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Create your own Rubik’s Cube design from any photo. The cube above was done using the cool Neatorama Zombie by Len.
Link – via Stationsvakt
Traveling and waiting, how great it would be to have a suitcase that doubles as chair.
"What we’ve done is build a silicon bra, insert it into the body and
attach it to the ribs and to the fascia. It’s like a normal external
bra," he continues, "where a strip lies on the shoulder and attaches
around the body. We attach it to the ribs instead of to the shoulder,
and to the fascia in the lower part of the body."
Israel21c via Medgadget
Ouch.
Monday August 13th: Celebrate your right to be left-handed.
On 13th August 1992 the Club launched International Left-Handers Day, an annual event when left-handers everywhere can celebrate their sinistrality and increase public awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of being left-handed. This event is now celebrated worldwide, and in the U.K. alone there were over 20 regional events to mark the day in 2001…
Any fellow left-handers out there?
After the highly successful Statetris USA, followed by Statetris Europe, here’s the next logical step: Statetris Africa (hard!)
Link – Thanks Raymond Penners!
As for me, I’m waiting for something I can win at: Statetris Antarctica. Woohoo! A solid block of ice!
John Howe (along with Alan Lee) did the excellent artworks for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, and King Kong.
The Little Chimp Society did an interview with Howe, and the article has a selection of cool artworks that made him famous: Link | Howe’s website – Thanks Darren Di Lieto!
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Royal College of Art graduate Miquel Mora has this neat project called "Flat Futures," exploring the potential uses of digital paper:
“The Flat Futures project is an exploration into digital paper,” explains Mora, who originally hails from Barcelona but now lives and works in Paris. “Through printed electronics we can create processors, displays, batteries on flat and flexible surfaces like paper. Objects will wear technology instead of carrying it inside, it will become their skin.”
This one above is the conceptual design of a paper alarm clock (how do you turn it off? Just scrunch it up!)
Links: Creative Review article | Miquel’s website | Flat Futures Website – Thanks Patrick Burgoyne!
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I started noticing this at work a couple of weeks ago, but the problem seems to be a long-standing one: If you’re using Hotmail or MSN email accounts, you may be missing legitimate emails.
Didn’t get that receipt for your online purchase? Wonder why some people never reply to your emails?
That’s because they did send the emails – you just never receive ‘em. These emails weren’t being placed in the junk email or spam box, nor were they bounced back to the senders – they just disappear into the ether, and it’s all Microsoft’s doing:
"They weren’t going to a user’s Junk mail box, nor were they being bounced," Firth says. "They were simply disappearing!"
So Firth began corresponding with Hotmail support people. After five days of back and forth, a Microsoft employee named Bobbi confirmed that emails sent from Firth’s domain, daltonfirth.co.uk, were being "hard filtered" by SmartScreen. And not because they violated some documented technical requirement or contained suspicious phrases that triggered content filters. Rather, they failed to pass conditions buried deep inside SmartScreen that support people declined to share with Firth – out of concern the disclosures would allow spammers to bypass the defenses.
Link (Image: Syris-Studios [Flickr])
Talking about email annoyances, a few days ago one of our computers got a big problem: Microsoft Outlook crashed repeatedly with a mysterious ntdll.dll error.
Rebooting, re-installing Outlook, installing a myriad of Microsoft patches – all failed to solve the problem. At the time, scouring Google for this particular problem didn’t help: there was no helpful hint on how to solve the problem.
Here’s how to solve it: turns out it was a Cloudmark spam filter (plugin) installed on that particular computer – we had to uninstall the software manually (some people said that all they had to do was rename this folder: c:\documents and settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Cloudmark into something else like …\Cloudmark-Bad).
After close to a year of trouble-free service, the Cloudmark people did something dumb: they did an automatic update that contained a bad bit of mojo. And the terrible thing is CloudMark’s website had no clear announcement of the problem (and when they did announce it, they buried this bit of bad news in the Download section – and this news is gone as of today!)
Moreover, CloudMark never sent us any email alerting us of this problem (we have other computers without the software that can get emails fine. Of course, logically, if that’s your only PC then you have to use another email client to fetch your emails).
Grr! Bad Cloudmark! Bad!
The Great Outlook Cloudmark Crash of 2007 got me thinking about backing up your emails.
Sure, Outlook has got an archive feature and even a backup plugin for your personal folders (Outlook 2003/2002). But this obviously wouldn’t work if that software itself was the one that crashed, or if your computer’s hard disk bit the dust.
Enter GMail: Turns out you can configure it as a backup of sorts (and still let you use Outlook in a normal way). In GMail’s Settings > Accounts tab, you can ask it to get mails from your other email accounts, fetch and store the emails (directly to the Archived folder, bypassing the inbox), and leave a copy of the emails on the server for your Outlook to fetch later on.
The tutorial from Gmail’s Help Center has a step-bystep direction on how to do this: Link
If you don’t have a GMail account, you can get one for free directly from Google.
Today’s collaboration with Cellar Image of the Day brings us this photo of an artwork-in-progress by Albanian artist Saimir Strati.
Albanian painter Saimir Strati works on a horse mosaic using toothpicks at the International Center of Culture. Strati will use around 1,000,000 toothpicks on an 8 square-metre polystyrene board in an effort to secure a place in the Guinness World Record.
Link – Be sure to check out Cellar IotD for more fun pics!
If the guy looks familiar, that’s because he was on Neatorama before for the world’s largest nail mosaic: an image of Leonardo da Vinci.
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A piece of concrete bearing a smudge of driveway sealant resembling the face of Jesus Christ was sold for £500 on eBay!
See also: A Busy Month for Religious Sightings
It seems solid to me, but to a physicist this is a valid question. Glass is one of the
“squishy” substances that cannot be pinned down as a solid or liquid. Referred to as “soft condensed materials,” they include everyday substances such as toothpaste, peanut butter, shaving cream, plastic and glass.
As water cools to its freezing point, it crystallizes into ice. When glass cools from a hot liquid, it slows down but never crystallizes. Researchers at Emory University have studied the phenomenon for years, but have yet to find a definitive answer, which could greatly impact the science of nanotechnology. Link
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The McFLY 2015 project aims to entice Nike to release the futuristic shoes worn by Marty McFly in Back to the Future II’s 2015 scenes.
The project has gained some headway, recently discovering that Nike actually patented the shoes back in 1990.
Now it seems that everybody’s getting into the act — check out the cover of Kanye West’s Graduation album (Release Date: September 2007). Kanye’s graduating into some cool footwear.
Kanye West [wiki] is an American record producer and solo rapper, his mascot and trademark is a teddy bear.
Via RumorsDaily.
Comments Off | The following is an article from Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader
Ever wonder what inspired some of your favorite songs? Here are a few inside stories about popular tunes. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Listeners may have guessed (correctly) that the singer had been drinking when he laid down the vocals, and according to Hawkins, “Every member of the band was drunk.” Even the recording engineer and the A&R man, Arnold Maxin, was plastered. It was Maxin who effectively changed the song from a torch song to a frenzied rant by supplying the band with several cases of Italian Swiss Colony Muscatel. “We partied and we partied,” Jay recalled, “and somewhere along the road I blanked out. When he regained consciousness, he had a hit record on his hands but no recollection of how he made it. The Tornados
Meek came up with the tune, but couldn’t read or write music, so he hummed the melody on demo tapes and then played it back to the band. The fact that they were able to discern any tune at all from the tone-deaf Meek’s fractured, off-key humming is a testament to their musical talent. Bad luck: The song became a huge #1 hit, but a French film composer sued Meek for plagiarism. Meek lost the suit, which cost him millions of dollars in lost royalties. Serge Gainsbourg
Moral authorities were outraged; the Pope even excommunicated the record executive who’d released it in Italy. But despite being banned everywhere, the single was a huge international hit. In the United States, the vocals were completely erased and it was issued as an instrumental The Ramones But most stadium spectators probably don’t realize that the band originally wrote the song as a celebration of gang rumbles, but with lyrics like “Shoot ‘em in the back now,” it fits right into today’s professional sports scene. Patsy Cline
Truth was, she hated the tune and didn’t want anything to do with it, but her record label was desperate for a hit and tricked her into believing she would be dropped if she didn’t record it. It became her first #1 single and stayed on the charts for an amazing 39 weeks. Oddly enough, Cline found out it was a hit after she’d literally fallen to pieces herself. Songwriter Hank Cochran recalls, “Patsy had been in a bad car wreck. It almost killed her. She was in the hospital with her head wrapped with bandages. I told her, ‘You got yourself a pop hit, girl.’ I think she thought I was just fooling around. When she finally got good enough to look at the numbers, she just laid back and said, ‘Damn!’” Beck
Frustrated by his inability to rap, Beck began criticizing his own performance: “Soy un perdedor”) (“I’m a loser” in Spanish). Beck wanted to scrap it, but Stephenson thought it was catchy. Stephenson was right – “Loser” made Beck a star. David Bowie
The Byrds Fonda gave McGuinn the napkin, and McGuinn immediately finished the song. But when Dylan learned that he had gotten songwriting credit, he called McGuinn and chewed him out, saying he didn’t want to be associated with it in any way. Dylan co-wrote the song, but McGuinn got all the credit. Aerosmith
Darlene Love / The Crystals
That evening, Garrett was preparing to record the song when his studio guitarist walked in. He glanced at the music and exclaimed, “Hey, man, I just played this!” Garrett asked “Where?” “In Studio C,” the guiatarist replied. By the time Garrett got to the studio to see what was going on, Spector had already put the finishing touches on his version – the version that became the hit. The Rolling Stones
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The article above, titled What the #!&%?, is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
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Here’s an online quiz from BBC Science & Nature – just how good are you at solving the perfect murder?
Imagine you are a forensic scientist who has to solve a series of murders commited by a killer who is particularly good at outfoxing the investigators.
Your first case is a lethal stabbing – and the identity of the victim is unknown.
What do you think is the most useful item to collect in order to identify the victim?
A Piece of bone
B Shard of eyeglass
C Bit of fabric
Link [Flash] (with explanation) – via Miss Cellania
Update 8/13/07: This repost mytsery was solved by Xayser!
Because the Optimus Maximus keyboard continues to be a vaporware (They’re supposedly to release it in March 2007!), here’s something else from Korea: a keyboard with programmable LED lighting system!
A software that lets you customize the way the LEDs behave is also included. You can make the keys glow only when your hit them, create your own patterns, or simply set it to glow in one single color of your choice.
Link (with video demonstration)
The concept of lung-shaped ashtray is not new, but this art/ad installation by German health insurance company AOK got people looking: Link – via One Large Prawn
The Littlest Angel Vest is a "halo" vest that acts like a white cane for blind dogs!
Link – via Scribal Terror
The COLOURlovers blog did an interview with the Lichtfaktor crew, whose awesome light graffiti art we’ve featured before on Neatorama not once, but twice!.
Link (with awesome pics of their lightwriting artwork)
So this is what it likes if you get swallowed by a giant pink bubble gum… Here’s the bouncy rubber ball guy (can you guess where he’s from?)
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Random Good Stuff and Japan Probe
Tired of driving without a working air conditioning in his car, Scott Dawson decided to bolt a home window A/C unit to the roof and wired it to his car!
Link | Gallery – via Spluch (Maybe this Ghetto Car Air Conditioning is his inspiration?)
What’s Dan Dunn painting on a giant rotating canvas? Wait till the very end of this "Paintjam improvisational painting performance" to find out [~4:30 min] …
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Dan’s website – Thanks Algonkin!
Roz Savage, 39, who rowed alone across the Atlantic Ocean last year, is now trying to do the same thing across the Pacific:
Her vessel is a souped-up 24-foot long rowboat named the Brocade after her corporate sponsor, San Jose-based Brocade Communications Systems Inc. [...]
She won’t be followed by a rescue boat, but will carry a satellite phone, update her blog through a PC with satellite Internet access and will be monitored online by Brocade employees and environmentalists through global positioning tracking technology.
Her rowboat is equipped with a tiny watertight cabin for sleeping, a bedpan and industrial quantities of health food bars, nuts and freeze-dried meals.
Link | Roz’s website – Thanks David R!
Cover Browser has a huge (80,000+) collection of comic book covers, including some obscure ones that are no longer in print. Whether you love comic books or just like to browse, it’s a virtual candy store of awesome illustrations.
Link (Don’t miss their Top 10 Comic Covers) – Thanks Phillipp Lenssen!
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The Song: “I Put a Spell on You” (1956)
The Song: “Telstar” (1962)
The Song: “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus (I Love You … Nor Do I)” (1969)
The Song: “Blitzkrieg Bop” (1976)
The Song: “I Fall to Pieces” (1961)
The Song: “Loser”
The Song: “Fame”
The Song: “The Ballad of Easy Rider”
The Song: “Walk This Way”
The Song: “He’s a Rebel”
The Song: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
