Offbeat posts

The folks at Team BlackSheep put together a “Christmas Special” video with their quadcopter and GoPro camera. While there are few details about the group, the equipment used, or whether or not the French police are investigating, it’s fun to watch as they land on a truck in traffic, hover close to the street with people taking pictures, and follow a French police car up until the point when they are apparently spotted. Then, they make their hasty retreat. Check it out: Here’s a separate video of a cool homemade quadcopter with a GoPro attached: Related articles ‘Team Black Sheep’ Troll French Police…

Just when you think you might be able to figure out how to align the well-known Rubik’s cube something else comes along to challenge your mind even further, meet the X-Cube. …

There’s something particularly creepy about Google Now that not only makes it superior to Siri and other voice- and location-based digital personal assistants, it makes it worrisome to those who take their privacy seriously. For the first time, we get to see the full breadth of how much Google really knows about us as individuals. It knows us from our Gmail accounts. It tracks our activities online. It knows where we are at any given moment. It’s aware of our real-world activities. In essence, it knows more about us than many of our significant others. That should be a little disconcerting. Strangely,…

When a company so new and so fresh off of a cash infusion from going public starts to make cost-cutting decisions surrounding their primary product, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the company. That seems to be the direction that Zynga may be heading after shutting down 11 of their titles. According to Techcrunch: The San Francisco-based company had overextended itself. During its heyday on Facebook it built dozens of games, then aggressively launched mobile games as smartphones gained popularity. It didn’t seem like a problem when the company was preparing for a big IPO. The “big IPO”…

Taking old pieces of technology and turning them into art is a nifty idea, and the older the pieces the more worthy they become within the steampunk world. It is not easy to mix match items and have them actually look like something recognizable. Although I have seen many steampunked items, this doll named Charlotte has caught my eye, not because she is steampunked on the outside (she’s not) but instead, she is on the inside. …

Although the image is funny and we would probably make fun of a friend who sent us this, it is kind of fun to see how people react to the things we can make up using chat and text messages on our smartphones. Whales are awesome creators and super easy to make and share with friends. …

We were so close. A non-controversial bill,  the Video Privacy Protection Act, flew through the Senate and was sent to President Obama last week. The bill itself isn’t important; it allows people using services like Netflix to post the movies that they were watching directly from the service onto Facebook and other social media sites just as they can do now with music sites like Spotify. This is currently against the law because of legislation from 1988 when Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history was leaked. That’s not the important part. What was important was that a section…

Every few months, it seems that Klout makes changes to try to bring its importance to a higher level and push itself into the mainstream consciousness. Every few months, the changes that Klout makes push them further into obscurity and away from mainstream consciousness because they try too hard to appeal to the people that simply don’t care. When they do this, they reduce the very thing that could actually make them better known and talked about more often: overall usefulness. The last algorithm change seemed to set “caps” on how “influential” people could be based upon their position in the real…

It’s no secret. We love Minute Physics. They have a way of taking complex ideas and dumbing them down to our level so that we don’t have to go to school to study quantum mechanics to understand some of the most important components that affect our daily lives. This time, they did something they normally don’t do. They made us think, not just about the science at hand but more importantly about a moral efficiency challenge facing many schools. Some concepts are hard to understand. There are false but “close enough” concepts that often cover the ideas and give us a decent understanding of what is happening…

The marketing adage “content is king” has been around for a long time. In 2013, it appears that both the search engines and social media sites are focusing on content as their driving forces, but in a different way than most understand. Things are changing in the world of internet marketing. Here’s what you need to know. Content was never really “king”. Though it made a nice talking point and allowed marketing companies an opportunity to charge for their labors, it was always a temporary fix. In search, it started off as extremely important for a little while until marketers started learning how…