So the guy in this one is pretty full of hot air, but the idea for the car is really cool. It’s a concept car where they used cloth instead of metal for the skin of the car, which lets it change shape and flex and morph a little bit. The hood splits open, the headlights blink like an eye, the spoiler deforms the trunk, and the tail lights show through the fabric.
Kind of wish it was more of the car and less of the guy selling the BMW brand, but cool none the less.
Really makes you wonder what all you could do with this. Switch from a sports car to a sedan with the flip of a button. Even change shape to make it more efficient and sleek at highway speeds, and still show off some really flared, stylized design around town. Maybe change the color of it by having different lights underneath the skin shine through. Maybe display messages on the sides of it. Not something I would imagine you’ll see on the streets anytime soon, but kind of fun for making you think about cars and what they look like from a whole different angle.
It’s dorky, it’s juvenile, and it makes me laugh. Almost 10 straight minutes of Star Trek clips strung together into one giant sexual innuendo, in case you needed more proof that Star Trek fans have too much time and sexual frustration on their hands.
I was planning to post a youtube video of a song that I heard recently, really like, and have stuck in my head. However, when I found the song on the singer’s official youtube channel (I like to link to the official versions so the artists get the page hits and all of that) it has embedding disabled. So I can’t post it here. Yes, I could link to it, and send you over to youtube, but I’m not, because this made me mad. I’d like to promote a small independent band, give them free publicity. But they put up a block to make it harder for me to share it with you.
Side / technical rant:
What really makes me mad on the internet is people trying to prevent sharing. The whole internet is sharing. It’s what the whole thing is based on. And (RIAA come get me you bastards) it’s based on making copies. Now, to be clear, I’m all for attributing work, and making sure the people who create things get the credit/cash (double meaning intended) for it, but we need to recognize the underlying technology here (to say nothing of the social aspect). Everything you’ve ever looked at on the internet (with very, very few technical exceptions that I won’t get in to) is a copy. Every time you visit a website, you don’t actually look at it where it lives, you make a copy of it on your computer, and look at it on your computer. What actually happens when you go to a website is this. Your computer sends out a request over the network. This request itself is copied many, many times around the network until it gets to a computer where the files live that you’re looking for. When your request makes it to the computer that has the web page you’re looking for, that computer knows to break up the files you’re looking for, and send them to you in little pieces. These little pieces (packets) then get copied many, many times to get them across the network back to you. Each picture and bit of text gets broken up, and copied from one computer to the next until it gets to you. Once at the bits for a given part of the web page get to you (for instance all the part of the background image), your computer puts them back together into an exact copy of the one on the computer where the website lives. And then, your browser puts all the images and text and dancing bunnies together, and displays them for you. you don’t get to see anything on the internet until you have made a copy of it on your computer.
Everything we call The Internet, is just a way of describing and organizing this copying of files from one computer to the next.
</rant><vengeance>
So, since this band didn’t want me to embed the nicely done, well recorded, professional, studio version of their song that is catchy and gets stuck in your head, I looked around a bit. I found a video of them doing the song live backstage at some show and sounding about as good as your average Stairway to Heaven playing college student after coming back from the bars and screaming all night, and looking about as good/sane too. Don’t want to make giving you free publicity easy? Fine. Free mocking is even easier, and embeddable:
The lyrics are still funny, but it’s amazing what a recording studio can do. </vengeance><random association theatre>
The above clip also makes me think of Benny and Joon:
And yes, that is Captain Jack Sparrow.
Let see you go Norwegian indie rocker to Disney ride in fewer steps.
Almost enough to make me want to have a driveway or sidewalk to plow.
I wonder if it would work to have a little bit flatter blade instead of a sharp V, with at an angle flatter to the ground, so it would lift the snow a little more before tossing it to the side so you could do sidewalks without just compact it to the side. It might also let you use the weight of the snow to keep the blade firmly planted against the ground, with less need for the one hand to hold it down.
Or one with a single blade all the way across, all angled the same way like the street snow plows, for clearing big areas. Though it would be harder to keep a straight line that way. Maybe there could be a sidewalk attachment, a driveway attachment, and a parking lot attachment. Maybe even a bagger version with a mold that drops a premade snowman out of the back when you’re done. That would be awesome.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to have a garage to tinker in. And learn to weld.
So, after a much longer than planned pause, I’m back. Now, not only do I have all of my data well backed up, but I built a whole new computer from scratch. I researched it excessively. Like, wanta know about all the different AMD Northbridge chipsets out there right now and how they compare on graphics rendering vs power consumption vs price vs upgradability? I can tell you. The general road maps for the major chip manufacturer’s socket types and backwards compatibility? Got it. Overall balance of fan noise vs air movement? Read more articles than I care to admit. Anyway, you get the idea. I dorked out big time. And have a shiny new box sitting on my desk now.
I also ordered the individual parts, put them together, and installed an operating system. Okay, four operating systems (2 entirely successfully, and the other 2 I’m still working the bugs out of).
And then transferred all my data to the new computer.
And am in progress of entirely reorganizing it and cleaning out old stuff.
And work, and running, and all that usual stuff.
At any rate, I digress, but it’s been a well occupied month, and now I’m back. Let the semi-regular posting re-commence!