Woot® : One Day, One Deal™

If you're one of those people who've never been to Reddit, you'll probably be really surprised by this video right here:

That's what speedy propellers look like to a Nokia N95 smartphone, and probably, we assume, to all robots. See, technophiles and cyberpunks? Our real peepers are still better at something.

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Is it a blog or a website? We're never sure these days. Either way, Sunday Magazine has a really cool story about the very first Internet, the classic telegraph line. The article the cite is from 1890, and it talks about two men who were close, and yet, had never met in person. Back then, this was a novelty. Today, it's called the average online relationship. Just think, these two guys might have been the very first nerds. We all clearly owe them a debt for showing us the way.

The same article also examines the special slang (like "min pen" and "g a") as well as a really cool explanation about each person's unique telegraphing style AND a story of possibly the only hardware-based telegraph chat bot in history. We won't spoil it, so you'll need to visit Sunday Magazine to read it for yourself. It's worth the trip!

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It may be hard for the current generation to fully grasp, but when we were kids, something like this:

was considered to be cutting edge graphics and was why you chased down the very best computer. You'd spend the school day telling the other nerds about how your game had FOUR floppies and so was CLEARLY the best game on the market, and then race home to try and figure out why the raven needed toast before you could get a castle key. That's why today we were all so happy to find that the very latest thing is the Sierra-looking landscapes of our youth. At least we're still cutting edge somewhere! After the jump, Effect Games shows off what HTML 5 can do. Those who can't handle the page can just look at our screenshots.

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The pioneers, the heroes, the titans who can do things we can't. They're always out there, on the go, breaking records and pushing the envelope of what it means to be a human. But it's the guys who say "Hey, I bet people would pay to hear about this" that end up changing the world. Homer, Shakespeare, James Cameron, it's always the storyteller who makes the quick buck and ensures that their legend-of-choice lives on.

Of course, in that awkward space between "roving bards" and "pay-per-view", it was much harder to convince dozens of people to pay up for a baseball game that wasn't even there. Even the most gifted storyteller was going to have trouble attracting a stadium full of paying customers. Unless, of course, that storyteller was using George S. Coleman's marvelous "Life-Like Baseball Players" machine.

Pretty cool for 1924, isn't it? As the scores came in via steampunk internet (a.k.a. the telegraph) five guys playing Oz would pull the wires and flip the switches and reproduce the game with only a slight time delay, so that the crowd could still enjoy each and every moment, from the joy of a last inning grand slam to the heartbreak of losing to those clowns on the other side of town that just need a good smack in the eye to take 'em down a peg. Why, the machine would probably still be running today, if it weren't for that riot at Comiskey Park's "Flapper Victrola Re-constitution Night" in the late thirties. And what a loss it was.

If you'd like to learn more, you can hit here and here to see the original photos and comments on shorpy.com. Thanks to the Something Awful forums for showing us the original link to FlipFlopFlyBall which is how this whole post began.

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From dogs who stink up your couch to ketchup that dribbles all over your new tie, infomercials have chronicled a litany of "problems" most of us didn't know we had. In tribute to the actors who bring such overwrought panache to their roles as incompetent shlemiels, a YouTube auteur assembled clips from over 50 infomercials depicting all the awful things that can happen when you're not properly equipped. Now, where did I put that Adjust-A-Slice?

(As seen on Gizmodo.)

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Days after the launch of the much-lauded iPad, the various merits of its very existence are still being debated. Will it change the face of computing? Will it save the publishing industry? What does it mean for video games? What about comics? Should you even buy one, or is Cory Doctorow just being a killjoy?

Frankly, I could give two good shakes of an Etch-a-Sketch about all that. Everything I want to know about the thing can be summed up in one little video.

Good to know, Tom. Good to know.

[Will It Blend?]

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Tired of having to push alllll those buttons so that the people in the chat room will know that you're having a really good day? Then won't you be pleased to discover the Auto-Smiley program over at Fffff.at. This video below pretty much sums it up:

You'll have to visit the page and install the zip file to test it out yourself, so if you don't trust that sort of thing, just watch the video and laugh. But if you're an installin' fool, guess what? This program will work on a Mac! We expect that should bring smiles to the faces of the Apple lovers among us, which we'll then all instantly know about, because of AutoSmiley.

Thanks to slater at Metafilter for showing this off, even though the cabal over there is always so grumpy about everything and hates our writing staff :(

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Way back in January 2009, I blogged in this very space about an embryonic effort to restart manufacturing of Polaroid instant film. With the help of a group of investors, Florian Kaps and the Impossible Project have brought that dream to life. It took more than just a couple of shakes of a photo, but they announced today that their PX films will be available this Thursday, March 25. For now, it only comes in b&w, but they say color PX film is on the way. Cool packaging, of course, since it's European and all.

The photographers featured in the Impossible Collection show just how much you can do with that old film's peculiarities. Here's to a new Golden Age of blurry, weirdly-tinted Polaroid instant photos!

Will you be rushing right out to pick up some PX for your old Polaroid? Or are you sticking with the pixels?

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One obstacle in the way of the vinyl LP resurgence is the lack of record players in American homes these days. Vancouver ad agency Grey Canada has a novel solution: turn the record sleeve into a record player.

Of course, there's no motor, so you have to turn the record by hand or with a pencil. And there are no speakers: the vibrations are amplified by the cardboard. So I assume the sonic fidelity won't exactly meet audiophile standards. But if you've always wanted a record player you could fit in your Trapper Keeper, here it is.

(As seen at Gizmodo.)

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Geekologie has turned us on to something cool. Something that we feel should have existed a long, long time ago.

That's right, they're NES Cartridge Harmonicas. Finally, there's something classy for when you want to accompany yourself while playing Guitar Hero!

Apparently you can only buy these beauties on eBay and they're just over twenty bucks, which seems pretty reasonable for such a cool harmonica. But what we'd like to know this: if we took one on stage during some 8 Bit Music Festival, would Pete Seeger get mad and try to plug it in?

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