Offbeat posts

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…

In many ways, infographics help to fulfill one of the important promises of the internet in general and social media in particular. When done right, they present a lot of useful and interesting data in a format that is visually stunning and easy to digest. They can be used to inform the world about things in ways that no other medium besides (arguably) video can accomplish. Rather than reading a long article or a numbered list of facts, infographics visualize important, interesting, or entertaining aspects of the world in an extremely sharable format. That was the promise, at least. The reality…

On the tail of the release of a report that showed how synthetic DNA could be used to store zettabytes of data in the palm of our hand, it’s important to understand just how much information that really is. The term “big data” is already appearing to be the most overused word of the year in 2013 and it’s only January, so grasping the size of how big it all really is makes for an interesting visualization. Search Engine Journal attacked the topic, and while they’re doing so from a search perspective, the infographic looks at it from many creative perspectives. The fact that the infographic itself is huge…

It may be too early to start firing up your DNA thumb drive, but that’s not out of the question in the near future. A British scientist has imprinted 739kb of data onto a strand of synthetic DNA that includes 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a photo, a PDF of a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, according to the South China Morning Post. The technology opens many doors for data storage. DNA has been shown to be extremely durable over time and requires no energy to maintain. Data storage devices have been getting smaller…

Last year, Audi started showing off its e-bike concept, a high-tech 50 MPH electric bike with carbon fiber and built in WiFi. The cool two-wheelers made its rounds through the blogosphere and tech shows and inspired many to think outside of the box with bicycle designs. Georgian designer Vladimer Kobakhidze was one of the inspired and designed a concept folding bike with the Audi logo proudly emblazoned on the frame. What Kobakhidze may or may not have done intentionally was to use the Mercedes Benz famous three-spoke logo as the wheels of the bike. It’s all harmless, but fun to point out nonetheless….