excellentideas
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The Pen, In Situ
This is the amazing pen, folded and ready to be put in a wallet.
You are viewing stuff tagged with excellentideas.
Mykala just invented (or at least, I think she invented) the krump attack. In our kitchen. At 8:20 this evening. Both myself and Essie thought it was amazing. It was also hilarious.
Krump attack.
Mykala converted my idiosyncratic and decidedly gentle ill-will towards some selfish strangers to something called “Unlikely Retribution”, and here’s how it works. First, a stranger must do something bad, wrong, or otherwise morally repugnant to you. They might cut you off in traffic, spend 5 minutes ordering coffee, or take your parking spot. The offense usually occurs in an incidental way where you don’t directly interact with this person, though that isn’t a requirement.
Consider this: one month after only part of a song called “New Soul” by Yael Naim backed the first commercial for Apple’s Macbook Air, the song debuted at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. Disregarding its precipitous tumble down the charts after that, it is easy to see that featuring music on TV can have a profound effect on sales. This brings me to my idea: illustrated radio.
Hamster powered shredder - Put your hamster to good use!
Pictures on your bike tires - Using the phenomenon of persistence of vision, these guys sell a kit that makes images on your bike spokes when the wheels turn.
I find the Pac-Man demonstration particularly fun.
Watch the sun move over the earth on your desktop - The great thing about this is how much information it conveys without any explanatory text. Everyone understands what’s going on, intuitively. Plus, it provides support for weather patterns. Gorgeous. I’m sure I’ll get this when I finally get a Mac.
This is the amazing pen, folded and ready to be put in a wallet.
This pen folds flat into a credit-card sized writing utensil fit for a wallet.
Inventing the smiley face - Way back in 1982.
Banana Guard - Plastic container storing and transporting individual bananas.
Rubber band shooting Lego gun - 64+ rubber bands all in a spinning Lego weapon of awesomeness. This guy is brilliant.
Amazing auto-stop table saw - Uses blade capacitance to detect when human skin is in contact with the blade, and immediately stops the saw.
The video is phenomenal.
Strap on wings that let your fly unpowered for 25 miles - Yes, jump out of a plane, and this special suit allows you to fly for long distances at high speeds before deploying your parachute.
Trading up from a paper clip to a house - Over the course of about 10 trades, this guy has gone from a large red paperclip to a year’s free rent in Arizona. He’s looking to continue trading until he gets a house.
Brilliant Way to Preserve Snowflakes - Cold runny superglue and some microscope slides will preserve snowflakes indefinitely. This is so cool. Will try next winter. Remind me.
When you think ‘aerogel,’ think unbelievable - The most expensive chemical substance known to man, more than safron, etc. For example: “Silica aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records for material properties …” and “it is very strong structurally, able to hold over 2000 times its own weight” oh … it’s “90-99.8%” air, so it’s also almost transparent. Unreal.
Great cheap steadycam - Uses a t-mounted counterweight to steady a camera for commercial-quality stabilizing with a college-student price. Link from Justin. Useful for Nils.
Check out the example footage - it really works!
Why oh why oh why is there not just one simple little feature for cell phones: a skip-to-leave-a-voicemail function/key sequence? Lovely as my girlfriend’s voice is, I already know she is going to tell me to leave a message and that she will get back to me. I already know she is not available. And goodness, I already know (if I’m listening to a Verizon-serviced phone) how to leave a voicemail. Is this a money-making move? I suspect it is. Keeping customers on the phone longer (the call begins when voicemail picks up) allows phone companies to make good money in very small increments. Consider this: Cingular features a direct to web button on most of their phones which, if pushed, almost always transfers web data before the user can mash enough buttons to stop the transfer (or in my case, try to rip the battery out) before charges are incurred.
Zubbles - Nearly opaque colored bubbles - took a guy at the U of M about 10 years to develop them. Wow.
Apple upcoming product speculation is mind-numbingly boring. Why am I interested, then, you ask? I am a perfectionist, and Apples are made by perfectionists. The fit and finish of the cases combined with the rendering of the text on the screen (literally 50% more readable than Windows XP’s text), is enough to sell the machines (for me). It is obvious that Apple is a company guided by people with ridiculously high expectations for the Apple Computer experience.
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