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This made all kinds of sense until the second time I watched and and found out that it is a “monetized” video, which means there is sometimes an unskippable ad before it starts. Go figure. -via the Presurfer
While we haven’t posted much about Miss Leslie Hall, if you’ve been following YouTube memes over the last few years, then you’ll immediately recognize this knitted amigurumi version of her.
Link Via Crafty is Cool
Have you ever wished for a way to filter through all the crap on YouTube and find the music videos you’re craving in a world devoid of music television? (MTV is clearly no longer about the music, thanks guys).
Well, the makers of Tubalr want to help, and their service will make cutting through the nonsense, and getting to those sweet music videos by your favorite bands, a snap. Here’s a bit more about how it works:
Looking past the fact that Tubalr has a downright ridiculous name (is that supposed to be tubular? Tuba Lore? Two-baller? No idea), it’s quite great. You punch in an artist name, then pick either “only” (to play only that artist’s videos) or “similar” (to play videos from similar artists.) It queues up a big playlist, and you can go about your business as the tunes play on. Think Pandora’s concept, mashed up with Youtube’s music video archive.
I wonder if this will become popular enough to make stations like MTV reconsider their reality TV programming in favor of playing music videos all the time like the good old days. Probably won’t happen while there is still money to be made off the Jersey Shore phenomenon, but a guy can dream can’t he?!
Link –via TechCrunch
Tired of staring at your food while it cooks in the microwave? That’s so 1980. Fortunately, students from the University of Pennsylvania have managed to hack a microwave oven to play YouTube videos while your food is cooking. If you don’t feel like waiting, you can also have the microwave text you when your food is done.
Now that’s impressive!
Link Via Geekosystem
The internet sensation behind the song “Chocolate Rain” returns to teach us a little something about the U.S. economy. Tay Zonday makes a little more sense than he did in his previous videos, but i’m still not sure I understand what’s happening with my U.S. dollar situation. Maybe somebody else needs to make an educational song about the economy, preferably someone with a degree in economics!
–via BuzzFeed
A scientific research paper reviewed 400 YouTube videos of dogs chasing their tails. A close look showed that about a third of the dogs observed showed signs of clinical pathology (“neurological, compulsive or other pathological conditions”).
Habitual tail-chasers had 6.5+/?2.3 times the odds of being described as ‘Stupid’ than other dogs, and perseverative dogs were 6.8+/?2.1 times more frequently described as ‘Funny’ than distractible ones were. Compared with breed- and age-matched control videos, tail-chasing videos were significantly more often indoors and with a computer/television screen switched on. These findings highlight that tail-chasing is sometimes pathological, but can remain untreated, or even be encouraged, because of an assumption that it is ‘normal’ dog behaviour.
Another takeaway from this study is how YouTube can provide a vast and unsifted resource of behavioral observations to researchers of all kinds. Someday a scientist may be watching your behavior, either on video, in the description, or in the comments! Link
Shakespeare Schmakespeare. The YouTube Insult Generator, the brainchild of Adrian Holovaty, farts in the the general direction of the Shakespeare Insult Kit (sorry, John!)
Wired explains:
The simple tool, created by EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty, is a search engine that takes a term, then uses the YouTube API to find videos relevant to that term and grabs the latest 50 comments. From those 50 search results, the generator finds the ones that start with a number followed by terms such as “people,” “nincompoops” or “youtubers” (key aspects of quality comments), then replaces the number and the word “people” with the word “you.”
So far, Holovaty’s act of “poor man’s data mining,” which he said took about 45 minutes to build, only finds comments about 50 percent of the time. But some of its findings are pretty good (try “Tom Cruise,” “Michael Jackson” or even “Wired” — the results are amusing, but a little too blue to republish here).
The results for "Neatorama" insults are oddly amusing. Apparently, we are peace-, peanut butter jelly-, and penguin-hating vegetarians and tooth-fairy non-believers who fell off our unicycle and broke our bagpipes and jumped whenever a toy Xylophone is played. Oh, and we bred a pitty with a cat (huh?) and didn't get chicks. LOL!
What insults did the YouTube Insult Generator create for you?
This wouldn’t be nearly as sad if everyone who ever used YouTube couldn’t attest to the fact that it’s totally true.
Link Via Laughing Squid
This smart, and very affordable, little device might not turn you in to the next George Lucas, but it will definitely help stabilize your home movie making, and might help you become the next net video sensation.It’s the Pico Dolly, made for the modern era of homegrown video stars, this modular mini camera dolly can be outfitted with attachments for lights, mics, and all the peripherals you need to step up your home cinematography skills. And with a price tag of around $65, it is affordable even for someone working on a no string budget.
Link -via LifeHacker
The guys from Epic Meal Time are blowing up YouTube with their crazy food-centric comedy videos, recipes seemingly created by Paula Dean while she was on acid, and devil may care attitudes that make them a big hit with the ladies. Every recipe these guys dream up starts with trays full of bacon, and become more and more insane as another ingredient is added. This edition, entitled Sausage Fest, shows you how to make sausage out of big macs and beef sandwiches, among other crazy combinations of (often fried) food which have never been stuffed in a sausage casing before. Let Epic Meal Time show you why things get strange in the kitchen when you’re cooking drunk.
The “Tron Guy” is back in a new video utilizing multicolored rolls of duck tape to recreate the iconic light cycle scene from the film. Watch the video at the link to see if a stop motion duck tape – creepy “younger” version of Jeff Bridges makes an appearance.
You may have heard of Pronunciation Book, a YouTube channel in which English words and names are pronounced for the purpose of helping non-English speakers. Videos have been added steadily for over a year. Pronunciation Manual, on the other hand, is a channel with ridiculously incorrect pronunciations that look just like the videos from Pronunciation Book. Woe to the English student who gets the two sources mixed up! Link -via Laughing Squid
Remember Mary Bale, a.k.a. the woman who was tracked down and harassed after someone uploaded a video of her throwing a cat into a trashcan? She’s one of the many people who were taught a lesson by the throngs of angry internet users. You can read more about her and 11 others in similar situations over at Ugo. Fair warning, not all of the people actually deserved what they got.
YouTube took the original Nyan Cat video down, and in its place there is a notice that “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by PRguitarman.” However, PRguitarman says he did not file a copyright claim. He is having trouble straightening this out.
Funny how someone can easily make a complaint but to actually prove it the owner has to jump through all of these hoops. FUN TIMES! But seriously, there is a lot of work involved here and it’s pretty stressful.
Meanwhile, people are flagging my videos on Youtube and giving me death threats just like upstanding Internet citizens usually do. Good job.
Anyway, I’ve been working at this for about two or three hours and have done the most I can for now. Saraj00n, Daniwell, and Youtube have been contacted and I am just now waiting for each of their replies so we can work on getting the video back up.
The cat is still available in the original .gif format at his site. Link -via The Daily What
Graphic designer Viktor Hertz has created a cool series of logos redesigned to better explain what you’re really going to find within the brand. Cat videos? Yeah, you know that’s what you’re really doing on YouTube.
P.S., Viktor also has movie posters as depicted in pictogram that are really cool. There Will be Blood is my favorite.
Amy-May Elliot of Mashable dug up ten facts from the mysterious origins of YouTube, some of which may surprise you. Did you know that the video hosting site almost turned into a video version of Hot or Not?
Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route. The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations.
Link via The Presurfer
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The new movie The Expendables opens this Friday, starring every action star Hollywood could round up. Sylvester Stallone tried to do an interview on YouTube, but he didn’t get to say much before everything went south. Link -via The Litter Box
Here’s a list of YouTube clips that helped launch people’s careers, and the stories of how a homemade video, or a collection of them, can get the attention of key folks in high places. The list includes clips of Justin Bieber, Soulja Boy, and Tay Zonday, among others.
When ’80s rock band Journey parted ways with their lead singer in 2007, they turned to YouTube to find a replacement. After seeing a clip of Arnel Pineda, from the Philippines, perform Journey’s ballad “Faithfully” with his cover band The Zoo, Journey’s guitarist Neal Schon was sold. After an audition in San Francisco, Pineda was named lead singer of the band.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
We’re still looking for your, great, fantastic (or otherwise) talent! So far only four people have entered the contest! Now, maybe you’re all busy cooking up those vids, but in case you’re not, take a moment, open the laptop, turn on the cam, and record yourself already! There’s an iPad on the line! And Web fame! For the complete rules, check out our YouTube page here. Above is one of our four lone entries…
Pull up any YouTube video, and you’ll see a button in the bottom right corner that looks like a soccer ball. Click on it, and a vuvuzela will play during the video.
via Geekosystem | Previously: Vuvuzelas
Featuring a group of friends running on top of the water, "Liquid Mountaineering" was an international sensation on YouTube, getting more than 4.5 millions hits in just over a month. But this week it was confirmed a hoax by the shoe company prominently featured in the video. It’s a viral advertisement. But it looked so real! Popular Mechanics takes a look at the biomechanics of walking on water and why the Jesus Lizard can do it and we can’t.
Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, the current world record holder for the 100-meter sprint, ran 10.4 meters per second. But J.W. Glasheen and T.A. McMahon, two Harvard biologists who studied how the basilisk runs on water, found that in order to mimic the lizard, a human would need to run at almost 30 meters per second, “a velocity beyond human ability.” A man would also need “an average power output almost 15 times greater than the maximum sustained power output for humans.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by telegraph.
How do you fit 24 rooms into an apartment of only 330 square feet? Architect Gary Chang, designer of the "Domestic Transformer," showcases the many, many shapes of this modern architectural marvel!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sal.
Pomplamoose is helping YouTube spread the word about their new independent music initiative, Musicians Wanted. We love Pomplamoose, so we thought we’d help out by doing our part to spread the word. The basic idea: if you’re a musician, you can upload your stuff to YouTube and share in the revenue, while keeping the rights to your songs. Check out the fun Pomplamoose vid below for details!
And if you don’t know the music of Pomplamoose yet, be sure to check out their “Single Ladies” cover (thanks to GeekGirlDiva for reminding us how much we LOVE this version). Oh, and the idea here is that if you hear it in the song, they’ll show you it in the video. Every instrument, every sound, it’s all there at one point or another…
| YouTube Doubler |
Those who love to spend their time creating mashups now have another tool in their box, and those that haven’t ever dabbled in the medium have profound access to it now, thanks to YouTube doubler. As someone already discovered, it’s a great way to imbibe in some Gestalt. Above, cockatiel that likes to bang on can with bird picture, mashed up with previously-mixed death metal rooster. Instant band.
Link (via BoingBoing)
Ever wonder what would happen if you combined true musical talent with a popular video game like Rockband? This is what you would get.
While taking a break from practicing one day, MsFrizzyHair, a recent college graduate with music degree had a bizarre thought as she watched her brother play Rockband. "I wonder if that microphone would pick up a flute…" Check out the video to see the answer!
– via youtube
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lennie02.
Some of these videos have been on Neatorama already, but some haven’t. Matthew Moore of The Daily Telegraph has compiled twelve of the worst and funniest parking accidents that can be found on YouTube. In the above video, a driver tries to pass over the undercarriage access space at an oil change business — but misses.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
Every geek knows that "A" is for Apple, but I bet not many know that Apple had a "third founder" who gave up his stake for $800 (it would've been worth at least $17 billion today). Or that Cisco was named for San Francisco. Or that Twitter used to be called twttr? Let's take a stroll through the A to Z of computing trivia, Neatorama style!
If you think that Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, think again: there was a "third founder" of Apple. In 1976, Ronald Wayne gave up his 10% stake of the fledgling company for $800 because he was worried that the company would fold and that he would be liable for debts incurred by the other partners (at the time Apple wasn't a corporation yet). Of course Apple became the big company, and Wayne's stake could've been worth as much as $17 billion today.
Originally, Research in Motion wanted its wireless messaging device to have the word "e-mail" in its name. When RIM hired Lexicon Branding to do a little research, they found out that people associate "e-mail" with work and therefore can raise blood pressure. Someone said that the buttons look like small berries, so they decided to name it BlackBerry.
Evolution of Cisco logo, by Design Maven via Speak
Up
Cisco System was named after the city San Francisco (the founders of the company worked for Stanford University, which is just a couple of town over). Indeed, first Cisco System's logo was the Golden Gate Bridge. (See also: Evolution of Tech Logos)
Ben Curtis, in his very first
Dell commercial
In 2003, after three years of playing the Dell Dude, actor Ben Curtis was arrested while attempting to buy a bag of marijuana. People immediately parodied his tag line "Dude, you're getting a Dell" to "Dude, you're getting a cell." Though charges were dropped, Dell canceled the Dell Dude commercials. Curtis was working as a waiter in 2007 but he's making a come back with a (supposedly) upcoming play "Dude! I'm Going to Hell"
In 1977, the US Postal Service recognized that email would pose a serious challenge to its monopoly on delivering mail. At first, it wanted to ban emails (like it did mails delivered by underground pneumatic tubes), but the FCC objected and the Postal Rate Commission refused. So it created an experimental email service called E-COM ("Electronic Computer-Originated Mail"). The idea was simple: You send the emails, which the post office would then print out and deliver as physical letters at the price of 26¢ each (it was said that it actually cost the USPS $5 to deliver the message). Oh, and the service was one-way. If something went wrong, you'd get an error message delivered two days later ... in form of a letter! Needless to say, E-COM failed.
John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN programming language, said this about his invention: "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
When Paul Buchheit started the Gmail project at Google, he named it "Project Caribou" after a Dilbert cartoon strip.
HP could've easily have been PH. In 1939, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard formed HP in a Palo Alto garage, they flipped a coin to decide the name of the company. Packard actually won the toss, but decided to name it Hewlett-Packard instead of Packard-Hewlett.
In 1999, Al Gore was asked by Wolf Blitzer what distinguished him from other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he famously said: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Gore was immediately ridiculed for claiming to have invented the Internet. Not to be outdone, Dan Quayle said "If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check."
JPEG stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, who created the method of compression for photo images. Like all image processing algo, JPEG was tested on the standard test image of "Lenna", a cropped photo of a 1972 Playboy magazine centerfold Lena Soderberg.
Knuth reward check, photo via Upto11.net
Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth offers to pay a reward of $2.56 for the first finder of errors in his books. Why $2.56? Because 256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar, which is sort of a joke that only a programmer can appreciate. But that's okay since that's Knuth's target audience anyhow. Indeed, Knuth reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies," according to MIT's Technology Review. If the name Don Knuth sounds familiar, that's because we've featured his Potrzebie System of Weights and Measure before on Neatorama. (see also: Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements)
At first, Linus Torvalds wanted to name his new operating system Freax, a portmanteau of "freak," "free," and "x" (for Unix). A co-worker thought that it was a horrible name and renamed it Linux without telling him.
In 1996, Monty Widenius and David Axmark created MySQL, a relational database management system that would later become one of the most widely used software in the world, powering many of the web's largest sites (WordPress, Neatorama's blogging engine, uses it). What most people don't know is that the "My" in MySQL doesn't refer to "me" - it's actually the name of Monty's daughter My.
The
term newbie or noob, originally thought to be from British
public-school and military slang "new boy," was first spotted
in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre as an insult to a clueless newcomer.
(N
is for Newbie Onesies/Kids T-Shirt at the Neatorama Shop)
In 1977, Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates were working on a CIA-funded project codenamed Oracle (because the CIA believed that it would give them answers to all questions). The project failed, but Larry and friends took the idea and used it to create a company that would later become the Oracle Corporation.
The most common passwords in the world are:
1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. link182
10. (your first name)
And you thought you were clever to do a derivative of Blink-182 as your password!
The keyboard you're using now is most likely set in a QWERTY layout (named for the first 6 characters of the top row of letters). This layout was invented by Christopher Sholes in 1874 because people were typing too fast on typewriters back then, thus causing the machine to jam. Sholes did frequency analysis on letter-pairs and separated pairs of letters that tend to cause mechanical jams when typed in quick successions like TH. Sholes' new layout was designed to slow down typists (technically, he aimed to improve typing speed by reducing jams - and indeed, that's exactly what happened.)
ROT13: Jung qbrf Whyvhf Pnrfne unir nalguvat gb qb jvgu zbqrea qnl Vagrearg? Pnrfne vairagrq n fvzcyr rapelcgvba zrgubq gung orpnzr dhvgr cbchyne va Hfrarg arjftebhcf nf n zrna gb uvqr fcbvyref, chapuyvarf naq chmmyr fbyhgvbaf. Gur vqrn vf fvzcyr: ercynpr n cvrpr bs grkg jvgu yrggref 13 cynprf shegure nybat va gur nycunorg ("ebgngr ol 13 cynprf" be EBG13). Gur travhf bs gur zrgubq vf gung orpnhfr gurer ner 26 yrggref va gur Ratyvfu nycunorg, gur fnzr rapelcgvba zrgubq jvyy qrpelcg n ebgngrq grkg!
Before Digg, there was Slashdot. The technology-related news website was so huge that getting linked from it meant a massive increase of traffic that would cripple smaller web servers. Webmasters call this the Slashdot effect, which is the granddaddy of similar terms Digg effect, Farked, or Drudged.
The very first Twitter message was sent by its co-creator Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006: "just setting up my twttr." That's not a typo - twttr was the original codename for the project (inspired by Flickr). At least twttr was better than one of the first names they were considering for it: twitch.
I'm including USB (Universal Serial Bus) here so I can play this awesome "Intel Star" commercial starring Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB. Watch it and weep:
Before the World Wide Web, there was Gopher (note: it's gopher://, not http:// - you'd need Firefox to see it) and Veronica was its search engine. Why Veronica? It's because the first search engine of the Internet, a tool that indexes FTP archives, is called Archie. Officially, Veronica is an acronym for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives."
Call it user-generated content, Bubble 2.0, millionth-word in the English language or whatever you want, but know this: Web 2.0 is trademarked by CMP Media (who partnered with O'Reilly in producing the Web 2.0 conference) in 2004. In 2006, they sent a cease-and-desist nastygram to the Irish non-profit organization IT@Cork for using the word in the name of their conference and sparked a kerfuffle over the ownership of "Web 2.0"
What's the company that invented the personal computer, graphical user interface, the computer mouse, but didn't bother to market them because it couldn't see their commercial potentials? Yep, Xerox. In 1979, Steve Jobs of Apple visited Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and saw the Xerox Alto workstation. Several years later, Jobs brought the Apple Macintosh to market.
When YouTube was sold to Google for $1.7 billion, the spotlight was on Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. But did you know that there was a third YouTube founder? That's right: Jawed Karim left the company to become a graduate student at Stanford University. He did, however, fare better than Ronald Wayne - Jawed got about $64 million worth in stock. Jawed also uploaded the very first video on YouTube on April 23, 2005:
If you own a PC in the late 80s/early 90s, then you're savvy about the ZIP file format. Back then, disk space was at a premium (a regular 3-1/2" HD floppy disk can only hold 1.44 MB worth of data) so compression was a big thing. In 1986, Phil Katz created PKZIP (Yep, PK is his initials) and released it as a shareware. He chose the name "zip" to imply that his software was faster than other compression formats available at the time. Sadly, Phil, the alcoholic computer genius, died alone in a cheap hotel cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps.
Ants are such amazing creatures! Able to work together to create vast underground empires and take down almost any animal of any size…even humans! So, what happens when a creature such as the crab ends up getting the ants attention? In a Goliath vs. David (x100 or so) situation a crab thinks its protective armor is a deterrent preventing the ants from killing it, guess again. I can’t imagine what it must feel like having something start eating you from the inside out. O_O
From the BBC show “Ant Attack”.
Ah, the beauty of slow motion video…with a crazy Japanese twist. I ended grinning like a fool by the end of the video as each individual running has a unique and hilarious run. This certainly made my day a whole lot bearable. Keep this in mind when you get near the end,”It’s like a lava lamp…”!
If anyone is interested in the song used for the video it’s “Luv (sic) pt.2″ by Nujabes.
TGIF!
Via from the crazy folks at Urlesque – Link
Originally from NicoVideo – Link
A new kitten named Norman vigorously tries to get a rise out of his older, more mature housemate, Thirteen, in this video.
