Must Have one.

It's called the Goliathon 83, and it is awesome.

They're gonna be selling them soon, probably for large amounts of money, and I want one. They don't work, obviously, but that's not the point. The point is that they are awesome. They are made by Weta Originals and they are awesome.

---

The Real Firefox

We all know that Firefox is the best browser, now we know that it's the most sickeningly cute as well:



Image linked from ThingsThatMakeYouGoAahh.com

---

Motion

You should take a gander over to the left: See where it says "Motion"? Click on that.

I've updated all of the videos that I had on here, and moved them offsite, to the Google servers. I was having many many problems with the Frihost servers and my videos, so I decided to say "Aww dingbat" and just embed them as links from Google.

The quality is pretty low, but they are all there and very play-able, the point of them should get across. Happy Viewing.

---

Hacked AC

I've been meaning to build one of these for some time now:



It's a fan that has cold water running through copper tubing to cool the air lower than the ambient room temperaure. It is said that one of these bad boys will cool a room to a comfortable temp in less than 15 minutes. Would have been quite useful during the heat wave that the Midwest went through recently. Here's a link to Kevin Kelly's Street Use, where I found this image.

---

Two Bubble Cars

Cars have really changed very littel over the past 80 years. The cars of today are smaller and lighter but essentially the exact same technology as the boxes that the original Henry Ford rolled off the assembly lines.

As energy costs continue to mount, people look to innovators for solutions, now as 80 years ago. People like Buckminster Fuller led the way off the beaten path of automobiles, with his ingenious Dymaxion bubble-van. Damn Interesting has an article from 2005 on this interesting car:



"Imagine a car that seats eleven passengers, turns on a dime, has excellent fuel efficiency, and cruises happily at 120 miles per hour. A man named Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller imagined and designed such a car, and in 1933, several fully capable prototypes were built for Chrysler." - DamnInteresting

Similarly, we see innovators attempting to accomplish equally fantastic feats with more modern technology. The fully electric Courreges Zooop is said to go over 450 KM per charge of it's batteries, meaning well over 300 miles to us Americans. Considering that 300 Mi on a tank of gas is pretty much standard for all cars in the US, I think that this Zooop unmasks another myth about electrically powered transport, that it is short-range only. Hopefully these Electrical Vehicles don't do the way of the Dymaxion and never see the pavement. Gizmo Watch has a short profile of the car on their site.



"André and Coqueline Courrèges have embellished their electric vehicle line with the latest ‘Zooop’ that takes you 450 km per charge. The three-seater 690 kg car runs on powerful Lithium Polymer batteries (70 A/hour 370 V) that don’t let you down by generating 150 kW of power and still maintaining their cool, and charging and recharging fast." - GizmoWatch

---

InterfaceLift

Desktops are a bit of a weak spot for me, I never seem to be content with what I have. I go through phases of wanting to collect them all, and throwing them away. It can be a bit tough.

The one thing that I can be sure of, however, is that desktop wallpapers are a great place to look for photographic inspiration. When you see a really well shot photo composed as a wallpaper for your desktop, it really makes you think about what you could do for your OWN computer with your OWN camera.

Enter InterfaceLift.com, a directory of artists' and developers' work for free on the web. There are a large number of very impressive and very high resolution images up there, it's very much worth checking out. There are a spattering of ads strewn over the site, but the wallpapers are good enough to ignore them.

---

Hyper-realistic Vector art

Women with seemingly airbrushed skin, fruit that looks like it has been buffed to a shine, a microscope that seems to shine like new, all done in vectors.



If you don't know what a vectorized image is, just check out the gallery of artists at This Blog, and know that they spent a LOT of time and effort to craft those images.

---

Bump Keying

There's a phenomenon arcing across the Internet that claims to make every keyed lock obsolete. It's called "bump keying" and it involves altering keys slightly in order to make them open any lock imaginable.

The idea is to cut the grooves a bit deeper, then simply tap the key as you are turning it to get the tumblers in the lock to bump out of the way, thus opening the door/padlock/safe. It's interesting, already there are sites making a killing selling sets of these keys, and people are losing massive amounts of money as insurance companies refuse burglary claims if there is no evidence of forced entry.

This foreign video explains the method and shows the process behind it, it's pretty sobering.

---

Somewhat... Scary.

Two things that I found rather disturbing.

First, people in the area around South Carolina have probably heard of it, but I sure haven't, not until today, anyway. It's an extremely invasive plant similar to buckthorn, but far more aggressive. Kudzu is a transplant from Asia, and under the correct conditions, can grow up to 7 feet per week. This Kudzu site has a large number of pictures from the Eastern US documenting the voraciousness of this vine.



Similarly disturbing, and vastly creepier is an infestation of caterpillars over in central Europe. Not sure what language the site is in, but the pictures tell it all. I urge you to check out all of them, those dark areas are not dirt, they're thousands and thousands of caterpillars. Their webs cover EVERYTHING.

---

Underground Housing

You may or may not know that I maintain other blogs in addition to this one, they can both be found in the navigation to the left.

I wanted to mention the Underground House blog because there have been a couple of neat things that I've put up there recently that any and all might be interested in, so check it out, if you dare.

Every so often, I do a quick Google search for "Underground House" and the first couple of links are always to Underground music, of the house variety.

---

Making oil cents.

It's very difficult to find intelligent discussion regarding oil and fossil fuels. The camps have their fingers so deeply in their ears that they are tickling their brains. On the one side you're presented with people calling for the gutting of big oil, and immediate cessation of oil use, while on the other side you have people that say that oil use is GOOD for the planet, we need to use more of it, and that it will not run out anytime soon.

Better is to think about what oil is and why it causes problems. My personal views are that a moderate and assertive move away from oil is a necessity, and that big oil needs to get out of the White House and back into the private sector. In contrast, oil will always be a useful commodity, and it can be a very efficient fuel source if used correctly. If automakers would simply supply the demand for higher-efficiency cars, we'd extend our current supplies, save money, and help offset the CO2 problems that we are beginning to see.

Getting to the point of this blog, I ran across an insightful and very nicely stated article by Texas Representative Ron Paul regarding solutions to the high gas costs we are required to deal with. From the article, entitled What Congress Can Do About High Gas Prices:

If we want to do something about gas prices, Congress should greatly reduce federal spending, balance the budget, and eliminate regulations that interfere with the market development of alternative fuels. All subsidies and special benefits to energy companies should be ended. And in the meantime let’s eliminate federal gas taxes at the pump. Oil prices are at a level where consumers reduce consumption voluntarily. The market will work if we let it. But as great as the market economy is, it cannot overcome a foreign policy that is destined to disrupt oil supplies and threaten the world with an expanded and dangerous conflict in the Middle East.

---