Category: Weirdness
VIDEO: Fan-power jetpack
Meet Martin Jetpack, Dutch inventor determined to produced back-strapped solo powered flight. Presumably a big fan of Thunderball. In this video we see Martin’s latest creation. This is the Ducted Fanpack and, according to the man, it can get up to speeds of 60mph and has a range of 8,000 feet before you need the in-built emergency parachute.
It’s not exactly portable and looks more like a drum kit than anything else but, well, take a look…
It doesn’t look like it goes that high which could be an issue if you don’t live in Holland or East Anglia but, should you be sufficiently stunned and not in stitches, then see if you can tap up the bank for the $100,000 you’ll need.
(via Oh Gizmo!)
VIDEO: Working Wolverine claws demonstration
Real Working Homemade Wolverine Claws – X-Men – Click here for the funniest movie of the week
Really tricky one, this. Yes, the claws are a mighty impressive piece of work. Yes, the quick release action is almost as good as the real thing and, if it weren’t for the whole retracting inside his body part, they’d be perfect. The trouble is that this guy comes across as a bit of a psycho.
Not quite sure what he has against cardboard boxes and I’m a little concerned as to what his plans are beyond destroying paper-based goods. Full marks for construction but perhaps it’s time to flog them once the novelty wears off, as in, now.
(via CrunchGear)
T-Mobile draws 18,000 karaoke singers to Trafalgar Square
Last night, in central London, 18,000 Londoners gathered to belt out karaoke hits in Trafalgar Square in the latest T-Mobile advertising stunt. The crowds convened at 6pm, and massive queues snaked into the central area. Pop star Pink showed up, too, and you can see in the video above.
After a couple of warm-up tracks, former T4 host Vernon Kaye led the crowd through several rock hits including “Hey Jude” and “Is This The Way to Amarillo?”. The staff at the nearby Texas Embassy confirmed to me that no, this wasn’t the way to Amarillo.
The Karaoke session follows a mass dance-off that took place in Liverpool Street Station in January and was subsequently used in adverts for the company. If you attended the karaoke fun last night, then don’t be surprised if your rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” ends up soundtracking the company’ latest handsets.
Niche of the week: Is this your luggage?
Are you a filthy voyeur? When you travel by plane, do you look at other people’s luggage and wish you could see what was inside? Are you envious of the x-ray machine operators?
Well, isthisyourluggage.com has you sorted. It’s a bloke that buys up old unclaimed luggage at auction and photographs its contents. Yes, including the pants. It’s an interesting look into the kind of stuff people take on holiday.
So go have a perve. And if you recognise any of it, then let the site’s creator know – he’s happy to reunite people with their lost luggage.
isthisyourluggage.com
Dead pixel as seen from Google Earth
This is an artist’s impression of a dead pixel. But step closer. It gets better. This 82cm x 82cm square of burnt grass isn’t just an organic version of a screen problem because when viewed from 1km above on Google Earth, this square will appear as a dead pixel on your monitor in real life. Clever, eh?
Congrats to Dutch artist Helmut Smits for that. If anyone can find the pixel, then let us know. I’m guessing Rotterdam would be a good place to start.
(via psfk)
Climbers get phone coverage on Everest
Climbers of Sagarmatha, Chomolungma, Qomolangma, Zhumulangma, or – as we call it in the West – Mount Everest, will soon be able to chat from the summit. Nepal Telecom is setting up four cell towers in Thakdin, Manjo, Pheriche and Gorak Shep.
You might know the latter because Nokia’s planning some crazy cricket game there. Normally climbers depend on satellite phones to keep in touch with base stations, but now your N95 should be able to perform the same job. It’s hoped that the work will be completed by mid-June.
Ridiculously impressive and tiny landscape generation
The demoscene is a subculture of computer art that specialises in creating non-interactive audiovisual content to certain set limits. This bit of art, called ‘Elevated’, is an example of the ‘intros’ subcategory, which limits programmers to either 64kb or 4kb file sizes. The above example is 4k.
Watch that video again, and consider that everything – music, landscape and lighting – fits into 4,000 bytes – the equivalent of 800 average english words. That’s *nothing*. That’s less than nothing!
But it’d be difficult for this tech to be integrated into games because it’s so compressed – although file sizes would get smaller, load times would increase massively. In tech, processor speeds are considerably more limited than storage, so for the moment expect this to stay a tiny subculture.
If you want to check it out for yourself, then you can download the file from Pouet, but you’ll need a pretty impressive graphics card to do it justice – it probably won’t work too well on your office PC. Expect to see a black screen for a few mins while it loads, too.
Village forms human chain to stop Google Street View car
A small village in Buckinghamshire has thumbed its nose to the world, and refused to allow Google to index its streets. Broughton, which is close to Milton Keynes, has suffered a few burglaries in recent months, so when the Street View car rolled into town, they formed a human chain across the street to stop it going any further.
“My immediate reaction was anger,” said resident Paul Jacobs “how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent?” The villagers called the police and accosted the driver, accusing him of “invasion of privacy”.
Google, for thier part, issued a statement saying that the vehicle was using public roads and wasn’t breaking any laws. They also reminded the public that anyone can remove their house from the service, and they also blur faces and vehicle number plates.
The street view car has recently been spotted in Reading, Preston, Ipswitch and Winchester. The service recently went live in London, but has been available in the USA for years.
(via Telegraph, image via @ruskin147)
Man dies using Wii Fit – port and kebab diet possibly to blame
A 25-year-old scout leader from Yarmouth died while using his Wii Fit making this the first balance board related death in history, or at least the first I’ve heard of.
Tim Eves was found by his girlfreind and flatmate in March slumped on the floor presumably with the machine still running and encouraging him to pick up the pace and not to be such a slow coach.
Mr Eves had just got back from holiday in Lisbon celebrating his mother’s birthday and it was she to whom Mr Eves last spoke moments before his death. She said:
“We spoke to him on the phone when he was playing on the Wii machine. He told us he had just ordered himself a kebab and was sitting there with a glass of port.”
“But a little while after he had put the phone down, he collapsed for no reason. It was completely out of the blue.”
The body is currently undergoing a post-mortem but for the while it is being treated as Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, which is, of course, a fancy way of saying that they haven’t got a clue.
It seems unlikely the Wii was to blame. Personally, I’d look to the diet of port and kebabs. It might also be worth noting that according to his mum, Mr Eves had only ordered the kebab and not yet eaten it. That puts the the delivery man right in the frame for me. I’m sure I’ve dished out enough drunken abuse in kebab shops over the years for someone to decide that enough is enough. Apparently, I’m not alone.
(via Telegraph)
Palace of Westminster blocks MPs surfing for pr0n
MPs are not allowed to surf the web as free as a bird when sitting in their Commons offices. It turns out that the Palace of Westminster blocks sites considered to be pornographic or inappropriate and, most amusingly of all, this includes the Daily Sport.
We’re led to believe that the block came to light after one MP tried to access a column on the site of the publication self-styled as “world’s most outrageous newspaper” which was written by the Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire, Lembit Öpik.
The official line from Westminster is that all “offensive or illegal content or sources of malicious software” are blocked with a message to contact the Commons Authority if they wish to view the site. The case of the Daily Sport article was probably the first time an MP wasn’t red-faced enough to do so.
On the on hand, I think it’s important for research that all sites are available to MPs. They need to know what’s going on out there. On the other, I’m convinced they’d just be sitting around looking at pr0n all day.
Perhaps what disturbs me most of all is what an MP is doing writing for the Daily Sport at all. I’m not sure any political opinion’s going to be taken very seriously alongside such stories as “I get £20k benefits and can’t be arsed to get dressed”target=”_blank” and Clarkson’s in the sh*t(ter)!
(via BBC)
