Offbeat posts

Most people have heard of Iron Chef, the show that pits two master chefs and their teams against each other in a battle of culinary creativity. The get a secret ingredient at the beginning of the show and have one hour to serve up a sudden masterpiece to the judges. The Flickr version of this is Iron Builder which takes the rules of Iron Chef and spins them on their heads to fit in with LEGO creations. According to the Flickr page, here are the rules: The basic rules of the contest require that the two builder’s receive a batch of the ‘secret ingredient’ part. In this case, the Bionicle Tridax Pod Half. The…

The CES Best of Show award is a big deal, so this isn’t exactly a case of the Streisand Effect, but CBS certainly didn’t want to draw such a spotlight to one of their litigation opponents. The decision to censor CNET and disapprove their choice for the award has turned from a mild spectacle to a major blunder. Adding insult to injury, CES issued a press release today, awarding DISH’s Hopper with Sling the “Best of Show” award with co-winner Razer Edge. “The CNET editorial team identified the Hopper Sling as the most innovative product of the show, and we couldn’t agree more,” said Karen Chupka,…

Lady Gaga joins Beyonce, Chris Brown, and Michael Jackson as artists whose YouTube channels had artificially inflated views struck from the video site’s coveted counts. It’s as if 156 million voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. As NME notes, it’s likely not her fault. Fans and hackers will often inflate the counts using automated video viewing techniques to either support or attempt to get the artists in trouble. There are other factors taken into account during these sweeps, including auto-play views that YouTube doesn’t like to count. If someone didn’t specifically…

It may not be the strangest geek find of all time, but it’s up there. Leonard Nimoy who played the ever-logical and always-lovable Spock on Star Trek, is found in the video below sings the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. The “bravest hobbit of them all” gets the full 60s treatment, including girls in sweatshirts and long ears with signs supporting the star of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Originally filmed in 1967 for a variety show called Malibu U, it was later part of segment for Funk Me Up Scotty, a 1996 BBC2 documentary that followed the musical careers of the stars of the original Star Trek. Warning: After…

The human rights atrocities in North Korea are no laughing matter and Google is doing their part with a different sort of activism, exposing many of the known concentration camps on Google maps and even calling them “gulags” in some cases. As CNN reported, they are showing more than just the monuments now. They’re putting nuclear facilities and buildings known for torture on their service. According to Buzzfeed: The purpose is obvious: to make the existence of these camps known; to point out that North Korea is secretive, and would never release this data on its own; to emphasize that the country…

There was a faux-PSA posted last year that was enjoyable to watch but that rang a truth within its contents. Vertical videos, most often created on smartphones when the user captures video holding the camera vertically rather than horizontally, have continued to spread on YouTube and across the internet. The wonders of mobile technology have helped to increase the number of videos being recorded every day by a mile and the expansion of YouTube and other video services makes distributing these videos as easy as pressing a couple of buttons. Unfortunately, the quality of the videos are diminished…

Clever. Tasty. Creepy. Hot Pop Factory has been able to make a name for itself by generating creative pieces of jewelry using 3D printers. Now, they’ve used a neat hack with Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect system to scan a person’s head, print it out on a 3D printer, and put it on the top of a Pez dispenser. If you’ve ever wanted to distribute candy through a hole beneath a figure of your head on a stick, this is the way to do it. Check out the video of how they scan the heads through Kinect and some images of the finished results:  …

The thinking that video games are just for kids has been long dispelled. Today, men and women of all ages are playing. Even the video game makers are catering their games to adults more than kids, knowing that it’s often easier to get someone to fork over $70 for a game if they’re the ones that are going to end up playing it. There has always been a line drawn for the elderly. You don’t see too many people cashing in their social security checks to grab the latest edition of Call of Duty, but it might just be a matter of exposure. A YouTube channel has been created called GrandpaPlaysGames in which the 84-year…

In many ways, smartphones are actually too smart. They have capabilities that few ever take advantage of and there are so many apps that there’s no way to explore a fraction of them. Smartphones can help you organize, remember, and hack life in general with their capabilities. Used properly, they can even help you make money. This video from Hack College gives us a breakdown of five different ways you can make the most out of your smartphone in a smidgen over a minute. From optimizing your actions to linking to the cloud, these hacks can take your smartphone use to another level.  …

We know where to find porn. There are more websites dedicated to giving people their skin fix than there are sites dedicated to curing cancer, solving political issues, or educating children. Why, then, does porn continue to pop up on so many apps and just about every user-generated content site? Vine, Twitter’s new 6-second video app, had major porn problems within hours of launch. 500px photography app had to settle for a 17+ rating on the app store over porn. Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Ning – they’ve all had their share of porn issues that keep popping up despite desperate measures taken…