fingers. Pieces of bone were ‘thrown’ outward from the center of my fingers.

Long story short, I still have the scars on 3 fingers, though you would never notice them unless they were pointed out, and I have ultra sensitive finger tips. And no, its not like a superpower… more like super painful if touched the wrong way.

The video does it no justice… you totally need to be there to experience the awesomeness.

If you want to see how it was done and what all it consists of, go to the Emergency Party Button page at www.plasma2002.com/epb

If you are bored and feel like playing with our lights, go to the following website.

http://tree.schwippy.com

’nuff said.

Along with the three common hand signs that can be thrown, 22 more signs have been added, each with their own set of rules on what beats what.

Click the image for a full size view

Check out the main site for a different chart that you can buy a large print of and put on your wall for reference.
Rock Paper Scissors 25 @ UMOP

Is it just me, or was Superman a total jerk back in the old days? Haha, check out these funny comic book covers and image scans from real comic books from way back when. Linky linky below!

Funny Superhero Book Covers @ Fresh99

Anyways, while we were riding up, I was thinking to myself of ideas on how a system could be made to accommodate shopping carts going up or down a story. Somewhat along the lines of an escalator system. Well, I left it at that and didn’t think about it much more afterwards.

After we left Bed Bath and Beyond, we went to the other side of the mall and found Target, my girlfriend’s OCD-friendly fantasy store. As much as she loves Target, I wasn’t surprised at how thrilled she was to learn that just like Bed Bath and Beyond, this store too was two stories. Up where we live, we have ever yet to see a 2 store Target. I honestly didn’t think they could have that much crap to sell.

What’s great about this Target is the fact that they had solved the shopping cart escalator problem! We were both as mesmerized with this thing much in the same way that Asian tourists are with a pretty blonde girl in Las Vegas. I felt like an idiot taking the footage of this thing in action, but I knew what I had to do. I was on a mission to bring back a sight of the new world to the people of the IE! So behold: the Target Cartalator! (Well, if I got to name it anyway…)

I usually wouldn’t post about a performance piece like this, but this short film just kind of hit me and I don’t really know why. I felt like I was inside the world of the artist, which is exactly what any movie creator/producer/artist wants for his/her viewer. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do to me. I just cant be immersed into a film that easily.

Thats why im posting about this. The movie is meant to be projected onto the floor, so while watching the film, try to imagine yourself standing in the immediate center and seeing all this around you. Oh, and one more thing, try to give this piece your full attention… it definitely deserves it. (Its probably time you took a break from WoW anyways, don’t you think?)

The story comes in two parts : You are alone in the center, suddenly the craziness of this world, crowds, people shouting, emotional impulses. Second part is a ballet, the world is turning, you remain still in the center watching it all. A character, a little lens dances solo and approaches you, … desire … desire … dance … and slowly going away without realization. The crowd moves away, living you by yourself, again.

AVRA _ cinema poetic machine @ Instructables

According to Wikipedia:

Headquartered in Osaka, the family-owned construction company has origins dating back to the year 578, when Prince Shotoku brought Kongō family members from Baekje, Korea to Japan to build the Buddhist Shitennoji Temple, which still stands. Over the centuries, Kongō Gumi has participated in the construction of many famous buildings, including the 16th century Osaka Castle, Hōryū-ji in Nara, and Shitennō-ji.

But it looks as though the business has finally lost its ongoing record. While they still hold the record for the longest running business, they lost the record for the oldest business still running when they were bought by the Takamatsu Corporation.

Now heres the question… Who is the world’s oldest business that is still running? It doesn’t look like many people have an answer for that one.

Business Week [Via BoingBoing]

The following tutorial will show you how to do just that. After this walk through, you will have a folder full of all your original images turned into thumbnail sized images.

Step 1: Find the Actions Pallet

After opening Photoshop, what your going to need to find is your Actions pallet. If it isn’t immediately visible on your screen, you can make it pop up by going to these menus: Window > Actions.

Step 2: Add Some Resizing Actions

Adding your own custom actions is an extremely simple process. Basically all you need to do is tell Photoshop to watch what you do, and remember it. So what we need to do is, on that actions pallet, lets click the Folder Button at the bottom. This is going to create a new folder for us to play around in. You can call this folder anything you want, but for this tutorial (and possibly more later) lets go ahead and call it Tutorials. After you press enter, you should now have a new folder called Tutorials, but with nothing in it. So lets put some stuff in it! Lets now add the entire script that will handle our image resizing process. Go ahead and click the New Action button.

Lets name this new action something informative that you can use later, such as Make Thumbnail.

After naming it, click the Record button. This will add your new action to the Tutorials folder and also start the recording process. When an action is recording, it is watching every step in Photoshop you do and adding it to the action. So, say for example, you applied a filter right now. The filter application would get recorded, and at any time in the future, you could simply double click that action with any image open in Photoshop and it would apply that filter with the exact same settings you used.

Lets start recording exactly what we want to do now. First we need to Open an image. It really doesn’t matter what image, since we are just showing Photoshop what we want to do. The specific images will be put into the batch process in a later step. As soon as you open an image, you should notice that a new action appeared inside your Make Thumbnail action definition; Open. New actions will appear every time we complete a process until we click the stop button.

Lets continue by now resizing our image we just opened. Go to the image menu, then image size. (Image > Image Size…). In the menu that popped up, make sure that constrain proportions is checked. Go ahead and put in a common width that you want all your thumbnails to be. In this example, I’m going to use 150 pixels. Leave the height to whatever it changes to. As long as constrain proportions is checked, it should be fine.

Click OK. You should now have a very small thumbnail of your original image on your screen. Now we have to save this image somewhere. It really doesn’t even matter where you save the file, simply because once we start the batch process, the saving part will get overridden with a set destination. So just ahead and save the file ANYWHERE you want. (Just don’t overwrite the file you opened…. unless you want to)

Once you saved the file, Close the image.

Now you should have a blank Photoshop. Go ahead and look at your actions pallet. Your’s should resemble mine:

If you have Open, Image Size, Save, and Close all listed, then you’re good to go! Now, simply hit the Stop Button . Its immediately to the left of the red record button on the actions pallet. You just created your thumbnail creation script.

Step 3: Start the Batch Process

Go to the File menu, then Automate, then Batch… (File > Automate > Batch…)

Upon getting to the Batch dialog, we want to change a few settings, but first, make sure that you have the right stuff selected: the Set needs to be the folder you created earlier, Tutorials in this case. The Action should be set to the new action we made, Make Thumbnail for our project.

In the next section, our Source should be set to Folder. Right below, is a button that says Choose…. Click the button. This will open a file and folder dialog, asking you what folder to use. Select the folder that has all your images that you want to make thumbnails in it.

Make sure you select the next box, Override Action “Open” Commands. What this does, is whenever it sees that we opened a file, it doesn’t ask us what file to open, but instead, it keeps opening files in the specified folder.

On the Destination drop-down, make sure to select Folder. Now below that, click Choose and select a destination folder that you want all your thumbnails to be output to. (I made a new folder for this, but you can use the same folder as long as you make each thumbnail have a different name - defined below)

Make sure Override Action “Save As” Command is checked. This will save each file by a set of rules we are making right now, instead of asking us how to save it on each file.

In the following drop-downs, you can leave them as they are, or you can customize them any way you want. In the second box, i typed _thumbnail and changed the 3rd box to extension. This will result in the files being saved like: OriginalName_thumbnail.jpg

Now just click OK!

As soon as you click OK, Photoshop will start opening all your images, one at a time, and instantly resizing them down to 150 pixels (or whatever size you chose earlier), then saving them where you told it to. It sure is a lot faster than doing it manually, wouldn’t you agree?

This was great for KFC. For one thing, it singled out a certain group of individuals for the promotion, and whenever this happens, there is ALWAYS going to be people trying to get into this group that otherwise wouldn’t be in there. Even if they really dont want the free sandwich, they want to be able to get into something they otherwise are not able to do. Thats just human nature. So eventually, word got out of the password all across the internet and everyone found it. Now they have a password, and only one thing to do with it. Go get a sandwich, and KFC hopes a drink and some tater’s too.

Another thing that made this a great marketing strategy; it is relatively uncommon. Almost unheard of for real promotions. And what more would geeks want than to tell everyone else about something weird and new about technology? Its that reason that KFC gained a lot of free press across the internet. Just the simple fact that people like to tell other people about interesting stuff. Look at what im writing about right now. Im giving KFC some free press.

Anyways… that was a while back. Im posting about yet another way KFC is using their ultra high paid advertising monkeys to churn out even more evil advertising. They are using the technological fact that younger people are able to hear different tones than older individuals.

This technology has been used in a few situations that I can think of off the top of my head such as cell phone ring tones that teachers couldn’t hear, but the kids could. Also I just saw a review on a device that was supposed to ward off teenagers from certain places that were more adult oriented (The review was horrible btw. It didnt work).

KFC’s new strategy is simple: insert a semi-ultrasonic tone into one of their advertisements. The advertisement looks and sounds completely normal to the elderly ear, but the commercial also says that there is a secret tone located somewhere in the commercial, and the first 1,000 kids to call a certain phone number with the correct location of the advertisement will get a free KFC menu item.

If you catch this commercial on the air and dont have one of your kids around to tell you where the sound is, I have a better idea. Go get your dog, set him by the television, and wait til the advertisement comes on again. When all of a sudden, your canine companion starts going into an epileptic seizure, you can bet that you just found that hidden sound.

Heres the commercial. I could hear that annoying sound perfectly, but just to be fair, this may be due to the video being transcoded into a digital medium. It may actually be a lot harder to hear on the TV.

KFC Mosquito Tone Commercial @ Engadget

The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Reactable [Via DialyCupOfTech]

Finally! Put your hamster to some REAL use! Make him work for his own well being. Load a sheet of paper into the shredder, and your little buddy just does his thing, running his little butt off, and presto; a few gear reductions later, an instant hamster bed made from purely recycled credit card applications and unfiled TPS reports.

This is artist Tom Ballhatchet’s design, which he plans to put on display in Milan, Italy.

Check out his hanster shredder and his site below.

Tom Ballhatchet [Via Gizmodo]

He made himself a dock out of Legos! Its actually 3 docks in one. Chris can hook up his Pocket PC, get some more tunes on his iPod, and charge his Nintendo DS all at once.The site is just a Picasa web album, so I can’t verify it, but it seems that he most likely has a USB hub tucked under there to tie it all to one usb cable and one power cable. And if you look on the side there, it looks like theres a spare USB port for just about anything else you could think of putting in there.

The dock looks good. Almost perfect. It seems as though the iPod dock was meant to be there. Theres no doubt that this took quite a few re-building to get it just right. Good job Chris! I definatly wouldn’t mind having this up on my desk next to my monitor.

Lego Dock Web Album [Via Engadget]

I just found the deal online and ordered $20 worth, haha… i dont know how that happened, but whatever. Theres quite a lot of Christmas and other holiday ties, but if you sort through those, theres some nice ones lyin around there. And $1!

Ha!

Amazon $1 Deals [Via Bargainist]

But sometimes, the temptation is just too much for the reporter and they decide they have enough Photoshop experience and talent to get away with changing some elements in their shot.

This is becoming such a problem, that the Associated Press actually has a third party help them out with it. They contract the help of Hany Farid. Hany has made special software that analyzes photos to determine if it is genuine or not automatically. The software looks for certain red flags about the photo that the normal eye just wouldn’t catch without a magnifying glass. Things like repeating pixels patterns, or unnatural shadows, pixel patterns due to rescaling, and especially the pupil reflections of multiple people in the shot.

It make sense when ya think about it. What is reflected in one person’s pupil should also be reflected in another person’s, to an extent.

Forgery has been around ever since… well…. authenticity. Theres no way to eliminate it. But even so, things need to be done.

“This is an arms race,” Farid says. “I can already tell you how it’s going to end: We’re going to lose. It’s always going to be easier to create a forgery than detect a forgery. But we’re going to take the power to create forgeries out of the hands of amateurs. We will raise that bar up until you have to be very, very good to do it.”

Computing Photographic Forgeries [Via Boing Boing]

Well, ok…. maybe we all just like sticking them in the microwave. But that aside, heres an awesome little tutorial on making your own peeps, done by the minds over at Evil Mad Scientist. Clicky clicky on the linky linky.

Make Your Own Peeps @ EvilMadScientist

Since then, the X Price foundation has come up with another contest that should spawn the ideas and improvements we desperately need in the world today.

The proposal states it will give an unnamed amount in prize money (Probably the standard $10M) to the first group that can make an automobile that can successfully break the 100 MPG mark.

Whats the record right now, like 50ish or something? Hold on…… ok, a quick googling shows 76 MPG (Dont quote me on that though). But anyways, how awesome would it be to be able to have a car that could get you across the country on a single tank of gas? The foundation isn’t looking for a car that was just made by some MIT students in a dorm room. They want something that can actually be manufactured and sold. They have 2 classes so far; a 4-wheel / 4-passenger model, and a 2-passenger model with an unspecified amount of wheels.

With the rediculous gasoline prices around these days, this has got to be one of the most needed things in our world. Everything should go pretty well too, as long as Chevron doesnt get their hands on the winning prototypes. We would never hear about it again.

Automotive X Prize [Via Slashdot]

I’m willing to bet that you’ve used one or more of these passwords online before. I know that I have used ‘qwerty’ on more than one occasion for throw-away accounts or for shady sites that I fear I may be in danger of personal information theft.

Just one more note, the list was compiled across the pond, so obviously, there are going to be different numbers if we were to take a poll here in the states. For example, our favorite team probably wouldnt include Liverpool

Click the link to check it out

Top 10 Most Common Passwords

For those of you that don’t know what ferro fluid is, ferro fluid is simply a fluid that is has a ferrous material embedded in it, thus making it magnetic.

Whats going on here is simple. The spiral ‘poles’ you see are connected to an electromagnet underneath and is being controlled with varying amounts of power to get the movement of the fluid.

Head on over to the link to see the project in the video.

Ferrofluid Spiral [Via Boing Boing]

DreamWorks will not just be making all of their movies in 3D, but doing so exclusively. In other words, there won’t be ANY 2D versions of the films hitting the big screen. Just the DVDs. This is going to do a couple things. For one thing, its going to mean that you wont be able to find any more DreamWorks titles at the smaller movie theaters anymore. This COULD even put them out of business, unless they are able to cough up the costs to upgrade their equipment (which is going to be a pretty big cost). But on the reverse side of the spectrum, that means that all of the larger theaters (Regal, Edwards, etc) are going to upgrade every one of their theaters to hold 2 digital projectors for each screen that will show the 3D movies. Thats why its going to take 2-3 years before they start making exclusive 3D movies.

But along with the ability to display 3D movies, the digital projectors would be able to display a multitude of higher quality movies of all types (Think IMAX).

But heres the drawback… and its a pretty big one, in my opinion… you’re STILL going to have to wear some goofy glasses. Theres just no way around it… not with single screen projection anyways. The positive side of the negative side is the fact that they wont be those retro red and blue glasses… they would be the perpendicular-polarized lens kind (I honestly don’t know what they are called, i just know how they work).

This is the one thing that would keep me away from the theaters. I just don’t really think I would like having to wear uncomfortable glasses for almost 2 hours.

But this COULD be an interesting trend if you think about it. If every one of the theaters are transforming to the 3D projectors, then that means that there will be more productions in 3D that just DreamWorks’. There will actually be an available market for it. Nobody will have to be scared of making a 3D flick in fear of no theaters buying the reel due to the fact that they wouldn’t be able to use it.

If it gains even more popularity, then this will bring another kind of manufacturer into the scene…. yup, you guessed it… polarized glasses makers. You will be able to buy your own 3D glasses for the movies. You would have your own pair that you could leave at home and whenever you want to go watch a movie, you grab your nice comfy glasses that you hand picked yourself. Or hell, theres no reason why regular glasses couldn’t be perpendicularly polarized! You wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference, and they could still block out the sun on those extra bright California days. Go ahead and click the linky linky to see the press report on DreamWorks asking Bank of America for some money to do this with, haha.

DreamWorks Exclusively in 3D [Via Gizmodo]

The BrakeLok fits over your already existing hand brake and covers the button on the end. It will let you press the button still when in normal use. But, at any time, at the end of the BrakeLok is a key, which can be taken out. If the key is not in the BrakeLok, there is no way of pressing the brake release button, or even taking the BrakeLok off, essentially rendering the car immovable.

As with all theft protection devices, a good thief can get around it. And that rule applies to the BrakeLok as well, but still, adding more protection to your $1,500,000 Enzo is never going to hurt.

BrakeLok [Via Gizmodo]

I’ll admit it, thats gonna be pretty funny. But Ill also tell you straight out that Im not that excited about the movie. Im just as much of a Simpsons fan-freak that can recite every episode from the first 6 seasons as the next, so I think I have the right to say that the quality of The Simpsons has gone way way down over the past 5 years. But anyways, back to 7-11.

Besides just changing the name to the Kwik-E-Mart, they are going to change a few select items to coincide with the cult hit. Such as the Squishy (What flavor did you get? Blue), Buzz Cola (Twice the sugar, twice the caffeine!), and Krusty-O’s (Now with flesh-eating bacteria in every box!). Unfortunately, theres no confirmed word about offering Duff (Duff-man does not approve!).

Along with the changes, there will also be the usual store-wide sponsored ads (Think ‘MMMM… donuts’).

Seeing as how there are more than 4,700 stores nation-wide, and only 11 are getting the new clothes, unfortunately it seems that not many people will get to see the changes. The locations haven’t even been released yet.

Ya know what would be great though? If Wal*Mart started the same thing. At least if they did it, you KNOW you would finally be able to go buy yourself an authentic Li’l Bastard Clock-Tampering Kit.

Real Kwik-E-Marts [Via Boing-Boing]