Here are a few ideas for different clock designs I have had in the past:
This is a clock, disguised as a thermometer.
(Picture courtesy Morton Fox via flickr)
This is a clock, disguised as a compass.
(Picture courtesy Leo Reynolds via flickr)
This clock only has a second hand.
(Picture courtesy mag3737 via flickr)
How would you disguise a clock?
Q: My Mighty Mouse stopped scrolling down. Is there any easy way to fix this?
A: This is the most common defect that Apple’s Mighty Mouse has. While it is impossible to fix, many users just spin their mouse around, and live with the fact that they can’t scroll up.*
Q: My keyboard is all grimy and looks disgusting. What is the best way to clean it off?
A: Usually a dirty keyboard is not worth the cost of sending it to the Keyboard Cleaners. If you’re looking to get a few more months or years out of an old keyboard, I would suggest giving it a fresh coat of paint. Avoid spray paint, as it may not fully cover all the surfaces. Use a three inch brush; I recommend firetruck red.**
Q: You just ruined my computer…
A: Did you know that dry erase markers work wonderfully on glass? They do, and it comes off perfectly.*** This means you can take a dry erase marker and draw on your friend’s computer screen! Then when they get mad at you, you can just wipe it off!**** If you’re not sure if they have a glass screen or not, just make a small mark somewhere near the middle of the screen, then try to wipe it off.***** If it comes off, then the screen is glass and you can continue to draw. If it doesn’t come off, then the screen probably isn’t glass, and maybe you should look around for some new friends.*******
*It doesn’t actually work that way… sorry.
**I’m not responsible for keyboards ruined with paint… …but I might have to do a photo shoot sometime…
***This actually is true.
****This is potentially true, but I wouldn’t necessarily try it.
*****This is possibly the worst advice I have ever written on my blog.
******Provided you are still alive enough to make more friends.
I just had an interview with Conglometroid over my latest project. Click here for the interview.
I love the Metroid Prime series, so when I came across a resin mushroom, I knew what I had to do with it.
Saturnine mushrooms are benign plants found throughout Tallon VI. They do not seem to harm anyone or anything, but they are photo luminescent. I painted the mushroom with black paint, gave it white lines and then covered the while with a glow in the dark quasar blue paint for effect.
For the past year or so I have had a computer grabbing a webcam image from a construction cam at my alma mater. At first it was grabbing photos every 15 minutes but after a time I switched to every five minutes instead. As you can imagine, this creates a whole lot of files over the course of time. I recently decided to go back and start working with these images so I can create a time lapse of the event this far.
Long story short: I had a folder on my FreeNAS box which had 25000+ image files in it. I connected to the computer from my iMac via the SMB protocol. The window loaded and loaded but never showed me the files inside. (I actually forgot about it and came back several hours later to discover that the folder did load, but it was unusable because it wanted to reload after I made a change. I actually watched it sit there fore 35 minutes without making any visible progress.)
I logged onto the FreeNAS web interface and opened the file manager. After letting the page load for about 10 minutes it finally was giving me a list of files, but it was growing constantly and was basically unusable.
Even trying to copy the folder to my local machine resulted in a copying bar which stayed open for hours without doing anything.
Highly discouraged, I realized that I had not tried to access the folder from my Windows 7 machine. I opened up the network storage and instantly saw I file list of files. I could move the files around and all it took was a short time to reload the folder once finished.
As I fell asleep later that night it dawned on me, I was connecting via SMB, but my FreeNAS box is also configured to allow for AFP connections. So I tried connecting via AFP and I was instantly given a list of files which could be moved, opened, copied or deleted.
I’m not sure what this is telling me, but I think it’s worth sharing.
In 2008 I bought the Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth Anthology. I paid $22.48 with shipping. Here’s my receipt from Amazon:
About a year later, I wanted to play multiplayer mode with my family and friends, but I only have one copy of the game. I figured $20 would be well worth it for the fun that it would generate. I headed off to Amazon only to find this:
After 12 months the game had jumped from under $20 to almost $200. If I wasn’t so attached to the game I would have thrown my copy up for sale to see what kind of cash I could rake in. I didn’t though, because it’s a good game and I still have to beat it.
Out of curiosity, I went back again on September 8th to check the price. The price had dropped tremendously, but was still more than I was willing to spend.
It’s really amazing how games change prices over time. There needs to be an app or service which you can use to track the changes in price. How about a piece of software that tracks the current price of an item on a number of different sites and offers the option to auto-buy an item if it drops below a target price? (Provided you have an account on that site, of course.) Now I think that sounds like a killer app!
Price Check:Battle for Middle Earth Anthology on Amazon
This small handheld device is the perfect way to introduce your child to Twitter as well as keep both parents up to date with the Baby’s current status!
With BabyTweet, a young child can tell his parents that he needs a diaper change, is hungry or can send a preset message created by one of the parents.
BabyTweet allows the baby to @Mom, @Dad or both with just the push of a button! BabyTweet can be configured to use either mentioning (@username) or direct messages to communicate between baby and parents.
Three custom buttons can be customized up to 144 characters by the parent!
BabyTweet is completely waterproof and teething friendly!
When the baby presses the emergency button, both parents are immediately notified via Twitter and are give the baby’s GPS coordinates. (Example: @Mom @Dad #emergency!!!
Me: 44.309943,-94.465863)
BabyTweet is USB 2.0 compatible. BabyTweet Easy to use configuration software runs on Windows, Mac and Linux!
BabyTweet can last up to three days between charges! Comes with a handy magnetic charger to charge the device while Baby sleeps. This charger is perfectly safe and can be attached to the crib so Baby can begin tweeting as soon as he/she wakes up!
Using BabyTweet is easy! Just follow these simple steps!
Step 1: Connect to computer via USB
Step 2: Choose your connection type and test the connection.
Step 3: Use the automated process to configure the Twitter accounts for Mom, Dad and Baby!
Step 4: Customize the messages and select other options.
Step 5: Unplug the device and give it to baby!
Order BabyTweet today!
While signing up with my credit card for paperless statements. (Figured don’t really need to get the mail every month and I pay online anyway.) I was met with this nice set of instructions:
You must have a valid Internet e-mail address, Internet access and access to a printer. You must also have one of the following hardware/browser combinations:
Microsoft® Windows®
Netscape Navigator® 4.07 or higher
Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher
AOL 5.0 or higher
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and aboveMacintosh®
Netscape Navigator 4.06 or higher
Internet Explorer 4.51 or higher
AOL 5.0 or higher
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and aboveYour browser must have cookies enabled.
Welcome to 2009.
Current browser versions:
Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.6 (Official support ended on March 1st, 2008.)
Internet Explorer 8 (Mac version has been discontinued since 2003.)*
AOL 9.1
Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1
I’m sorry, but if I was dealing with people’s credit card or banking information, I would want them to have a recent browser. You know, a browser that isn’t so full of security flaws that it like keeping a burglar out by opening a second door.
*Oddly enough, I just talked to tech person who has been ‘in the business for 13 years’ who had no idea that IE wasn’t available for the Macintosh platform.
I went to an art museum the other day and came home with the ultimate idea for a “haunted house” attraction.
First off I wouldn’t call it a haunted house. Only a certain crowd of people go to haunted houses. If you really want to scare people, you need people who are not expecting to be horrified. For this reason I would call it something along the lines of “Museum of Horror” or perhaps “Museum of Haunted Houses.”
Next, I would model the attraction after a museum. It would be completely white inside, have marble floors and high ceilings. The first few rooms would have bizarre art pieces, artifacts and a few models of famous haunted houses with information about them.
The first floor would offer a maze of directions and exhibitions. This would make it seem like there was a lot to see and also encourage people to wanter about, potentially separating themselves from their group.
No music would be playing in the museum. It would be silent except for the whispers of those visiting. (Some rooms might have music or sounds, but I’ll touch on that later.)
Around the middle of the first floor there would be a few secret rooms which would entice a visitor in. (Some might be labeled with a “one person at a time” sign.) The inside of these rooms would be dark with only a few lights shining on display cases. A sophisticated camera, thermal and motion tracking system would watch a visitor enter a room, make sure no one was in the vicinity or watching the door and quickly perform a few tasks. The first would be to drop the lights for a second. In the pitch darkness, covered by any potential screams, the entrance to the room would vanish and be replaced by a different exit. The lights would snap back on and the visitor would go on their way, only to discover they came out in a different part of the museum.
The bizarre artwork would continue throughout the museum. Many pieces could be sculptures and paintings of demons and malformed beings/creatures. Other pieces would be of things like clowns or grotesque monkeys. It might also be creepy to have some sort of mangled doll that keeps appearing in or on the artwork of different rooms.
One of the art pieces would be a realistic sculpture of a girl who drown herself. She would be pale and have wet hair with a muddy face and hands. Her dress would be wet, warn, frayed and perhaps ripped a bit. a few rooms later, I would have wet footprints on the floor and a pool of water in front of a painting. This might happen in other places as well.
The stairway going up would discretely skip at least one floor on the way up. (Perhaps having the levels offset one step for every floor, perhaps all in one go. The tall ceiling can help to fake this. Also many museums have half levels or partial levels that go up a few steps at a time.) This way they visitor will encounter new and strange floors on their way back down. It will also mess with their perception as they go down more floors than they went up.
There would be a number of rooms on different floors and in different areas that would be identical, except that they would all be facing different directions. This would help to disorient the visitor to thinking they know where they are going when they really don’t have a clue.
Sound and sound effects will come into play in later floors and rooms. In the museum I visited there was a panel of speakers in the wall where a voice kept saying things like “na na na na” when heard from adjacent rooms it actually sounded creepy. If odd noises like that continued to occur from time to time it would be very scary. Especially if you didn’t know where it was coming from. Again using cameras, motion and thermal sensors, it would be easy to trigger sound events in rooms that are either adjacent or near someone walking through. A simple AI program could ensure that it doesn’t happen rhythmically or systematically but rather have a randomness so the visitor does not realize it is automated. Another sound effect to use would be footsteps to make it sound like other people are walking around.
The other sound I would use is the sound of little children laughing or playing. For those that played Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Celestia temple in the sky had creepy background music. It really made me uneasy when I played it. I would do something similar for some of the rooms, although I wouldn’t have as much or any background music, just the young-children-esque sounds.
Using projectors, (with the sensory equipment) I would make people appear in the room ahead of the visitor and walk out of sight (around a corner), then disappear. Neat shadow effects could be done as well. The projectors would have to be hidden in such a way that no visitor would ever see them. This could be done in a number of ways, but it is vital to the efforts of terror.
There are artists that create 3D murals on the side of buildings. I would have a room that featured a giant 3D painting on two of the walls. I would have several doorways in the painting, most of which would just be painted doorways. One of them would be real, though. It wouldn’t be *hard* to find your way out of the room, it would just cause some confusion at first.
At one of the half stairways I would place a pool of fake blood, with a trail to make it look like a body was dragged away.
Most of the museum would be well lit, minus a few strategic locations where some trickery must be done. One room, or perhaps a small cluster of rooms would have lights that flicker on and off, like there was a broken or faulty power cable. I would take advantage of this lighting to maybe have a picture or two switch positions from time to time.
Something potentially harder to pull off, but even cooler to do, would be to have a couch that was indented like an invisible person was sitting on it. When a visitor entered the room, it would expand out, as if someone stood up and left. A similar feat could include a table chair that gets pushed back from the table accompanied by footsteps of someone walking away. (Motors and/or magnets would have to be used here, but it would be vitally important that the visitor could not see any mechanics behind it.)
The main concept of my haunted house would be that of emptiness and loneliness. Many haunted houses try to do scare visitors by surprises and darkness. I think open empty whiteness is more likely to freak people out and create a memory that will last longer in-your-face jack-in-the-box style events.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Where can I improve things? Does anyone want to fund this project?
