Sleeping in a Beer Can

Filed Under Events, Funny, Websites on 2009-05-14, 14:01 | 1 Comment

With large multi-day festivals one of the problems is where everyone goes to sleep at the end of the night! Sometimes the festivals are located near hotels, but a lot of the time you’ll find a sea of tents housing everyone. But the organizers of Smukfest, a large music festival in Denmark, hit upon a novel idea: after spending all day drinking beer, why not sleep in a can?

The giant cans (11.5 feet high and 7.2 feet in diameter) are dubbed “Can Sleeps” and have a lockable door, a refrigerator and a roof that opens for light and air. Inside you’ll find all the comforts of home, a refrigerator (can shaped of course), tables, chairs, mirrors, shelves, etc. The bed itself is lofted and comfortable large enough to sleep two adults. All of the furniture is of course from a nearby neighbor, the Swedish Ikea. Currently Royal Unibrew has a contract on them, but in the future I’m sure more brands will start jumping on the wagon. It’s a wonderfully unique approach and I can’t wait to see them when we take Dance Dance Immolation to Denmark for this year’s Smukfest. And yes, they do come in six packs.

photo by micfour

Thanks to Springwise for some translation.

Tagged: CanSleep

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In Bb 2.0: A YouTube Collaboration

Filed Under Art, Websites on 2009-05-14, 11:43 | 1 Comment

Want to make your own ambient Kutiman mixes? Thanks to the work of Darren Solomon of Science For Girls and several YouTube contributors you can (as long as you like Bb). The project is called “In Bb 2.0” and can be found at www.inbflat.net.

Darren put out a call for people to post YouTube videos of them playing instruments (or singing) in Bb major. He gave some guidelines on what works best, but left it open for people to be creative. The result is incredibly fun. You can play all of the videos at once, or just a few. Try playing a couple, and then bring in a few more, adjust the volume, start/stop, etc. The resulting sound has an incredibly pleasant ambient quality. Rather than a mash up where things were forced together, it flows incredibly well regardless of which video you play and when you start playing it. I’m also very fond of the spoken word video.

If you want to contribute to the video, Darren outlines the guidelines on the site. He’s not putting every video up because he wants to maintain the feel of the project. I agree with his choice as I’m not sure Rap Chop would really work.

via Jaku

Tagged: Darren Solomon, In Bb 2.0, YouTube

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Twitter Angering Users By Removing @replies

Filed Under Twitter on 2009-05-12, 22:28 | 5 Comments

Twitter made what might first appear to be a small announcement, but on second thought has a huge impact on how many people interact with their service. They announced that they rolled out an update the would remove tweets from your friends that start with @Username from your Twitter stream if you were not following Username as well. They are not removing tweets that contain @Username mentioned anywhere else other than the start of the tweet. Confused? Let’s break it down:

I (@edrabbit) am following Colin (@catcubed). Colin is following Some Cool Friend (@somecoolguy) but I am not following @somecoolguy because I have not met @somecoolguy yet. The problem occurs when @catcubed posts the following tweet:

@somecoolguy Your latest album is awesome! Thanks for the great drum and bass tunes!

I will not see this tweet in my stream and I would potentially miss out on finding out about @somecoolguy and his awesome music. Or maybe @somecoolguy is in fact that person that Colin introduced me to at the party last week, but we never thought to mention Twitter names. When I see Colin @replying to him on Twitter I’m able to start following him myself. If I never see Colin’s tweet, then I’ll have to manually hunt down Some Cool Friend. Just like on other social networks, I watch who my friends are talking to because chances are their friends are interesting and quite possibly are my friends already too!

So, enough explanation, if you’re someone that this bothers, you’ve probably already realized it. I urge you to post to Twitter using the hashtag #fixreplies and #openreplies in order to bring Twitter’s attention to the fact that thousands of us want this feature back.

Tagged: #fixreplies, #openreplies, Twitter

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Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

Filed Under Funny, Movies and Music, SF Bay Area, Video on 2009-05-12, 16:42 | 6 Comments

Ever wondered what it would be like if a gigantic shark and a humongous octopus battled it out in the waters of the San Francisco Bay? Neither have I, but after seeing the trailer I couldn’t resist pre-ordering Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, the straight-to-DVD-movie with Debbie Gibson. It’s a flick from The Asylum, a company with a large amount of movies with strangely familiar titles.

Wondering how big “Mega” is? Here’s a still from the movie of Mega Shark attacking the Golden Gate Bridge. Needless to say our favorite Bay Area shark is put to shame.

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Tonium Pacemaker Replaces Turntables for Hobby DJs

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Movies and Music, Video on 2009-05-08, 12:53 | 3 Comments

As someone who has a problem with both electronic music and technology, the Tonium Pacemaker seems right up my alley. It’s never going to replace a truly talented DJ and luckily the creators recognize that. However, thanks to the lower price of entry ($499 for the 60GB version), it can bring more people into the world of mixing music. I’ll be honest, I’m torn. I don’t know whether to whine about the purity of vinyl, or to go out and buy a Pacemaker. But I do know that if I was to get one it sure would take up a lot less space than the two Technics + a mixer + cabinet of records. My big question though is how well does it deal with jungle/drum and bass tracks?

If you don’t have the patience for the full in-depth review above, check out Engadget’s quick video highlighting some of the features. The official video is absolutely horrible however:

Tagged: DJing, Tonium Pacemaker

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My Little Pony Live Action Movie

Filed Under Funny, Video on 2009-05-07, 18:59 | Leave a Comment

I can’t wait for the My Little Pony Live Action movie to come out.

via Rubin of course

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Beautiful Thermite Explosion

Filed Under Fire, Video on 2009-05-02, 15:12 | 1 Comment

Definitely file this one under “Don’t Try This At Home” or even “…At NIMBY”. The above video is a wonderful example of what happens when you pack gunpowder into a pipe and then top it off with thermite. It’s a beautiful mushroom cloud of molten metal that you’ll want to be far away from when it goes off.

via Jon Sarriugarte

Tagged: Explosion, thermite

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DDI at How To Destroy The Universe Part 6

Filed Under Events, Fire, Fire Art, News, SF Bay Area, Video on 2009-04-27, 17:25 | 3 Comments

Dance Dance Immolation - Inches from fire

On Saturday, we pulled Dance Dance Immolation out of storage for the first time in almost two years, dusted it off and got it running again. The event was “How To Destroy the Universe Part 6”, an industrial party held at the new NIMBY location in Oakland. We ran one of the longest and most problem-free runs in the history of DDI. BoingBoingTV came and filmed and we had a chance to shoot the infamous sfslim with fire. We also got to shoot fire at several Noisebridge members, the newest blogger for Laughing Squid (Burstein), and a bunch of others. Many photos and videos were taken. My photos can be found in this Flickr set and this album on Vimeo.

If you’ve never seen Dance Dance Immolation, here’s what it looks like in action:

One of my personal favorite photos of the night was captured by Audrey while I was practicing my Fire Art DJ skills:

More photos and videos:

Tagged: Dance Dance Immolation, DDI, Interpretive Arson, NIMBY

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Amazing Landing After Plane Engine Dies

Filed Under Video on 2009-04-22, 17:13 | 1 Comment

Want to see the correct way to make an emergency landing? Watch from two different views as the engine cuts out and the pilot calmly makes a landing on the highway amidst the occasional profanity.

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How To Take Apart the Flip Video Ultra

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Geek on 2009-04-13, 12:50 | 17 Comments

Flip Video Ultra Camera with Macbook Pro

I love the idea of the Flip Video cameras.I bought a Flip Video Ultra last year and it has served me quite well. It’s small enough that it’s easy to carry around for those random moments when you wish you had a video camera. It’s cheap enough to not worry about taking it places where it could get absolutely destroyed. And it has enough space (60minutes) to record quite a bit of video.

However when I was doing some video for the 2009 Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight I noticed that the power switch was not sliding as easily as I remembered and would occasionally stick and cause problems when I needed to quickly turn the camera on and start recording. I figured it was just dirty so I’d open it up and clean it. I didn’t want to just start pulling stuff apart as I’ve broken many a plastic tab with this method. I did a quick search to see if there were any tear-down guides for disassembling the Flip Video camera, but came up short. I did find this video which was helpful, but also difficult to flip back and forth through. So here’s my quick photo guide to dismantling should you want to clean things, modify the LED, microphone, or whatever.

[Show as slideshow]

Unfortunately after all that disassembling and reassembling my power switch was still sticking. A couple loosening turns of the screw closest to the power switch was actually all the solution I needed. It was still interesting to take a look at the guts of my trusty Flip though.

Tagged: Flip Video, How-To

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