Career News 24/7: Geekosystem Newsletter - 15 Terrific Pixel Art Soda Displays

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Geekosystem Newsletter - 15 Terrific Pixel Art Soda Displays

	15 Terrific Pixel Art Soda Displays When I did my time in the stockroom at a grocery store, we devoted our "free time" to such admirable pursuits as sleeping in the storage trailers or hanging out in the ice cream freezer, eating out of the damage bins. Apparently other wage-slaves feel better if they waste their time on something that at least looks cool, like turning soda displays into walls of pixel art. Naturally, the form lends itself to video game homages (particularly Mario homages), but you might be surprised at the breadth of the art form. Don't believe me? Check out this collection of 15 notable examples. Read More »
	Mojang to Host Mojam This Weekend, Create Crowdsourced Game In 60 Hours for Charity Mojang, the rising game-company superstar behind Minecraft, is teaming up with Humble Bundle this weekend for a nifty little event called Mojam. Starting February 17th at 10 CET, Mojang is going to blitz-code an entire new game in 60 hours, live-streaming the whole shebang for your amusement. Following its completion, the game will go on sale at HumbleBundle.com, with all the profits going to charity. If all that wasn't enough, you can also vote to pick the game's genre. Read More »
	iOS '86, the Hot New Mobile Operating System Hey guys, did you hear about Apple's fancy new mobile operating system, iOS '86? The rumors flying around all the hottest tech blogs say the operating system sports up to three colors! We're seriously living in the future. Designer Anton Repponen shows us what 1986 would've looked like if Apple focused all of their technical prowess on developing the iPhone, but didn't save any resources to further software aesthetics. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be a theme for jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches. More pictures after the break. Read More »
	Photoshop CS6's Content-Aware Fill Features Are Impressive The prominence of Photoshop and its amazing capabilities have taught us that we can never really trust our eyes when presented with things on the Internet. Adobe's image manipulation tool has always been impressive, to the point where we can't quite tell if simple pictures are real or not anymore. In Adobe's latest sneak peek of Photoshop CS6, they show off some of the ridiculously impressive content-aware fill features. Need to move a girl to the other side of a field, but not have a girl-shaped hole in the picture where she used to be? No problem. Want to make the roof above her extend further? It takes roughly five seconds and looks like you never manipulated it at all. Check out the sneak peek after the break, and if you don't regularly manipulate images via a digital toolset, prepared to be impressed. Read More »
	The 22-Year Trip Down Into Lake Vostok, Visualized For 15 million years, Lake Vostok remained untouched, buried 3,768 meters beneath Antarctica. Though the 22-year drilling journey finally reached the subglacial lake, scientists still have to wait until 2013-2014 to extract samples of unfrozen lake water, and have to wait until the end of this year to extract frozen samples. The team plans to explore the lake in 2013-2014 using cameras, probes, and water samplers. The researchers will also be looking for life, and could potentially find specially adapted microorganisms living within the subglacial lake. To better understand the great depth the drilling traveled, as well as what layers of ice the drilling passed through, the journey to the unfrozen subglacial waters of Lake Vostok has been tastefully visualized after the break. Read More »
	How To Say I Love You To Anyone [Video] All you omniglots out there might not have any trouble in telling anyone, anywhere, that you love them in any language. The rest of us might have a little trouble. For all you cross-language lovers out there -- or aspiring cross-language lovers -- here's a crash course in "I love you" from Memrise. They've even got you covered in the unlikely case that the apple of your eye speaks pig-latin, and the unlikely case that you don't already know how to speak it. Check out a full I-Love-You below. Read More »
	Robot Shoots Baskets, Makes Bullseyes Without Hands or Anything Even Like Hands A team of clever robotics-minded folks from Cornell University and the University of Chicago have demonstrated a truly novel way for robots to interact with the world around them. Their "Positive Pressure Universal Gripper" can pick up and toss an object of just about any shape without the need for pesky and complex hands. Instead, their gripper uses a robotic arm with -- no kidding -- a balloon. Read More »
	Geekolinks: 2/14 Romania is buried under snow (BuzzFeed) 10 alternate history mistakes (io9) Jabba the Hutt is now a LEGO piece (Neatorama) Learn a thing or two with Radio Lab's Valentine's Day playlist (Radio Lab) Minecraft for Android updated with survival mode (Make Use Of) NASA shuts down its last mainframe computer (Universe Today) Delete pesky people from your images with ease (Engadget) (title pic via Bits and Pieces) Read More »
	Giant Heart in Times Square Beats Faster With Every Touch Architectural group BIG has given a large, glowing Valentine to the city of New York with their BIG♥NYC project. It is, quite literally, an enormous heart in the middle of Times Square made from 400 transparent rods that form a 10 foot-tall cube. Lit by LEDs, a large red heart resides in the center of the big cube which can be affected by visitors. Simply pressing a nearby plate will activate the heart, but linking together more people make it beat faster and brighter. Hopefully people will keep some hand sanitizer around, lest this "heart"warming display become a disease vector. See a video of the installation, after the break. Read More »
	Talking Dog YouTube Video Tapped For Talking Dog Feature Film Remember this guy? The disappointed, talking dog whose Ultimate Dog Tease video stole the Internet's heart and netted 94 million views in the process? Well, the video's creator Andrew Grantham is now reportedly in talks with Paramount Pictures to produce a feature-length film based off the one minute 21-second YouTube video. There's no word as to why the studio is interested, but it might have something to do with it being the second most watched YouTube video fo 2011, coming in after Rebecca Black's "Friday." Let's hope Hollywood doesn't go after her next. Read More »
	Historical Figure Valentine's Day Cards are Pun-Tastic Valentine's Day is a great excuse for awful puns, but artist Ben Kling takes it a step further with his historical figures series of Valentine cards. You Kant believe you went all day without seeing these. On his cards, Kling has taken the likenesses of famous dictators, philosophers, U.S. statesmen, and a few surprising additions to create a set of truly charming and somewhat educational Valentines that you can print out and give to your sweety. And should he or she fail to recognize the significance of the featured historical figure, you can politely inform that they failed the test. See the rest, after the break. Read More »
	Newly Discovered Chameleon is the World's Smallest, Smaller Than Your Fingernail When it comes to camouflage, chameleons have the pretty distinct advantage of being able to change colors. Several newly discovered species of chameleons have an extra hiding advantage: They're tiny. Naturally this makes certain aspects of their life a little tough, but it also makes them almost impossibly cute for a reptile. Discovered in Madagascar, the Brookesia micra are some of the smallest reptiles in the world at a scant 3 centimeters long. Read More »
	Vintage Valentines Are Weirdly Violent, Disturbing You can decry the vapid commercialism of the modern Valentine's Day all you want, but it has got nothing on the bizarre Valentines of yesteryear. Back in the day, it apparently wasn't all that unusual to express your affection with a card featuring images of violence, suicide, bondage, cannibalism, worm eating, and you don't even want to know what else. Actually, having written that, I think we could afford to bring some of that hilarious weirdness back. Read More »
	Beef Roses Are Red (Meat) Flowers may be a good last-minute Valentine's gift, an easy fallback, or the one thing you can think of that you know she wants, but sometimes your average bouquet might seem a little tired, cliché, and entirely inedible. That is, unless your dear is a deer. If she's a omnivorous human female on the other hand, and you want to switch things up a bit, you might appreciate a little work of art called “Steak Bouquet” by butcher Antony Bowness of the Quality Standard Beef and Lamb in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. Read More »