Photographer Steph Goralnick took these “alternate reality gravity” photos to celebrate April Fool’s Day. Pretty neat perspective shots, huh? Check out some a couple more in the gallery below, and head over to Steph’s Flickr page for even more.
[Via Doobybrain]
On April 1 word got out that Felicia Day’s web series The Guild was to expand its dominance to the television with a children’s program called Lil’ Guildies. The opening segment for the animated series was put on YouTube and it received a ton of positive buzz. Greg Aronowitz co-created it with Day, and Paul and Storm came up with the catchy theme song. The miniature Guild members even included an embryonic version of Bladezz, since he is the youngest of the group on the web series. That little nuggest of information should have made me roll my eyes and figure that this was an elaborate April Fool’s hoax. But it didn’t. And now I’m disappointed that it’s not real. It all started at Tubefilter and it came to a screetching halt when Day screamed April Fools on Twitter.
[Via Tubefilter]
The dudes at the online shop ThinkGeek bring us the Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock. Our Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock is conveniently programmable to go off only once every 24 hours, and at a time convenient to you. But if you don’t get the numbers right before you see the hieroglyphs, there’s no guaranteeing what will happen. All you gotta do is type in the numbers 4 18 15 16 23 42 to stop an electromagnetic cataclysm…er, turn off the alarm. It requires 2 x AAA batteries and comes with a 23-year warranty, “or until your house implodes.” Now that’s some extra motivation to get up in the morning, now ain’t it? Only $49.99. Check out the video below to see it in action.
The fellas at ThinkGeek asked themselves, “How cool would it be to slide your iPad into a desktop-sized arcade cabinet and rock it old school with some Pac-Man or Space Invaders?” Enter the iCade, an iPad arcade cabinet. It’s simple, really. Slide your iPad into the built-in docking cradle, plug in the included 10-watt USB power adapter for extra power, and load up a classic arcade game using the iCade app (available in the App Store on iPad launch day). The handcrafted wooden cabinet somehow stuffs 2.1 Dolby speakers and a subwoofer! Look in the gallery below for some game screenshots. Future iPad buyers, get your iCade today for $149.99.
If you’ve already got an iPhone, forget the iPad. All you have to do is place your iPhone into the the back panel and the Pad-Dock iPhone to Tablet Converter uses a touch-screen magnifier to enlarge your iPhone screen to the exact dimensions of an iPad. That’s all there is to it! And unlike the iPad, this converter device will be able to make phone calls since your iPhone powers it. Available to purchase here for a price of £89.99.
[Via IWantOneOfThose]
Today Starbucks announced two new cup sizes to debut this fall in the US and Canada.
Plenta™ (128 fl oz) and Micra™ (2 fl oz) cups arrive in Starbucks stores this Fall. Derived from Italian word for plentiful or small, the Plenta™ delivers coffee lovers record amounts of the world’s finest coffee beverages while the Micra™ delivers a quick and satisfying morsel of goodness.
Starbucks recommends “several subsequent uses” for the cups: “…options [for the Plenta] include popcorn receptacle, rain hat, perennial planter, lampshade or yoga block. The Micra also serves as a convenient milk dish for kittens, soft boiled egg cup or paper clip holder.”
Now there’s a size for everyone!
[Via Starbucks]
CNET UK is reports: “Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.” If you have been keeping up with the news lately, you should know that the scientists at CERN recently had the Large Hadron Collider successfully collide particles at record force. Their aim is to smash together atoms, create mini-black holes, and attempt to discover what exactly happed during the birth of our univierse, the Big Bang. Ever since its inception people are worried that the Switzerland-based LHC experiment might go awry and cause a huge black hole on Earth leading to instant worldwide death. Time-traveller Cole was at one point captured by Swiss police and explained why he came to stop the LHC from continuing its work: “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.” According to the latest reports, “Mr. Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.”
[Via CNET UK]
Hulu Confidential – For Internal Use. Super-secret. Narrated by Alec Baldwin. Watch it here.
The next installment of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is here! The narrative jumps abot 80 years into the future from lasy year’s “Century: 1910” to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1988. Is that Dr. Emmet Brown front and center? Synopsis, people:
When war-hero-turned-handyman Kesuke Miyagi is found drained of blood, it becomes clear that the occult gang known as the Lost Boys are targeting the only individuals that can stop them from complete domination of America. It’s the perfect case for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen–except that their government contact, Oscar Goldman, disbanded the team in 1979 after they defeated Mr. Han’s army of the living dead.
Now, disgraced scientist Emmet Brown has to put together a new team to combat the growing threat of the Lost Boys and their leader, a newly resurrected vampire kingpin Tony Montana: Transportation specialist Jack Burton, ex-commando B.A. Baracus, tech wizard Angus MacGyver and the mysteriously powerful femme fatale known only as “Lisa.” But will Brown be able to stop the Lost Boys before time runs out?
1988 is written by Moore, but, according to ComicsAlliance, one Rusty Shackles will fill in for illustrator O’Neill “due to the latter’s crippling addiction to “Pokemon SoulSilver”.”
[Via ComicsAlliance]
As I am sure many of you noticed today, Google changed its name to Topeka. But why, you ask? Well because the town of Topeka, Kansas changed its name to Google for the month of April. Topeka, Kansas is one of many communities that have entered a pool of contestents to vie for a fiber-based 1 gigabit broadband network to be provided by Google sometime in the near future. To get Google’s attention, Topeka Google’s Mayor Bill Bunten changed the town’s name and this is how Google pays it forward. Though it’s quite a gesture of gratitude, Google has this to say: “We want to be clear that this initiative is a one-shot deal that will have no bearing on which municipalities are chosen to participate in our experimental ultra-high-speed broadband project, to which Google, Kansas has been just one of many communities to apply.” And that’s why you see Topeka at www.google.com today.
“Google Translate for Animals” does just what you think an app with that name would do. Check it out in action in the video above.
The latest addition to YouTube is TEXTp, a text-only mode way of watching (most) YouTube videos. Once you flip the switch (found in the same place to select SD/HD modes) the YouTube video will playback in ASCII code, or a dumbed down jumble of letters and numbers. It’s pretty neat! The Lego Matrix stop motion video was made to be dressed in ASCII code, and Trololo (the Creepy La-La-La Guy) looks downright funky.
Google on the new addition: “TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements.” “For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while you watch a video, you save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings for us.”
Head over to YouTube to check out your favorites in TEXTp mode, or add append &textp=fool to the end of any video URL to enable the feature. This better not be a one-day deal, Google!
And lastly there’s the new Google Wave wave notifications. They’re real time, real life notifications from a human male in a lab coat who literally waves at you when your Wave account receives a new message. To enable the new notification system, access the the drop down menu that appears in the Inbox Navigation panel. There you can choose from four levels of loudness: Silent, Medium, Loud or Vibrate. Now see what it’s all about in the video above.