After Thanksgiving, there's Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, with stores offering holiday shoppers the best deals they can muster up. This year's Black Friday was practically a one-day warzone, with Target taking on most of the mayhem (see videos below).
Sometimes going ghetto is the best route, especially when you can save about $1200 big ones. Just ask the guys over at 1 Block Off the Grid. When they needed a fancy Mac to run Adobe After Effects, they decided to Hackintosh it. Meaning they built a Mac in a box -literally (a cardboard Amazon box acts as the "case").
Greg Gillis is Girl Talk. Girl Talk is pioneer of the popularization of mashups and digital sampling. To some, Girl Talk may be old news in today's over saturation of remixes and mashups. To others, Gillis is master.
Joseph L. Griffiths, an Australian artist who resides in Paris, has created a DIY bicycle-powered drawing machine. I'd like to see a video of the piece in action.
Have you ever been mesmerized by the Lindy Hop? It knocks me out. WonderHowTo has tutorials, but here's an interesting way to absorb the moves: watch in slow motion.
What if everything in life was controlled by augmented reality? Keiichi Matsuda imagines: "The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Matt Zoller Seitz from Salon.com writes this beautiful ode to Kodachrome. "To shoot a roll of film was to take a leap of faith. The digital evolution has eliminated a lot of uncertainty from the process, and that's probably a net gain -- especially if you're an amateur shutterbug. Unfortunately, some other, wonderful elements have disappeared as well: mystery, poetry and the element of chance."
Hongkiat has compiled a collection of beautiful examples of "Bokeh" photography (1, 2):
Did you ever, as a know-nothing kid, push against your closed eyelids for the pleasure of the resultant light show? LCD bending takes the low-tech fun of physical retinal stimulation and updates it for the 21st century. And, as the title suggests, the end result looks very much like a sort of angelic, fractal-based fingerpainting.
The full 30 minute short film by John Hillcoat that was shown on TV. From the description: Red Dead Redemption: The Man from Blackwater
Ah, the old transparent screen trick. Endless possibilities... Though it doesn't QUITE work like this (via Joy of Tech):
This little bad boy is lots of fun, but I'm not sure I'd hold it up to my ear in public... especially wearing creator Junior Tan's menacing facial expression.
Thanks to TV.com for pointing out how cool a video from an incredibily uncool band can be!
With the advent of the iPad and large inexpensive monitors, movie posters have not only gone digital but they have gone moving as well. Now we are not talking a trailer, we are talking moving Key Art or what is now known as a Living Moving Poster. This term is similar to a motion graphic Title card that has a "Living Hold" which simply means, the title is resolved but there is still movement in the background and lighting effects. Here is the final results. These same guys are now pushing i...
So watching this I think what is so interesting is not what film does better, but what the differences are between the DSLRs. Give me Kodak indoors and Fuji outdoors any day, but the 5D really does shine, it becomes hard to see why you should shell out for a RED, or most Sony products especially for a anything without guaranteed theatrical release. Documentary I believe remains a whole different question and workflow is still a headache but when the name of the game is make this beautiful ...
Having grown up with quite an addiction to movies I have always loved the Key Art Posters that sell the film. Today movies, especially indies, are often sold by their DVD cover art. Its quite talent to package a crappy movie with an awesome cover. I particularly love the older movie posters that were created way before the advent of photoshop and digital cameras. The amount of work that went into these posters is quite amazing and even though the movies might suck, the key art lives on he...
Wish you had $1000 to throw down for a projector? Well, if you have an old laptop lying around instead, here is a simple way to cheaply build your own digital projector. Lifehacker posts a HowTo excerpted from DIYer Randy Sarafan's 62 Projects to Make with a Dead Computer: (And Other Discarded Electronics).
16-year-old Alexander Kendrick has invented a low-frequency radio that allows for cave-texting, meaning deep underground cellular communication.
Coming soon! Popsci reports that a multitouch skin that can make any surface a touchscreen will be released this summer.
An article in Friday's Wallstreet Journal examines a model for success that can't be ignored: the world is just goo-goo for Lady Gaga.
Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 3, or CS3, is the industry-standard application for digital photo manipulation. It is ideal for professional photographers, serious amateur photographers, and graphic designers. Having the software, however, isn't enough; you'll need to know how to use it. In this CS3 tutorial, you'll learn how to distress text edges in Adobe Photoshop CS3. Distress text edges in Photoshop CS3.
If you are like most people, you will probably be traveling a lot over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. While holiday air travel is hardly the most fun or relaxing activity in the world, you can prepare yourself with the following tips and strategies to make long flights as bearable and comfortable as possible.
There are many advantages to knowing how to speak in foreign languages, whether it's for traveling, business, or simply for the pleasure of getting to know a culture that is completely different from your own.
In this New section We are going to learn about the texturing in Autodesk Maya. In this tutorial we will learn how to make an eye texture without using any external image or any kind of digital painting. Still we will manage to creat not so realistic but very convincing and customizable eye shader with the help of ramp in Autodesk Maya. Hope this technique will help you to create the same with very little expense. Eye Texture in Maya | Maya Texturing | Maya Shader | Texturing In Autodesk Maya...
Talk about yankee ingenuity... zany Japanese inventor, Dr. Nakamats, has lead a life propelled by curiosity and inventiveness. Nakamats boasts that he has Thomas Edison beat by a mile (compare Edison's measly 1,093 patents to Nakamats' 3,357).
Dutch designer Anneke Jakobs created this recycled Chiquita banana box chandelier while a student at the Utrecht School of Product Design.
Look left. Can your garbage take photos like that? With a few tweaks it will! The pinhole camera is photography in its most basic form. Using a light-proof container, the 35mm will capture the image when the pinhole is opened. The resulting photographs have a distinctly démodé look, like this shot from Kodak's archive.
Both petty and fun, this tutorial requires only double stick tape, an Altoids tin, a Hallmark greeting card, and a primal sense of justice.
The Canon EOS 40D uses a nine-point focusing system. Learn more about using the focusing features of the Canon EOS 40D Digital SLR camera in this free Canon photography lesson. Use focusing features on the Canon EOS 40D - Part 1 of 9.
For lazy children, winter snow means snowball fights, snowmen and snow days. For lazy homeowners, it can mean leaky roofs and costly repairs. Fortunately, where snowy roofs are concerned, a little bit of preventative maintenance can go a long way.
Through Thursday, January 20th, Borders is offering the Kobo Wireless eReader for $99 with coupon—that's $40 off its typical retail price of $139! Though the Kobo comes preloaded with 100 out-of-copyright classics, new users will nevertheless be interested in filling their new eReaders with their own books.
There's something about the world of steampunk that fascinates me. WonderHowTo has plenty of steampunk projects, like the hardware chess set, binocular goggles, and even a lesson on fashion. But nothing screams steampunk more than nevets_mcd's hard drive case.
Let's face it— most people don't understand Shakespeare's language. If they say they do, they're probably lying. The poetic words of the world's most famous playwright continue to plague school children and college lit. majors alike, but not anymore.
To those who may not know about this, the UK high court has ruled that all UK based ISP's are to begin blocking Piratebay. This comes in retaliation to Piratebay's action to take down all torrents and provide only magnet links to the pirated content - a move which releases TPB from liability should they be once more accused of hosting the actual content.
Mad Science is looking for more hackers, makers, and DIYers to participate in our community madness. If you've recently designed or made a project, we want to see it! Share with the other Mad Scientists out there by posting up a how-to of your pet project on our community corkboard, or even just a few cool, inspiring photos of the build.
Today's digital cameras record not only the images themselves, but also the metadata behind the scenes, like camera settings, location, date, time, etc. But there's a lot more to say about a photograph. What's the subject? Is it night or day? Outside or inside? Person, place or thing?
Even if you live in a big city, chances are you have some wild raccoons or foxes that cannot abide a vertical trash barrel. While apparently omnipresent, these phantasmic critters usually vanish in the night leaving only a shameless trail of refuse you never wanted to see ever again. While I haven't found a way to stop them, I can help you snap some photos of the dastardly creatures.
Over the next few months, I'll be focusing on building a fully functional, long range UAV. This series will consist of several in-depth articles on my progress and the steps involved, so you can follow along and build your own unmanned aerial vehicle!
1.) If you do not know something, keep our mouth shut.* No-one, I repeat no-one, is interested in your uneducated guesses about why something is the way it is, or why someone did something a certain way. At best, you will trick them into temporarily thinking you know what you’re talking about. At worst, you will convince them that you are speaking the truth and they will perpetuate your bullsh*t to others. Do not contribute to making the world a more foolish place just because you had to say ...
Christmas just wouldn't be the same without cookies. Besides the gifts, it's the one thing that keeps the family (not to mention Santa) coming back each year. As with any family gathering, there's bound to be some chaos this holiday season, but as long as you've got a good supply of Christmas cookies, there should be peace and harmony.