Author: Ransler Dier

When Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to do something creative with their logo back in 1999 to signify their attendance at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada Desert, things were simple for the Google logo; just a stick figure stuck in the middle of the second ‘o’. Since that seemingly spontaneous burst of creativity, changes in the look of the logo have become as regular as Pink’s hair color changes. While the story of the “Google Guys” and their nerdy acknowledgment of their Burning Man attendance may be what originally sowed the seeds to the doodle concept,…

Lists are everywhere on the Internet and everyone seems to have an opinion about how the items are ranked therein or just all out disagree with the choices. Thankfully, Listiki has come up with a way for everyone to be happy while allowing everyone’s opinion to be addressed. Listiki is a new site just fresh into its beta stage. It offers users a place to make a list and have the option to post it on their Facebook or Twitter accounts. What Listiki excels at is giving everyone an opinion without having to worry about getting into a virtual fistfight in the comments section. This is achieved by the ability…

Who doesn’t want to compare their own Internet impact with their friend’s footprint? Your digital footprint will only be like a drop of rain in the Atlantic Ocean but at least you can say your own raindrop is larger than your friend’s. PeekYou, a search engine with a database recording footprints for over 250 million people on the net, has announced a new application called PeekScore. The new app will size everyone’s digital footprint and allow users to compare their footprints to the likes of Ashton Kutcher or Conan O’Brian. The PeekScore is a rank from 1 to 10 that the search base assigns…

The 1-Bit Symphony is not a recorded album in a traditional sense, it instead adapts to create the music right in front of you; essentially a live show in a music case. Tristan Perich has composed an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. A complete electronic circuit plays the music through a headphone jack mounted on the side of the case itself. The whole thing is programmed by the artist and assembled by hand. 1-Bit Symphony works by utilizing on and off electrical pulses, which are then synthesized by an assembly code and routed from microchip to speaker (or in this case,…

Torrents have been getting a bad rap lately, but pressure has been increasing lately as more and more studios are cracking down on piracy. They must know that you cannot kill a system like that (even by suing those who downloaded The Hurt Locker), it’s just too large and spread out. Somebody seems to get this, as we are now seeing the first series ever to be released exclusively for free download via torrents. The show, Pioneer One, is a science fiction story about an object falling from space only to release radiation which spreads all over North America. US Homeland Security, suspecting terrorism…

Oh, George Romero… what happened? On top of the world of horror at one moment with your groundbreaking films filled with the walking dead and social commentary, then you fell into this slump of ripping yourself off but doing it worse than many of those others riding off your success. Night of the [Living] Dead and Dawn of the Dead gave us nightmares for weeks. They still have us looking for all the possible exits of each place we enter just in case there is a sudden outbreak of zombies during our morning coffee. Then Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead came out and were merely OK, and we wont even mention…

Do we all remember the Tamagotchi craze in the 90s? Those annoying little digital playthings made up of only a few pixels made my life hell for a good week before I traded mine to a friend for a full tube of Pogs (we were all so cool back then). Well if you were one of those who missed the craze by either being too young or too old, there is another digital cry-box in town and this time its purpose really is just to annoy. The Durex Baby app for the Apple iPhone aims to annoy users, more specifically male users, into buying Durex condoms. It could work, it could not. It doesn’t help that the target market for the…

Have you ever been to a house and stated in your head “WTF were they thinking?” when judging their design choices? Now with the help of some docking speakers for your iPod/iPhone you can provoke your friends into thinking the same thoughts. The iCrystal by Speakal is a new innovative design as far as docking stations go; backlit Omni directional speakers with an illuminated teardrop giving off a gentle blue light around its rim. They have been compared to alien pods, and its hard not to see why. These orb-like speakers definitely give off the feeling of something that is not from our world. Of…

Apple has released it’s new version of Safari. The latest version of the popular web browser, Safari 5, boasts a performance boost and many more little additions to make users lives a bit easier. This update adds Bing search and secure sandboxed extensions. As well, there will be support for more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies. “Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine…

Apple has been hyping Monday’s upcoming World Wide Developers Conference pretty heavily. With all this hype, it better be good. Here is a roundup of some predictions of what will be announced at the week long show starting this Monday. iPhone OS 4 This won’t be a surprise to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock these past few months. Steve Jobs has guaranteed he will be spending a good portion of time during the keynote talking about all the new things his new magical device will bring to the world of telecommunications and music. Hopefully we will get an actual release date for the 4G iPhone…