’cause if it is then I need to get one of these bad boys!

[via @aaronpedersen]

Ever wonder how the Twitter-verse can be owned by a total n00b like yourself?  Want to become hella l337 at the Social Web 2.0 party?  Well thanks to peeps at “The Complete Social Media Douchebag™” you will soon be able to:

use Web 2.0 Social Media to become a millionaire overnight … to increase your Twitter followers by eleventy-billion in 3.68 seconds … to use Twitter to make a gazillion dollars through affiliate marketing and multi-level marketing schemes

Why wait, act now!

Read [via DvD]

Video from the KAGUYA explorer probe.  Make sure to watch the HD version since the probe has HD cameras.  Very, very cool.

[via ze frank]

National Geographic (or NatGeo if you watch there awesome channel) has a new project on their website called Infinite Photograph.

Dive into this photo-mosaic portrait of the Earth to see it through the eyes of users like you. It’s made up of hundreds of photos of the natural world, each submitted by users to My Shot.

Its a interactive image viewer that uses hundreds of images to make a tile mosaic of another image. From there you can click on a quadrant and zoom in to see the images that made up the larger image. Very much worth checking out.

Read [via @ryanstewart]

With the growth of control and interactivity available via video games, the world of Machinima is really taking off.  Games like Little Big Planet are designed with user content generation in mind and its amazing to see how it is being adapted and expanded by the user community.

Machinima, as defined via Wikipedia:

Machinima (pronounced /məˈʃiːnɨmə/ or /məˈʃɪnɨmə/) is the use of real-time three-dimensional (3-D) graphics rendering engines to generate computer animation. The term also refers to works that incorporate this animation technique. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, often use graphics engines from video games, a practice that arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios‘ 1992 computer game Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter (FPS) video games, such as id Software’s Doom and Quake.

[via @mesh]

Brilliant look into what our future wirless world will look like, all thanks to Qualcomm.

[via Geekologie]

Holy edible circuit board!  This is just the coolest food make ever.  Why couldn’t we have had someone think this up when I was a kid?  This is the kind of nerd fun that arts and crafts time is all about.  Construction paper turkey’s and circuit boards!!  I may have actually learned more about hardware if I had this project 20 years ago… maybe.

Read [via Evil Mad Scientists]

I love Tesla Coils. I remember the first time a saw one when I was a small boy. It was at an Academy of Science in Dallas or Fort Worth, the actual location is hazy, but sitting in the audience watching the electricity arc out was the coolest thing ever.  They are even cooler today.  Spending the last 10 years in San Francisco and being a DJ, eventually you play or attend at least one party that has a Tesla Coil.  The last one I saw was at the Steampunk Treehouse Fundraiser where I was DJing a set.  They had this massive 10′+ Tesla Coil that was both deafening and f***ing cool.  Especially since I was on the same level as the top of the coil and the electricity kept killing my midi/usb sync to my laptop.

Since that last in-person demo I have been seeing a new trend in “singing” coils, something I have not experienced in person yet.  By modulating the resonant frequency of the coil you can make them play songs. Oh Science, is there nothing you can’t do?  The first video is the original video of a singing coil I had seen.  Below is a new one featuring the “Imperial March”:

By now, pretty much most meme-aholics have heard the vocal isolation track of Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil” featuring the crazed wails, screams, whistles and OH YEAH’s of David Lee Roth.  The song was included on the seminal 1978 release of Van Halen’s self-titled debut. Due to the release date and the extreme rock qualities of the album, this clearly makes the album “Van Halen” Classic Rock.

Jump ahead to 1979, barely a year later, another great is born.  Black and white line graphics represent your ship as it blasts and drifts through monstrous rocks in the darkness of deep space.  Asteroids is considered by many to be one of the great games of the past arcade mania, a legend that still lives in our hearts today.  Truly a Classic game.

Due the close proximity of time, there is a good chance that many Asteroids players listend to “Running with the Devil” while blasting rocks into smaller and smaller bits, while difting, ever drifting.  Thanks to the boyz/girlz at shitbagz, you can now play Assteriodz, The Diamond Dave Edition featuring Van Halen.  A true classic paring, like fine wine and cheese.  If the wine is a Flash casual game and cheese is the over the top stylings of Diamond Dave.  Good times.

[via Ryan]

This reminds me of the Fire-engine water powered flying car from Mythbusters.  I seriously want to know what kind of design and engineering went into this contraption.

Read [via Geekologie]

There has been many-a-time where I read about a band (new/old) and wonder what they sound like.  Usually, I search for a MySpace page or a Imeem page, but I just found a new way to find music called Just hear !t

Just Hear !t is a music oriented search/aggregator that finds music videos and tracks from sites like YouTube, Seeqpod, etc.  Its a simple and fast Adobe Flash UI that plays the music and video’s within the site.  I am impressed by its simplicity and it turned up some pretty amazing results.  A great resource for SXSW too!

South By South West (SXSW) is the annual interactive/film/music conference & festival held in Austin, Texas.  This year is the 22nd annual conference and it will be Niki and my 4th year in a row.  To say SXSW is awesome is an understatement.  Its has been one of the best and most amazing music experiences I have ever had, and each year gets better.  As my friend Cyrus said: “Its like the Disneyland of music. You can see a year’s worth of shows in four days”.  And he was dead-on.

One of the challenges of SXSW is preparing for it.  With 1500+ bands playing at 70+ venues over four days and nights you have to have a gameplan.  Who are you going to see?  When are they playing?  What day shows should we hit?  Can we get in for the show?  You have to ask youself all of this to achive the best SXSW musical experience.

SXSW posts a band list, which is daunting in itself, to help you find out who is playing this year.  Seeing that many names on one page, its really easy to lose your place and everytime you re-read it you see bands you missed last time.  Luckily, some people over at Sun are hosting a SXSW Artist Catalog with band notes, pics, links and a tag cloud.  Its a great tool and really helps you see who is attending. Expect to see more on the blog about SXSW over the next month as the March 13th kick-off is rapidly approaching!

Read [via SXSW RSS]

Flinging toast far to reach one’s plate,
Hopeful the distance is judged just so.
Butter prepared, sliced thick like slate
Angles precise, before my bread does bake.

Read [from Ivovos via Ryan]

Parks on Fire is a new piece of video art by Scott Pagano. Mr. Pagano, with his fancy-pants RISD cred, has done a lot of amazing work with a large list of world-class electronic musicians. Seeing him live at the Recombinant Media Labs (R.I.P.) in San Francisco as visual counterpart to Speedy J (oh, don’t get me started on him!) was inspirational. This particular piece is set to the chilled-out sounds of Trifonic.

Parks on Fire is the latest short graphic film creation of digital artist Scott Pagano. It is an exploration of the complex, interpenetrated, and reflective relationships of structure, form, and motion that both bind and conflict the natural and manmade worlds. The experience is a visual and aural expedition through a series of uniquely explicated environments. Stunning synthetic worlds of micro precision evolve and meld in to landscapes of natural forms evoking the achingly unknowable sublime that is here captured, redefined and expressed via intensive digital reprocessing. Sound and image drive each other to create the uncanny sense that both are emerging from the same dammed-but-divine ethereal engine. The lush cinematic soundtrack is by Trifonic, and is available on their debut release Emergence.

Parks on Fire [vimeo.com]

Speaking of impressive, check out this keyboard hotness:

Now that is a mod I can standbehind.  Using scrabble (a game I despise since I can’t spell worth a shit) tiles as pure inspiration.  Rad.  Seriously, how cool is that?  Eh, probably only cool if you are a geek or some strange subset of geek.

Read [Datamancer.net]